Will Google’s $75 Billion AI Plan Kill Blogging and SEO?

Welcome back to the latest episode of the Niche Pursuits News Podcast!

This week Spencer is back, and he hosts the episode alongside Jared. As always, they talk about the latest headlines in the AI, SEO, and content creation world. They also share some very impressive side hustle progress and highlight some very weird niche sites.

They kick off the episode talking about Google’s recent earnings call, the company’s performance, and how it fell short of expectations. They discuss the movement of share prices, different parts of the company, and one major news item: its investments in AI across the entire business.

Watch the Full Episode

Google’s planning to invest $75 billion in AI, and these moves are definitely impacting search and AI overviews.

Jared also points out some interesting highlights from the call about younger users and Google monetizing the AI experience. Tune in to hear all the details!

They move on to discuss a recent study of the effect of AI Overviews on organic search, and Spencer shares the findings. 

What do you think about the good news and the bad news? Do you agree with his predictions? What do they say about ads?

They switched to a different study, which found that AI Overviews were found in 74% of problem-solving queries. 

They discuss the key findings and talk about how the two studies support each other, and Spencer highlights the main takeaway: AIO is showing up more than ever, it’s impacting click-through rates, and Google is betting big on AI moving forward.

That being said, Jared makes some interesting observations. Do you agree with him?

Moving along to the Shiny Object Shenanigans portion of the podcast, Spencer goes first and talks about his experience with the Facebook Bonus Program. 

How did he do over the last month? He talks about his process over time, the learning curve, and the importance of engagement. 

When it’s Jared’s turn, he talks about his HCU-crushing website that he turned around on Pinterest. He shares his earnings from December, which were very good, and then his January earnings, along with some of his stats and RPMs.

How much did he earn? How does he expect to do in February?

He also shares some exciting news about his Weekend Growth newsletter side hustle. What did he recently achieve?

Finally, Spencer shares his Weird Niche Site: Bored Button. He shows and explains how it works and how it’s monetized, talks traffic, and shares some of its keywords.

When it’s Jared’s turn, he shares Yesterland, a site that highlights discontinued Disney attractions. It shares his observations about the site and his thoughts on its monetization (or lack thereof) as well as general information about its traffic and the user experience.

Can you take away any lessons or inspiration from the site?

That brings us to the end of another fantastic episode of the Niche Pursuits News Podcast. 

We hope you’re feeling up-to-speed on the latest news in the space, you’re moving forward with your side hustles, and you feel inspired by the weird niche sites.

See you next Friday!

Transcript

Spencer: Hey everyone. Welcome back to another episode of this week in niche pursuits news. And, uh, I'm hosting today. I show up about once a month and, uh, we've got Jared with us today. We have some big news. Google released their quarter four earnings and their shares immediately went to drop 9 percent in price.

Uh, Google is making a lot of moves, especially as it's related to artificial intelligence in particular. They mentioned that they're going to invest 75 billion over the next year, expanding their AI business. And so we're going to dig into these numbers, what it means, how it might impact us as bloggers, niche site creators.

Uh, and then we have a couple other stories, oddly, uh, related to artificial intelligence and AI overviews in Google search. And, uh, then of course, we're going to talk about our side hustles. We've got a couple of weird niche sites. So we've got a lot to get through here, Jared. But first of all, welcome. How you doing today?

Jared: Oh, doing great. You know, I feel like the last couple of weeks, uh, the news items have not necessarily been Google focused. We've spent time on Tik TOK and Reddit and HubSpot, these other things. But, um, yeah, it's going to be a Google day and AI day. And we've got a lot of, uh, interesting things coming out, uh, that have come out this week.

Spencer: Yeah, absolutely. So, um, just, uh, yesterday is when Google did their earnings call and of course they had the Google CEO and others there that were talking about their business and it, you know, the stock market is an interesting beast, right? Google is still growing. They're still doing very well. I mean, um, let's see.

For example, they reported, uh, this is about their cloud revenue. Like it still did 11. 96 billion. They wanted the, the wall street wanted it to do 12. 19 billion. And so that's, that's an impact overall. Their revenues were a little bit lower than expected, but still grew by, I think it's like 12%, something like that.

Yeah. Alphabet overall revenue grew nearly 12 percent year over year. Uh, But that was a 13 percent growth in the same quarter last year. There it is. So wall street doesn't like that. Right. So it grew a little slower than anticipated. Uh, and so that's what led to the stock dropping in price 9 percent in after hours.

But of course, um, I think today it's, it's up a little bit more and so it'll probably level out after a few weeks. But the initial reaction from the, you know, the stock market is. Is negative. They didn't love the results that Google had to share so much.

Jared: Yeah. I had the 14 percent number on my sheet here because total revenue for 2024 grew 14 percent year over year, but in the quarter four, it only grew 12%.

So if you kind of think about it, that means that, you know, their growth was stronger in previous quarters in 2024 than it was in the fourth quarter. And so, you know, all this plays into how a stock price reacts. It's still grew. They're still growing, but it's just not growing as much perhaps. And as much as hoped.

Spencer: Yeah, exactly. And it's, um, it's interesting, you know, I find these numbers quite fascinating because I kind of love following the stock market and everything like this. Right. But, uh, YouTube advertising revenue, um, was it, uh, 10. 47 billion versus 10. 23 billion. Um, Comparing to the last quarter. So that, that YouTube is actually really strong.

That actually grew, uh, more than expected. Uh, but as mentioned, Google cloud revenue was down. Traffic acquisition costs, uh, were a little bit different as well. The one. Big detail that they talked about a lot. And I didn't listen to the whole earnings call like I did last time, but I did listen to a little bit and I read a little bit of the transcript out of the gate.

The very first thing that, uh, Sundar Pichai talked about was artificial intelligence, their investments in AI across. All of their business, not only search, but also, you know, Gemini and all the other tools that they're building and how they're integrating it with their business. That is the number one thing that's at the forefront of his mind and of the business overall.

And so, uh, within the results. They talked about how much they're going to invest. The company announced that it plans to invest 75 billion in capital expenditures. Um, and a lot of that is related to AI. And so they're building out, um, you know, sort of their servers. A lot more capacity so they can train their AI models more.

And they're, yeah, they're just increasing the investment. 75 billion is a huge number. It's hard to imagine. Um, but it's, it's massive. And most of that going towards artificial intelligence improvement. Um, I think meta announced that 60 billion over the coming year. Uh, and so, uh, you know, Google is investing, you know, 15 billion more than Facebook or Meta, uh, is doing.

And so, AI is not going away, uh, they're investing even more heavily in it, and it is impacting. AI overviews. It is impacting search. And we have a couple of stories related to that before, but before I move to that, Jared, any other thoughts or input on sort of these Q4 earnings?

Jared: Yeah, I didn't listen to the whole thing either, but I did go back and listen to the part or at least the part I found that he addressed search a couple of sound bites or, you know, notes.

I jotted down, uh, AI overviews enhances user satisfaction and search usage. Um, There's one very interesting stat, particularly among young, uh, younger users. They appreciate the speed and the efficiency of the new format. We've talked about how Google is kind of for old people. Remember that article we had a while back?

And so it's interesting, I don't know if that's kind of a PR play around this, uh, or if they really are finding that AI overviews is tapping into something that the younger generation likes. But they particularly called out young Younger users appreciate AI overviews, they like the speed, they like the efficiency of the new format, um, and then, uh, I had a couple of soundbites around AI overviews, but some of them we're going to get into in the next couple of stories, so I'll leave it for that, because there's been some, some deep dives and some studies about AI overviews, and the findings that are coming out are, um, I would say, I guess, somewhat supportive of what he said as it relates to AI overviews,

Spencer: right?

Exactly. That is interesting. They've clearly got some sort of demographic data that shows that, uh, probably younger users get their answer with the AI overviews and they're happy. Maybe older users are digging deeper and, you know, actually going down to further results, clicking on results. That's interesting.

One more thing he did say about,

Jared: I'll just highlight because I, before I forget, I see my notes here now, um, AI overviews in search are already monetized at a similar rate to existing search ads. Um, they talked about how they were testing them in, for mobile devices, but that they are making as much per ad unit as the traditional ads you ads are to existing search ads.

So we've talked for years in this podcast of how is Google going to monetize. Kind of the AI experience in their SERPs. And it appears so far that they're monetizing. At or better. I mean, they said similar rate, basically,

Spencer: right? Well, there you go. So they've made their business case for it. Um, and so they're going to continue moving forward with that clearly, right?

They're, they're liking the results that they see. Uh, boy, how long has it been since AI overviews? We're first announced. I feel like it was around May of last year or something, or when they rolled out, uh, May, May last year, May, 2024. Yeah, yeah. So here we are, we're coming up on a year almost, uh, when they were rolled out.

So, um, a lot of people have been doing research and analyzing the impact of AI overviews. And so we're going to share some of these findings because there's actually two different studies that talk about this, uh, that came out this week. And so one of these was. Conducted by seer interactive dot com. Um, and so I've got, uh, that study here.

Basically, they took 10, 000, um, search keywords and they looked at the top 20 positions and these were all keywords with informational intent. And they did that because they felt like informational keywords were the most likely. To trigger or are most likely to be taken over by AI overviews. So they felt like, Hey, this is what they wanted to study.

So 10, 000 keywords related to informational. Uh, content and, um, yeah, they just wanted to, and then they looked at, uh, Google ads, they looked at, uh, Google search console and AI overview data is really what they looked at. Did it pull up for this particular query? What was the click through rate? And, um, what are, what are the ads click through rate?

And so we get some interesting findings. They have an overview summary here, but I actually want to look at some of these charts because it's just a little bit easier. to understand. So, uh, this is organic click through rate. So At what rate did people actually click a result when the AI overview isn't shown?

So when it is not shown, um, and so this actually is showing that click through rates have been increasing when an AI overview is not shown compared to where it was about a year ago, right? So that, that is good news. Um,

Jared: and look at December, that spike in December is insane. I mean, it's got to be related to the Q4.

Uh, kind of change in intent of how people use the internet on during the Q4 kind of sales period. But look at that. I mean, that's a massive uptick.

Spencer: That really is. And that's, that is interesting, right? Going from, you know, hovering around two, two and a half, 3 percent to almost 5%. Um, that's a very high click

Jared: through.

Spencer: Yeah, exactly. Uh, and so I imagine you're probably right. It's it's probably the intent. Right? And so again, this is looking at the year over year organic click through rate. Um, it improved. So more people are clicking through to websites when A. I. Overviews did not appear compared to a year ago. So that is a good thing for bloggers and those that rely on organic search.

All right, Now, unfortunately the bad news, uh, organic click through rates have dropped. When AI overviews does show now, this is not surprising, right? That, Hey, if you're going to get an AI overview, the likelihood that your website's going to get clicked when it's down below, um, that's probably going to decrease and that is certainly what they're showing.

Um, it looks like, I mean, it's dropped by more than half, uh, over the last year. From one point a half percent down to, yeah, about three quarters of a percent here in January, 2025.

Jared: And I mean, if you're looking at January, 2025 and you're looking at just the individual click-through rate, you've got a click-through rate when a and AI overview are not shown of right around 4%, right?

That was just last month's data. And then when an an AI overview is shown, you are hovering just above 0.5%. I mean, that's a seven to eight x difference in click-through rates.

Spencer: Yeah. Yep. And so, uh, drastically different. Yeah. And, um, so unfortunately, I mean, we can potentially deduce that as more AI overviews, um, as the increases, they're being shown for more and more queries.

Uh, the organic click through rates. Heart on a continual decline. Um, and so, yeah, I would call that not good news, right? If you're reliant on organic, uh, clicks to your website. Um, and then the other thing that they did here in their study is that they looked at the paid click through rates. So paid ads, um, those are actually dropping.

Um, they show both with and without AI overviews, right? And, um, it's not a significant drop here, um, with, um, AI overviews. It's this sort of, anyways, this one that's below here, the teal, there you go. Uh, is, you know, it is dropping, but I wouldn't, I wouldn't call this drastic over the last year. Uh, and then the paid click through rate rate with no AI overviews actually has a more significant drop, which that's kind of interesting.

And so they. I have some comments of this basically saying, Hey, are we tired of ads in the Serbs? They sort of deduce that maybe this is the general public feeling like they don't like ads as much. They're more ad blind. They're not clicking is on as many ads. And so maybe putting ads on Google search. Is becoming a little bit less effective over time.

Um, the, the click through rates are dropping. Um, so that's not a good thing for Google, obviously. Um, but this is just really interesting data overall.

Jared: Yeah. The article touched on that. As soon as you scroll down, it says a retired of ads in the SERPs. Maybe there's an element of ad fatigue with Google ads as a whole.

Um, especially since the leaked email show Google search and ad execs working together to increase ad revenue at the detriment of the user experience. So it's almost like, well. Yeah, you kind of got what you wanted. Yeah,

Spencer: exactly. The, they were doing anything that they could. And we talked about that here on this podcast, right?

Is, um, what the executives were doing. They were basically doing anything they could to get people to click on more ads, come back to the SERPs even more often. So they could have more, um, you know, ad displays. And maybe people are kind of catching on, right? The more savvy users like, eh, I'm just not going to click ads anymore.

Jared: Yeah, it's, um, I mean, this and then the other, the other study we'll look at here next. Like, these two studies are very interesting. A lot of it confirms what we would, we would have guessed. And a lot of it does also make sure to question, you know, um, the specifics behind it. Like, how much did we think? CTR was going to drop.

Um, you know, how does, and it does go into paid ads as well. A little bit on paid paid ads and that sort of thing. I don't know if we'll have time for that, but there's some interesting connections because there's just so much going on in the SERPs in a vacuum. It's easy to see AI overviews are going to decrease the amount of interest people have.

On the rest of the SERP results. But when you throw in all that happens on a SERP right now with the ads and the, um, you know, the people also ask and the, all these different things, like it, it's interesting to see in real time now how it's all playing together.

Spencer: Right. And so there is a really interesting summary of all the findings that people want to check that out.

I mean, kind of, I'm just showing this chart here, but. There's a lot of numbers there. We're not going to go over here, but again, just go to seer interactive. com. They've got their insights, you know, their findings on this. If you want to check that out, really interesting data. Um, so this next study that we're going to talk about is a separate study.

Uh, although it was also done on. 10, 000 search queries, different queries run by a different company. But they both, yeah, target 10, 000 search queries. And, um, the queries that were targeted on this are problem solving queries. And, uh, basically because they felt like the, these problem solving queries are the most likely to trigger AI overviews.

And so they wanted to see how often that occurred and the overall big number is that it showed that 74, 74 percent of problem solving queries. Had Google AI overviews show up, uh, for them. Do we know if they define what a problem solving query was, Jared? Did, did you happen to notice that, um, what that means exactly?

Jared: This was a very challenging article to read through. The opening line, once you get through all the ads and all the videos and all that, the opening line is, A new report shows that AI overviews in Google search results are uncommon. But significantly affect visibility and user engagement. I'm like, what is it?

You just told me that 74 percent of them of the time they show up in, uh, in problem solving queries. So the whole article was in that vein kind of, uh, uh, you know, flip flopped a lot. It was hard to understand exactly what they're talking about, but some of the high level information that you're sharing is the key points to, to, to kind of grasp onto.

Spencer: Yeah. Yeah. And I think it's more question based. I know I read that somewhere more question based when you actually ask a question. I think that's. That's a big part of it, right? Those types of queries, um, are, are the things that AI overviews might be showing for, um, Okay. Overall, it shows the AI overviews appear in less than one third of search queries.

Which

Jared: is super fascinating in of itself because that would not have been something I would have predicted based on what we're hearing and what we're seeing, you know?

Spencer: Yeah. Yeah. I feel like certainly when I'm doing searches, I'm, I feel like I'm seeing it more than one in three searches. Way more

Jared: than 50 percent is what I would say.

Spencer: Yeah, you're right. If I were just to make a hunch based on what I'm seeing, right? Um, but then it goes on to say that industry and user intent are major influencers, certain industries like telecommunications, beauty and cosmetics, or sorry, telecommunications is the highest at 56%. Beauty and cosmetics is the lowest.

At 14 percent that triggers an AI overview, but then it goes on to say, queries aimed at solving problems or asking specific questions. Most often triggered AI or reviews at rates of 74 percent and 69 percent respectively. Is that talking about the industries telecommunications versus beauty and cosmetics?

I assume that's what it's talking about.

Jared: I assume the opposite to be fair. Oh, okay. Only to the point of how confusing to some degree, the article was, but yeah. It depends

Spencer: on the industry, I guess, uh, is the takeaway. I don't know which one it is. Um, uh, okay. Non brand terms are more likely to produce AI overviews.

Makes sense. If you search for a brand, maybe an AI overview isn't needed. It just shows the website and you go to that. Um, And the, you know, there's, there's a few other interesting things. Was there any other nuggets that you noticed in this study that you wanted to pull out and mention?

Jared: I, I, I mean, that, that doesn't really, you know, will surprise anyone.

I mean, there's the non brand terms are more likely to produce AI overviews. That makes sense when you type in a specific branded query or branded type of query, you know, it makes sense that that isn't as likely to produce an AI overview. Um, but no, I think the rest is pretty much what we would all come to expect from this.

Spencer: Yeah, yeah, exactly. I mean, it just goes on to basically say, hey, it does have an impact on traditional organic search results. Clearly, right? You've got a show it, you know. On average, something 220 pixels, it gets shifted down. When you click that show more on that AI overview result, pushing down the organic results, which kind of dovetails into the other study that we talked about, click through rates are down on organic results because of that.

Um, but the big story, if I were to encapsulate sort of all three of these stories is that AI overviews are showing up more and more. It is impacting click through rates. Those are typically trending down when an AI overview does show up for a particular query. And Google is going big with AI overviews and AI overall in their business.

Uh, they're investing in the infrastructure. They plan to expand AI across all their businesses. I mean, we talk about search primarily here on this podcast, but. I mean, you look at all of their products. I really can't think of any of their products where AI won't be touching that, uh, and they won't be integrating that into their business.

And so, um, it's kind of fun to be right in the middle of it. I mean, it's changing our lives, um, you know, real time. And, uh, so we'll see where it all ends up, but. That's where we are right now.

Jared: I would add to that, uh, that, you know, on the podcast here, we can only kind of read the big headlines, the broad stroke statements and all that.

But every single time we seem to get one of these studies back, even before it was AI overviews and it was, you know, SGE search generative experience. There was a ton of nuance to it, you know? And so you just talked about, Hey, it varies across industry. We talked about, Hey, it varies across type of query.

Hey, it varies across branded versus non branded. So. From a high level, AI overviews is definitely driving CTR down, but in the nuance for the specific type of query, the specific industry, et cetera, et cetera, it varies dramatically. And so I think that's where we're going to have to wait and watch and learn and see, you know, and, and that would.

If you're listening, you probably have a specific industry you're looking towards, and you probably have a specific type of query that you get most of your traffic from. And so it is very nuanced as it relates to all of us, maybe individually.

Spencer: Right. Absolutely. Yeah. Great point. And, um, there's so many different business models and ways that you can build your website to bring in traffic and right.

So all of this, uh, Changing and evolving, but it doesn't mean that there isn't a sort of another angle or another way or a way that you can tweak your business to still get a lot of traffic, both from Google and from other sources. Right. It's just about next. We are indeed going to talk about that. Uh, we got some interesting, um, things to go into.

And in fact, yeah, let's, let's talk about, um, our side hustle projects that we're working on. Hey, everyone. Spencer here, founder of Niche Pursuits. So you probably know the importance of building internal links so your site can perform well in Google. Today, I want to share how Link Whisper can help you add outbound internal links to your articles.

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Building smart internal links just got easier. Go to link whisper. com today. And be sure to use coupon code podcast to get 15 off. I guess I'm first up on the list. Aren't I, uh, kind of talk about

Jared: one of these agendas, Spencer, but who does this? Yeah,

Spencer: I'll, I'll do it. So, uh, it's actually really good timing because I just finished up, uh, the sort of pay period for the Facebook bonus program that I'm in for those that don't know, they don't do it on a calendar month.

They do your 30 days of earnings based on when you joined or when you got accepted to the bonus program. I happened to get accepted, I think on the fifth of the month or the fourth or the fifth. Anyway, so my pay period, uh, goes from, you know, January 4th to February 4th. And so I just got those last 30 day results with the Facebook bonus program.

I've talked about it a number of times, but I had a record month, my biggest month ever, uh, cracked the 5, 000 In earnings for a month over the last 30 days, just barely over 5, 000 is like 5, 016, uh, that my Facebook page earned. And so my mind is blown. Uh, it's one of those things that, um, I've built this business pretty hands off.

Uh, and so I pay somebody 2, 000 a month to run this Facebook page for me. And this is somebody in the U S. Right. They do great work, but somebody could probably do it for half the price of what I'm paying. So somebody could pro you could probably outsource it overseas easily for 1, 000 or less per month, what, what my person is doing, but I like her.

She does a great job. She's super engaged. I'm happy to pay the 2, 000 a month. So I'm walking away with, you know, 3, 000 last month. And I really didn't do anything. I didn't. I don't post anything on Facebook. I don't engage on Facebook again. I do business a little bit differently than I know a lot of people.

Um, but you know, I sent a few emails, emails to my employee that's running the page, uh, per month and that's, that's pretty much it. Um, but it's, it's just. It's really cool to see that when you really dial in and focus on just one platform, you can figure it out. And that's what we've done with Facebook is, uh, we've tried a lot of different things, different images.

We've tried some videos. We've tried just, you know, status updates, just text. Um, You know, for us, it's primarily images that work with a brief description. Um, we've found certain types of those images that do really well and what is engaging. And the other thing that we do that appears to work really well is when we get people that are starting to comment, um, my employee replies to all those comments or likes them or.

A lot of engagement with within that Facebook page and doing that, we feel like that helps Facebook expand the reach even further to say, Oh, this is an engaged page. This image is getting a lot of engagement. We'll show it to more people. And that's produced a lot of big winners for our page.

Jared: I asked you last month when you shared, I think it was December's results about RPMs.

I won't go, I won't go into RPMs this time, but I'll ask you this time, cause you keep, you keep upping the ante with earnings. And I think we could have all said like, Oh, well, he probably earned more in December because everybody earns more in December. But most people who have their highest month ever in December don't end up having their highest month.

Happen the next month in January because they're just such different periods of engagement, uh, of, of, of brand spending of, of RPMs of all these things. Like, what is it that is causing this thing to keep growing? Like, are you posting more? Uh, is it just more like somehow more engagement is happening more and more to this page?

Spencer: Yeah, we are, um, I don't know if we're posting more, but we're posting a lot. Like, we have been posting more over time. You know, if you look at the last 12 months, we've kind of consistently been posting more. So, so that is true that, uh, we are more engaged with the page. Um, the other thing that I, you know, it probably was in sometime in December, we started, we decided to start posting less.

To our website.

Jared: Okay.

Spencer: Um, right? We used to post links to our website. Right. More frequently. Mm hmm. Right? Um, saying that we

Jared: still do three or four a day or something like that?

Spencer: Yeah.

Jared: Where we post? Yeah. I think it was

Spencer: like twice a day was kind of the goal. Right? So, um. And after looking at the numbers, I'm just like,

Jared: you

Spencer: know, might make 200 on the website or making 5, 000 on the Facebook page.

And it's causing my employee to spend a lot of time. She's got to write the articles every day. She published them. So we're actually doing less. So, um, so we're posting probably about the same on the Facebook page,

Jared: but it's all focused on people in Facebook, which is exactly why they have the bonus program.

Spencer: That's exactly right. You're doing what

Jared: they want or more of what they want. I guess we're

Spencer: doing a little bit more of what they want. In January compared to what we were doing and you earned a little bit more than what you did in December. We, we earned a little bit more. And I hope 48, 4, 700. Yeah, it was like 4, 800.

Yeah. Yep. Yep. And so a couple hundred dollars more this month. And, um, yeah, it's just, it, it just works, right. When you can keep people on the platform, engage with people on the platform, Facebook loves it.

Jared: And so that's what we're doing. I still need you to. Crack the code on how to get a page in there.

Spencer: I know.

I wish I had good tips. I know people ask me that all the time and it's like, I got accepted, you know, in July or whenever that was. Um, and it just happened. I don't, you know, so unfortunately I'm not an expert of, so you can ask me, you know, how to get accepted, but I. I just applied and it worked. I don't know.

I didn't ask you. I just mentioned it. I wish you'd just for listeners. I wish you'd crack the code on it. I know. That'd be nice. That'd be nice.

Jared: Uh, congratulations.

Spencer: That's a huge number. Thank you. And a nice number to

Jared: hang in January too. Cause man, January is, uh, oftentimes for many niches and many industries and many websites.

RPMs can be down. Yeah. It's good. Yeah.

Spencer: No,

Jared: it feels good. Thank you. I guess that means I'm up. Yup. Uh, I'll give you an update on one of my side hustles and then something cool that happened on a different side hustle. Um, it's, it, man, you and I always kind of neck and neck on this. It's kind of interesting.

Uh, when you talk about the Facebook bonus program, I tend to talk. That week about the website that we, that was crushed by the HCU and we flipped it on its head by focusing on Pinterest and generating traffic to the website from Pinterest, and it's recovered in terms of its earnings. And, um, uh, you know, December was a good month.

We made, um, over, I think over 2, 500 guy. Let me see if I can pull it up while we're talking here. Um, hold, hold the phone there on, on December. December was a good month though. And one of the best months that we had had. And, um, but as I alluded to, if you know, the industry, it actually is in the space where January and February are going to be its best months.

And again, I just thought, cause we've owned the site for. Three or four years now. And so we've been through several Januaries pre HCU where January and February were the best months for organic traffic. So I'm like, it stands to reason that people searching Google, people searching Pinterest, the interest level is higher.

And so I would imagine that it's going to do better in, um, uh, in the month of, um, in the month of January. And so we did get the results in and, uh, let me pull it up here first off. So December, I can tell you right now, uh, duh, duh, duh. Of course, my screen is taking its time to load here. Um, well, that's not loading.

I apologize. Uh, but what I can tell you is what January came in at. And it's not 5, 000, but, um, uh, it is, uh, oh, here we go. Here's December. Okay. December was 2, 500 and that was about the same as November, which was 2, 600, um, great months. And remember like this site never earned more than about 2, 000 a month pre HCU.

So we're kind of celebrating there. January was just over 4, 500. Wow. That's huge. Yep. Um, and, uh, some of the reason why it did so well is it drove a lot of traffic. So over a hundred thousand page views, uh, sorry, over a hundred thousand sessions from, from Pinterest. Um, uh, like 115, 120, 000, but over 330, 000 page views.

Wow. So when people came, they would go to an average of like three, almost three pages per visit across. Yeah. Across everyone and so again, every time they go to a new page, I mean, you're loading a bunch of new ad units, you know, so the RPMs were for January really pretty darn good. And that's probably a lot of what caused to, um, to this earnings being, you know, pretty darn good.

And obviously there was a lot of traffic because a lot of people were going to the, um, to the site. So anyways, um, man, uh, that's the project that just keeps on giving, you know, it's, it's amazing. It's a huge line item when given that, you know, last April, the site made, I think like 130.

Spencer: Yeah, no, that's massive.

Do you happen to know roughly? What the traffic was like in December. I'm just curious if it was like all traffic growth. Um, I have that right here for you.

Jared: I'm glad you asked. Luckily, that's on the exact same screen as the earnings that I took forever to pull up. Uh, traffic was under, it was about 45, 000 sessions.

And so it went up to 110, 115 sessions in January. So

Spencer: pretty much all traffic based is the reason. Um, do you think that I guess you kind of alluded that there's maybe a little more interest in this niche in January or something? Um, that's probably did a little better.

Jared: So RPMs in December were about 56.

Um, and then RPMs in January were about 41.

Spencer: So still good RPMs

Jared: for January, you know, but definitely still a drop down in terms of what the RPMs were. I wish I could have those 55 RPMs in January. Cause then we would have, then we would have beat your earnings from the Facebook bonus program. Yeah. Sorry about that.

It's okay. Um, anyways, uh, fun little update I shared about this in the weekend growth, uh, newsletter this week. If you remember Spencer, my very first side hustle that I ever announced on this news podcast back when this thing was brand new, which by the way. Do you realize this is our 24th month of the news podcast?

Spencer: I did not realize that. Wow. Happy two year anniversary. Two

Jared: anniversaries next, uh, next month we'll celebrate two full years of doing the news. Um, anyways, that time flies. But my first side hustle, when you're like, Hey, you got to talk about a side hustle on the very first news podcast. I'm like, all right, I'm going to do it.

And I said, I'm going to do this weekend growth newsletter. Um, well, two years later, uh, and certainly not because I was trying, but, um, long story short, uh, we qualified for a journey by Mediavine. There you go. All right. Simply just from taking each week, not even every week's newsletter, but some of them and publishing them to a blog.

Not optimizing them as you know, when you're not optimized, wow, search, but eventually published enough. And you know, Google really is into unoptimized content these days. So out of all the sites I had that lost because of that shift, we can growth kind of benefited from it.

Spencer: That is, I didn't realize. Uh, the, I mean, I kind of knew you were doing that, but I didn't realize it was gaining in traffic.

And you know, I mean, it does not have to get Spencer. No, I mean, it's got to get like 10, 000 sessions or something. No, no, not even.

Jared: So here's something I found out again. I haven't got an email back from anyone yet. Uh, that I sent this, my newsletter out to, I threw it up there because of someone I interviewed in the podcast like last month and they said, yeah, I didn't hit 10, 000, but I got accepted.

And I was like, that's interesting. So I put, I installed the plugin, right? Which they require to be up there for 30 days so they can track the data. That's right. I don't get 10, 000 sessions. I don't even get 5, 000 sessions a month. And they were like, Hey, you're in. I'm like, what? So I'm like, well, I wonder because I get a lot of pages similar to the, the, the Pinterest site I was just sharing about.

I get a lot of page views per session. So maybe it's because the, that that's so high, I went and looked at the application, went and looked at the blog post where Mediavine announced journey. None of it says anything about a minimum number, a minimum amount of traffic. Really? I know. Did they take it out?

Are we having,

Spencer: are we having like a Mandela effect here, where like, we're misremembering the past?

Jared: I could swear that they, there

Spencer: was an

Jared: announcement

Spencer: of 10, 000 sessions. That's what I mean, 10,

Jared: 000, like, I feel like everybody has that in their mind. Like, I feel like everyone's like, 10, 000, that's new. But I can't find any evidence of it.

Spencer: Huh, well, we're in some sort of alternate reality. I didn't start

Jared: combing through the Wayback Machine, and you know, I don't Just take your acceptance letter. And I was going to say, I'm not going to, you know, let's, let's, let's leave a good thing where it is, but yeah, I couldn't find it. So I don't, I don't know if you're listening and I'm wrong.

Please tell us in the comments. If you're like Jared, it's right there. I totally admit I could have missed it, but I did look for it. Um, and so, you know, kind of like what you said, let's be honest. Is weekend growth going to earn much money on ads? No, maybe a couple hundred dollars a month if I'm lucky, but Hey, it's still another way to monetize an email I send out, you know, I've been sending an email a weekend.

I don't know kind of maybe i'll make a couple hundred bucks a a month now from all those emails i've sent So, you know just a little bit more so this

Spencer: this triggers a little business idea that I I Hesitate to even mention it right because it's a little shady. I don't know that I recommend it I haven't fully thought it through.

I think i'm gonna go with this. Yeah, and i'm not sure if I heard somebody else A couple of years ago, maybe mentioned this, or if it's, you know, just based on what you just said, but why not have an aggregator website that pulls in, you subscribe to how many newsletters? I don't know, a thousand. Um, And put those in as blog posts because most newsletters are not doing what you're doing.

Jared, they write content and it dies in the email inbox. Google never sees that. So this would be fresh content that Google can crawl. Uh, I don't know how I feel about it. Um, but it's an idea nonetheless.

Jared: Or what if you came with a licensing model where you're like, we will aggregate your content. That never would see the light of day on the internet and we'll pay you 30 percent of the ad earnings at the end of the month.

Yeah. And so your content would go on like a DR 70 site and have a better chance of ranking on optimized. And you know, at that point you'd have a relationship with them. And then you being the person that kind of light almost licenses the content for your website and then pays out a little bit of accounting nightmare.

But yeah, that could also work.

Spencer: Yeah. It's just, it's. Interesting to think about, because there's hundreds of thousands of newsletters out there. Well, you're right, newsletters Maybe there's a niche you could go into, or, yeah.

Jared: Newsletters are all the rage right now, right? But, like you said, 99 percent of them, I'm guessing, some high percentage of them, go and die as soon as they hit the inbox.

Spencer: Yeah. Yep. The internet never sees those. So, uh, anyways. Take it, take it for what it's worth. Uh, proceed at your own risk. I'm not saying this is a good idea.

Jared: If you're wondering, no, I don't want you to take my Week in Growth and put it on your website. So please don't do that. I will not be happy about that.

That's right. I feel so inspired. That's right.

Spencer: Alright, well, let's move on to our weird niche sites. Uh, we've got a couple of weird niche sites, and, you know, I really didn't want to share this one. Uh, because, well, I'll explain why here in just a second. But it is, it's a good one, and it is weird. Uh, and I think it'll give some people some ideas.

Um, so let me just share what it is, and then I'll explain why I was a little bit hesitant. Oh no, don't

Jared: share this one!

Spencer: It's, it's too late. I know

Jared: what you're doing! You can't do that! It's too late. Well, it's too late. I put it on the list. Oh, come on! Is this why you waited so long to slip it into the agenda?

You knew I'd be frustrated? I did not do that on purpose. Tell the listeners, you put it in like 30 seconds before we hit record.

Spencer: That is true. I forgot to put it on the list. Sure. Sure. I did not intentionally throw Jared under the bus, uh, or anything like that. So, so apparently you knew about this one.

Jared: Cause you told

Spencer: me on a call this week. This is the one. Oh, is this the one I told you about? I'm sorry. That's why I thought of it. See, well, it

Jared: is what it

Spencer: is. I have nothing else to say other than let's share the site. Okay. Um, so this website is. It's board button. com and it's just a button you go ahead and you press the button.

All right. And then when you press the button, what it does is it takes you to another website. You know, you're still on board button. com slash random is the URL that I'm on right now. But this is just an iframe of a different website. Okay. So this brought me to the world's dumbest game. How long can I push and hold this button?

Jared: We might be here. Well, I would

Spencer: sit here, right? I did it for 5. 1 seconds, right? And then it gives you today's high scores. 53 minutes. Is that 53 minutes? Come on. That is 53 minutes. CWH. You got something better to do. Look at how it's, that's just insane.

Jared: Yeah. Look at that. That is 53 minutes.

Spencer: Okay, somebody's got problems, but anyway, so you could go and do that again, but you can push the button again, Jared, and what does it do?

It takes you to another website. Now, I'm still on boardbutton. com. I should clarify. I'm on boardbutton. com, but it's an iframe of guess the pin. Yep. Right? Uh, so, I don't know. Let's try Are you just supposed to put in

Jared: some random number?

Spencer: Guess. Uh, That's not it. Guess again. It doesn't even tell you if, how many numbers can it be?

Okay. It is a four digit pin.

Jared: Okay. So this is like simulating, like trying to hack someone's, uh, yeah.

Spencer: And, uh, one of these may or may not have been my debit card pin. Uh, no, I'm just kidding. By the way, loading a new ad unit every single time. Loading a new ad unit. So here's what's interesting, right? This is an iframe.

So this is an This is guessthepin. com, I think, uh, that we're actually looking at.

Jared: Yeah, you're

Spencer: referencing it, right. It's in an iframe, so these display ad units are actually being attributed to that iframe, to guessthepin. Right. So guess the pin is getting the ad revenue board button is not if I'm understanding correctly.

Right. But you are correct. Every time I've been as guests, um, right. And we could go on board button, you know, emoji, phrasebook there. It goes on. I don't know how many websites are in this database, but every time I click the board button, it goes to another random website, a trombone. And maybe this is why I'll reveal that, you know, Jared is maybe a little sad that I'm sharing it because.

Every time you push this button, you go to another weird website. So these could all be individual weird websites that we bring up here on the podcast. And they probably will be, I was going to say,

Jared: after I vented my frustration that. The fact that you shared this does not preclude me from using some of the individual weird niches in future podcasts.

Cause as I said, we're two years in now in this, alright? I gotta take every angle I can at getting access to weird niches. Cause it's hard every week coming up with one, you know?

Is

Jared: that how you feel about it?

Spencer: I felt like that was just the appropriate time to push the trombone. Uh, so yes. So we may be sourcing a lot of our weird niche sites from boardbutton.

com, but, uh, what is interesting is that boy, they get a lot of traffic. Oh, okay. I pulled up similar web and boardbutton. com gets. 807, 000 visitors every single month and, uh, they get 8. 58 pages per visit. Look at that

Jared: visit duration.

Spencer: And the visit duration. Oh my

Jared: gosh. Wow.

Spencer: Six minutes. Almost six minutes, right?

Um, and it makes sense that there's a lot of page views per visit. Yeah. People, I just, you know, click the button five times. So every time somebody clicks the button, it's a new page view. Um, and, um. So calculating how much they actually make is a little bit difficult because a lot of these page views, you know, the ads displayed are actually on guess the pin.

com or the other weird, uh, niche site. Um, but where are they getting their traffic? Uh, I've got a trust pulled up here, you know, a big chunk of that, you know, a quarter of that. Is, uh, 227, 000 visitors a month are coming from, uh, organic, uh, keywords. I'm guessing it's things like, yeah, I'm bored. I am bored for button.

I'm bored in school. I'm feeling bored. Those sorts of things are what people are searching for and finding board button.

Jared: And here's what's interesting looking at that too. It's I would imagine it to be the other way around. I'm bored. Obviously a big search term 27, 000 volume per month. They're branded website.

Board button as a search term is more than double that in terms of search, right? It's 62, 000. That's insane. Wow

Spencer: Wow, so I think this website has been around for a really long time. I didn't look up the year but um It, uh, is clearly been around for a long time and Oh, 2006. Look at that. So this is, this is old school.

I'm looking at, um, the, the website down here. It has the copyright 2006 to 2025

Jared: back to your idea about the newsletter. Yeah. And it sort of applies here, do, do these websites know they're being iframed in to board button? I would imagine at this point, perhaps it's good for these websites because maybe then people will bookmark them.

Oh, it's great. Right? So I imagine it's a win win, but you know.

Spencer: Very much. I would say it's a win. I don't know the arrangement, but, uh, they can include my website all they want, right? If it's another source of traffic. That's great. So, um. Well, good

Jared: find. Thanks a lot for sharing. Really loved that website.

Spencer: Yeah, well, let's hope Thomas doesn't listen to this episode and you can just source all your weird websites from this from now on.

Jared: I feel like Thomas has enough weird habits in his life that he, all of his weird niches just seem to come from personal experience.

Spencer: That's right. So he's not going to have any problems.

Chicken

Jared: poops and turkeys and all sorts of bizarre things. Whatever. Yeah.

Spencer: Oh, man. Well,

Jared: what do you got? Well, I don't know if you listened to last week's, but I just got back from Disneyland with the family. So I did a Disney focused one. You can a disney dating site. That was last week. I saw that. I thought that was pretty good I mean i'm not much of a disney guy, but we were like thinking about all the different ways you can apply that to other niches um this week, uh Of course, I gotta go over it We're going to go with another Disney themed site, but not a dating site.

It's called yesterland. com. So we have Disneyland, right? Like the theme of Disneyland. Apparently, if you're starting at a Disney site, like you gotta have like an ode in your URL to Disneyland or Disney or something. We had mouse mingle last week. Today we have yesterland. And basically this is a site that is, uh.

Uh, kind of all about discontinued Disney attractions. Now, again, not being a Disney guy, I'm like, why, why would a site exist about that? Well, first off, there's a lot of discontinued stuff that's happened over the years since Disneyland started. I believe last, last week we learned it was in 1955. It's 2025 now.

So, I mean, we're going on, you know, 75 years or so. And, um, and again, they're passionate people. And I do kind of get it, like, if you got up I'm sorry, when you grew up going to Disneyland like I did, like the rides are a lot different now, you know, and there's a lot of rides that aren't there. There's a lot of parades and, uh, and, and all sorts of things.

So they break it down by land. So you're kind of scrolling through on the homepage. I got a lot of links. We got Frontierland, and Fantasyland, and so yeah, they got the original Dumbo right there, the original, um, uh, Mr. Toad's Wild Ride, I went on that, they got, um, uh, you know, Pirate Ship Restaurant, so it's not just rides, it's like experiences and stuff.

And, um, if you go in to, you know, just click on any one of these you want, um, Let's do, uh, Remember

Spencer: from,

Jared: I don't know. There you go. That's

Spencer: a good one. Sure. Let's click on that one.

Jared: And so if you go in, I mean, this isn't just like a directory. This is like someone put their time and effort into this. It's got pictures from the olden days.

I mean, look at that. That rocket's from TWA days. That puts it in perspective. Um, and it, yeah, it just goes into like. Like, it's like a, like a Wikipedia article on this, if you want to, if you want to be honest, you know, um, it's, uh, it's clearly written by someone I imagine who is really passionate about this and kind of just, I mean, it's just like a Wikipedia article.

So, um, uh, yeah. So in terms of the website, it's, it's, it's definitely got some age to it. It's, it's definitely an older design. Um, uh, as you can imagine, like. It's picture heavy. The pictures are kind of all different shapes and sizes and, um, you know, it kind of reads more like a news website. I'd say, um, now they do have ads, but the ads are very limited on the homepage.

Um, you don't get an ad until you're well below the fold. It's a pretty minimal, um, banner ad when you're in, um, you're in one of the articles. It is, uh, you know, you don't really don't notice it much.

Spencer: Just at the top and on the side. And then once you scroll down, it doesn't look like there's much.

Jared: It's a very small ad unit at the top.

It's all

Spencer: the bottom. Right.

Jared: And then, yeah, you scroll down and it does, um, well, it doesn't stick that, that sidebar ad is not sticky for me. I don't know about you.

Spencer: Yeah, no, it's not sticky. So,

Jared: and then at the bottom, so, I mean, uh, we'll talk about traffic here in a second, but. Uh, very under monetized, you know, it's, it's, it feels like someone was like, Hey, put some ads in your site.

And the guy's like, uh, cool. Like AdSense sign up. Oh, I don't put one there, put one there, put one there. But it's, you know, it's not put together by someone who kind of knows what they're doing. And again, I only call that out because typically we see two types of sites here on. The weird niche segment, one of them, no ads.

And you kind of surmise, like they probably don't know about ads or they probably don't know they can put ads in their site. You're just guessing on that. Or then you see the person that just checked every single box for their ad units, and they've got like six ads going at any one time. It's a terrible user experience.

This one kind of feels in the middle. So hard to say, um, traffic. Uh, yeah, you can imagine. So. I went to Ahrefs, right? And I pulled this up in Ahrefs and it was kind of like what I thought it was. So it's a, it's a DR62 actually. Um, but only gets, uh, less than 10, 000 keywords and only gets, uh, 5, 800 estimated traffic, but you, you have similar web apps.

So pop it into similar web. I think you'll see kind of the point of Disney. Like once, once a Disney fan discovers a site that's, that's kind of well made in terms of the content, they're going to come back. So it gets, you know, almost 10 times the number of visits. Uh, that, that Ahrefs predicts there. It's almost 50, 000 visits a month.

And again, that's not much, but if you, if you put enough ad units on that, that could be, um, a couple thousand dollars a month for you.

Spencer: Right? Yeah, exactly. Man. It's, uh, it's just fascinating. Like there are so many Disney sort of fan sites and spin offs and other things. Um, so my question, I wasn't clear on this website.

Are these. All the rides that currently exist, or are they only listing rides that have been discontinued?

Jared: They are listing, my understanding, again, not a Disney guy, so. Yeah. They are only listing rides that have either been discontinued, or where there's older versions of them. Oh, okay. So like, Dumbo is a, there is a Dumbo ride still, but this is the old Dumbo ride.

They're featuring, he'll

Spencer: show pictures. Okay. The original Dumbo ride or whatever.

Jared: Yeah. There you go. Interesting. It's not like that. Yeah. Although it's kind of like that.

Spencer: Yeah. Huh. That's cool. I mean, it, it's nostalgic, right? People that went to Disney when they were. Kids or whatever, uh, took their kids and they can look back and go, Oh yeah, I remember what it used to look like.

And I could see taking a walk down memory lane. A lot of people would enjoy this.

Jared: I mean, their articles are super long. I wish they'd load those suckers up with ad units just because they're long. And I think most people, if you're going to go read about Dumbo, you're probably going to carve out five or 10 minutes and really kind of engage with this old.

Walk down memory lane, like you said, and, um, you know, they can put a lot more ad units in and still not be a terrible experience. And, um, I, I imagine that the number of page views per visit is, is also pretty high. Once you read about one, you're like, ah, let me go read about a few others. You know?

Spencer: Yeah.

Like I'm taking a look at Mr. Toad's wild ride. It is very good right now. I'll tell you that much. Yeah. A little

Jared: different,

Spencer: but

Jared: on that still

Spencer: same, same idea though, same cars, similar cars.

Jared: Yeah. Some more concept. Yeah.

Spencer: Anyways. That's fun. That's a good one.

Jared: That's a good find. I promised, I promised a couple weeks of Disney weird niches, so I, I don't, I've been done two.

We'll see if I come up with a third one or if I just go to the board button and pull one from there next week.

Spencer: Yeah. Well, I did just notice one more. I don't know if you were looking, I was hovering over something else. I did. Maybe I'll let you find that nugget. I did catch that.

Jared: That little Easter egg there for me, huh?

Spencer: Yeah. So I don't know if that's one. I haven't even looked at it. Looks like there is another Disney themed site out there for sure. I would imagine there's at

Jared: least one

Spencer: more. Yeah, at least. Awesome. No, that's good. Um, good, good weird niche site. I love it. Um, this board button can give, get, get the wheels spinning for people.

They can click through and maybe it'll spark an idea, uh, for somebody out there as well. But, uh, that's the main idea, right, is we're trying to spark some ideas, some creativity, uh, that maybe people can go and implement in their own business. Whether they're looking at. Our side hustles and they can do a spin off of that or these weird niche sites, whatever it is, but hopefully people enjoyed the news here that we had to share a lot going on with Google continually investing in their AI.

Um, we talked a little bit how it might impact bloggers and our business, but, uh, thank you podcast. Really appreciate it. See you guys next week.

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