97% of these sites got hit by Google's HCU, Eight newspaper publishers sue Microsoft and OpenAI over copyright infringement, CNET + best buy = new era for media?, 70% of millennials relating to creators over celebrities

0:28All right. So welcome to the Agency Owners Association. lot of agency owners, they're struggling to grow faster. They're struggling to get more clients. They're struggling with operational issues, hiring issues. And both Neil and I have been through all that, right? So in terms of covering, getting an agency to six figures, seven figures, eight figures, Neil in his case, got his agency to nine figures, right? Maybe even 10 figures one day. But we wanted to share those experiences with you to help you grow faster. And there's a lot of value in this group. You'll see below all the bullet points on the things that we currently have.

0:57And we're going to continue to add value to this group over time. And the cool thing about this group is you can cancel at any time. So there's no commitment. You can sign up right now for whatever price it says down there. It's going to continue to grow up, grow and grow. I will tell you that this group initially started at 149 and it's going to continue to rise, right? So now it's going to be the best price to get in on it. You can cancel at any time. Just know that when you come back, it's going to be at the elevated price. And that's what we thought we'd do. And those of you that are doing seven to eight figures, once you join the group, or actually you can even see it, there's an application to join a live mastermind.

1:28So this is a live mastermind that where you'll be able to hang out with Neil and myself, and we'll have other agency owners at your level, but that's for agencies that are doing seven figures and above. I think once we have enough demand for maybe the six figure groups, we'll figure something out there. But for right now, seven and eight figures for an in-person mastermind and then online community, a bunch of other benefits. If you're doing six figures and below, you'll see that right below. and then we'll continue to figure out and grow this thing as we continue on. So without further ado, go ahead and sign up below.

1:59If it's not for you, that's totally fine too, but no commitment. Why not? If it helps you, if you think it can even help you 10X the price that you're paying for one month, then why not just give it a shot, right? So that's it for this little intro over here and just go sign up somewhere over here and we'll catch you inside. Do you know that, let's finish off the helpful content update thing. So there's this tweet here from Lily Ray. And so she often will tweet about sites that have been hit by these Google updates. So she pulled together data from Systrix and BuiltWith to look at 1 ,500 sites that had the greatest percentage decrease between the helpful content update and now.

2:37So just for a refresher for everyone, Google's helpful content update hit a lot of sites. We had a lot of friends that were hit, and a lot of people haven't recovered. So BuiltWith indicates that 97 % of these sites that got hit, what do you think was the one thing that they had in common? if you were to guess. AI-generated content. Try one more time. Old, not updated content. Try one more time. You're kind of on the right path. Thin content. No, okay. They all had ads, right? And you could call ads like thin content too if you want. Not really, but kind of. So she says, okay, and also 40 % of these sites apparently use AdSense, right?

3:15So if you're loading your site with a bunch of pop-ups, a bunch of ads, that's not a good user experience at the end of the day. and that's not helpful content. And so by definition, these sites deserve to get hit, right? Now some sites, we have mutual friends that got hit, maybe didn't deserve to get hit. So take it for what it is. With the helpful content update, I've seen sites that are good that got hit. I've seen sites that are crap that did not get hit. It's a luck of the draw. With any algorithm change, the way you got to look at it is you got to adapt for what's best for the user. And in the long run, you should do fine, but you can't optimize every day or every month based on an algorithm change.

3:51You've got to diversify. Yeah, not just diversify, but you've got to play the long game with SEO, right? Because if you're doing what's right in the long run, you should see your traffic go up and to the right. I still think we should diversify too. The reason for that is because even Google themselves, they don't even know where SEO is going in the next five, 10 years. I had a conversation on Saturday. It's like, there's a guy that has an SEO tool, right? And he's like, actually, after we hung out, he asked me, he emailed me, and he's like, hey, do you know who else is in the space? Because I'm not sure where things are going, right?

4:18And so for the product leader to say that is kind of scary. And it was actually a lunch with three SEOs, right? And everyone's like, yeah, don't know where it's going. So that's a scary place to be. If you don't know where things are going, yes, played a long game with SEO, but you still have to diversify a little bit. I told you, right, months ago I sat with a Google engineer to go over their changes with AI. And this engineer was high up. You know what they said on what's going to be the future with SEO and everything? They don't see a future where there's no organic results because there's different use cases for different queries, which I agree with that.

4:57But what's going to be the future with AI? Honestly, they don't know themselves either. They look at it as one big experiment. They're going to release a lot of iterative changes, see how users interact, see how it affects their revenue, see how it affects the user experience, and then they'll tweak. They're not looking at this as a one-month change, six-month, one-year, or even five years. they think it's going to be very iterative over many, many, many years before they really figure it out. They better hope it is for their sake. Yeah. And look, their numbers are still climbing, but here's the kicker.

5:28And I posted about this on Twitter a few weeks ago and we talked about it on the podcast. Dude, Google is still growing in popularity. Google is not declining. Have you seen the Google Trends for chat GPT versus Google? Dude, load it up on your computer. Google Trends versus what? Okay, go to Google Trends and type in Google as one of the words. And then go type in ChatGPT. Oh, Google versus ChatGPT? Yes, you do worldwide. Instead of past day, go look at it for like... Last five years? No, past 12 months. If you look at past... Actually, first go 2004 to present. You see the spike, ChatGPT went from nothing to something.

6:10And then look at Google. And just because a trend line is going up or down, it doesn't mean necessarily someone's getting less or more traffic. I think you might need to tell people how to read these Google Trends charts too. Yeah, so the way Google Trends charts work is these are all the people that are typing in this search query on Google. Like they're typing in ChatGPT or they're typing in Google. Over time, people go direct to the source. So even if the trend line decreases, it doesn't mean that less people are going to the website. Yeah. Right. But if you look at the last 12 months, chat GPT, the amount of people typing it into Google hasn't increased much.

6:49It's gone from a nine to a 12. This is an out of a hundred. And the reason it's out of a hundred is because Google was a hundred at one point and is at 85, right? And just for people to know too, a hundred means that to Neil's point, that's the highest point that's ever been searched, right? It doesn't necessarily mean it's like, oh, it's fading away. Correct. And 100 is in comparison with whatever is there in the chart. So Google, because it's more popular, that would be out of 100 and ChatGPT would be lower. But all I'm getting at is ChatGPT's growth rate is slowing down. If you actually look at similar web and you look at OpenAI and their traffic stats, I don't know if you've looked at them.

7:29I check them on a monthly basis. But their total visit count, their growth has been slowing down. So last month over month change is pretty good, 8%. But the month before that, it was much slower. It went from 1.6 to 1.7. The big things that increase chat GPT's growth is releasing new features. So like if they're saying, hey, you can now create videos, et cetera. And this is analytics for open AI. It's not just the chat GPT part of the site. But when they do anything like that, we're seeing massive increases in traffic. If they're like, hey, you no longer have to check your emails and respond to them, OpenAI does it for you, they'll see a massive spike in traffic anytime they release anything like that.

8:14I think this is exciting. I mean, the main thing for me is there's a lot of competition. Google feels competition now, and they're forced to innovate. OpenAI is launching a lot of new features. You have perplexity, all these things, right? They're all launching new products all the time and new features all the time. Now, to wrap this helpful content thing up real quick, do you know the average percentage change, I'm just going to list the top three here. The types of sites that got hit the hardest are news. So average percentage change is down negative 61%. Okay. And then the second would be pets.

8:45Okay. And then the third would be adult, interestingly enough. Yeah. And by the way, speaking of perplexity, to go back to AI, dude, they are growing at the fastest rate for a large AI site. I don't know if you've seen their steps. We talked about this last time. Yeah. Yeah. You were surprised by their traffic. Their traffic is going up at a really rapid pace. Now, of course, they don't have a billion visitors like chat GPT. But if you're at 100 plus million visitors and you're going 20 plus percent month over month, that's ridiculous. I mean, look, here's the thing, right? At the end of the day, organic traffic is getting hard.

9:23I don't care if you're perplexed. I don't care if you're Google or whatever. This is why CNET and Best Buy did a partnership. Because they're trying out this new, I don't think I've seen a partnership like this before. or you can correct me if I'm wrong, but this guy, Stephen Reginald, posted this on LinkedIn. CNET plus Best Buy, new era for media. The merge of content and commerce hit an inflection point this week. Media company CNET has committed to a first-of-its-kind partnership with Best Buy. CNET will publish articles on bestbuy.com. Ads from Best Buy will run site-wide on CNET, reaching millions of readers.

9:55I haven't read CNET in years. The deal represents the first time a publisher and retailer have combined data in this way. Why is this a big deal? because CNET and Best Buy have worked together for a year in a test phase. The goal was to lean into strengths both entities have and combine them toward a bigger whole. So now there will be in-store content by editors at CNET, the product reviews and coverage of new tech offer, third-party validation for shoppers. And basically, I'm going to give you some stats so we can react to this. So CNET is a top tech publisher, I'm air quoting right now. Best Buy has 1 ,000 retail stores, 50 million plus audience combined.

10:31I don't really know what that means. New commerce media model template, CNET content on TV walls at Best Buy. The goal is to enhance the shopping experience. And the trend is signals rise in publisher-retailer partnerships. All right, welcome to the Marketing School School Group. Okay, so Marketing School, S-K-O-O-L group, right? And so this is a free group that Neil and I are doing. And what I want to do with this free marketing community is I want to build a very strong group of people that are sharing the latest knowledge, the latest trends, the latest topics, and we'll share our content as well.

11:06And we just want people to engage with each other and build a strong community, right? Because people ultimately stay for community at the end of the day. People are longing for community. And we thought with all the free content that we do, well, what's been missing? A free community where we can continue to help people level up in terms of their marketing. And hopefully we can help people find jobs in the group. We can even maybe even create a job board, but even offer a lot of our other content, package it up for you. just to help you get better at whatever it is that you do in the world of marketing and whatever it is that you do in the world of business, right?

11:35So Neil and myself, we thought that from a retention standpoint, we do very well with acquisition on all the channels that we have, all the audiences that we have. But from a retention standpoint, building something that we think we can be proud of for a very long time, why not do a free group, right? So we have a paid group, obviously, called the Agency Owners Association for agency owners. and if you want to go to that, there'll be a link somewhere over here to that. But this group will always be free and as long as people are continuing to engage, this group's continuing to grow, then we'll continue to invest more resources into it.

12:09But we thought this was a long time coming. So you can sign up for free. You might have to fill out some information or you will have to fill out some information just so we get a sense for where you are and then we can start to help segment the group too, right? Based on whatever it is that you're looking for because we want to continue to add value and hopefully we'll have a very strong database of people and you just tell us what you're looking for, what you need and hopefully we can make those connections. So go ahead and sign up somewhere over here and we'll see you inside. It's smart, but do you know who Sina's owned by?

12:36No. Red Ventures. Yeah, yeah. Which is their model, their performance marketing shop, their agency. Yes, kind of. It's an agency like Eric and I's. Yes, they do affiliate, but it's actually a very unique deal where they say, hey, you are Best Buy. We'll work with you. We actually control a lot of the traffic to just drive you sales. and they work on very different models. They can do some stuff on affiliate, but a lot of theirs is contractual basis where they're getting paid out X amount of dollars. I like the way how this is being presented to you. It's a PR release. It's basically signing a new client, right?

13:11And it's a PR release. So it's marketing them getting a client. But it seems like it's a smart thing. So it really matters how you package something. Totally agree.

13:24so uh did you see the stout here 70 percent of millennials are really 70 percent of millennials are relating to creators over celebrities it was from ad week no yeah you read a lot of cnet at ad week i noticed cnet sorry cnet just because we're talking about cnet you read a lot of cnbc and cnbc ad week ad age economist uh tech crunch media posts wall street journal wall street journal i read quite a bit uh campaign i read quite a bit uh but yeah dude and this totally makes sense because dude the problem with the celebrity stuff is everyone knows especially millennials more than older people they know that these people were paid for and when they look at you know content creators creators the content that they're creating is more authentic the celebrities it's the question is who's paying them the biggest bucks?

14:15Or is it their own product or service that they're shelling out? Which I don't blame them. I would do the same thing if I was them. Yeah. I mean, that's why we've been talking about the last couple of weeks. More and more people are, we've talked about the creator payments growing 70 % year on year, and we think it's going to grow a lot faster. And also creators are, I believe that a lot of them are heavily under monetized right now because they rely so much on sponsorships. They don't know how to build businesses, right? And this is a trend I got from doing the podcast in the last, I don't know, eight months or whatever.

14:45A lot of these creators that have millions of subscribers, millions of views per month, they all resort to sponsorships. And when I start to talk to them about business, it's like deer in headlights kind of. So I think that's going to change. I mean, when you look at like a, you know, Mr. Beast, I think his manager raised money from this, this private equity firm, and they're just looking to partner up e-commerce operators with these creators, these influencers. So that's the model. It's distribution at the end of the day. Dude, it is. Here's an interesting set. So my buddy Mike owns this company called Legion Athletics.

15:15It's a supplement company, like protein powder, fish oil, you get the drift, but like they focus on people who want to live a healthier lifestyle and people who are like going to a gym and lifting weights and building muscle. So Mike is an influencer, has a lot of books, got a advance for a book. He sells like crazy on Amazon. Some of the most popular fitness books are his on Amazon. Yeah. All right. He also has a podcast as a content creator. How much revenue do you think he drives to his business? It's a multi million dollar business, not like a million a year, more than a million a month. Like it's substantial, much bigger than that even.

15:49Okay. So let's say he does$120 million a year. I'm not going to, I can't say the revenue. Okay. Oh, you know the revenue. Okay. I'm just gonna say he does 120 million a year. I would say maybe he drives 60 to 70%. So his revenue that he's driving trackable revenue. Okay. And there's probably more than what's trackable from the podcast, the books, um, social media, 30 to$40 ,000 a month in revenue. That's it. That's it. Wow. Okay. But trackable revenue, trackable revenue. So there's more. Yeah. They also leverage influencers, micro influencers who are well-known, not like a Kardashian who has a hundred million, a hundred million followers.

16:26They leverage someone like Eric Sue living in century city and being like, this is how I live a fit life in LA, lifting weights, my morning routine. You walk to Equinox every morning, I think, when you're in town. You get your smoothie. Half the time I'm talking to you, are you here? No, I make my smoothie. Yeah, that's a blender in the background. And you live a fit lifestyle, okay? So they're paying a lot of micro-influencers. How much revenue do you think the influencers are driving on a monthly basis? And it's profitable. Much more than that. Yes,$400 ,000 to$500 ,000. When I first started my business, the overwhelm was real.

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19:14So when you actually look at the dollar amount per influencer, it's not as much as his own brand, but it's way more scalable. Yes, it's worked. You got to outreach him, but he can go get from 750 or 700. He can go get another 700 or 1 ,000 or 5 ,000 and just scale up the process. I always forget these marketplaces you can go to get these micro influencers. Do you remember them? There was one called like influence.co. I think it shut down or something. I don't know what happened. There's still a bunch that they'll do everything soup to nuts for you. They'll help you find an influencer. Isaiah, that was one of them, right?

19:50Isaiah? I forgot. Isaiah's publicly traded, by the way. I don't think it's that great of a platform. But dude, still, I've looked at these platforms. I still think it's just better to go out there and manually reach out to each of these influencers and work out a deal. Establish that relationship, yeah. Yeah, because then what you can do is the key, and this is where people screw up. They have all these influencers. they pay them and they're just like, yeah, promote my product. But then they don't put the influencer on the landing page so it doesn't look like it's fully tied into the marketing message and it doesn't convert well.

20:20But the moment you tie them in throughout the whole funnel, the conversions and the numbers just go through the roof. I think with influencers, this is a very buy low, sell high opportunity. So you can buy it because a lot of people, they still don't know how to monetize themselves very well. So if you can negotiate a no-brainer deal with them and then prove that you can drive results. It's a good symbiotic relationship. They know, like, and trust you. It can be something that lasts for a very long time. So, and let's use an example, right? You're an influencer in the marketing space, right? So like what percentage of your business actually comes in from your brand?

20:57We used to track it. It used to be around, when we first started off, our first year of revenue was around$5 million. Almost all of it came from me. Our second year, I believe it was either 16 or 18 million in revenue of that around 10 came from me. And then as we started scaling up, cause we grew substantially from there, um, no more than 10 million. It caps at 10. For me, it's capped at 10. For someone like Kylie Jenner, she was able to produce way more, but, um, it's less than 10 % of our revenue. Yep. Which is interesting. People would think that it's, it's a lot more, but no, the reality is it all comes down to the product or service at the end of the day.

21:33The product or service does a really good job. That's how you get referrals. And that's how you get those other deals coming, those bigger deals coming. And then you have to play the game too. There's other stuff. Yeah, and people look at influencers like Kylie Jenner or Rihanna and like, wow, look what she's done. And look what Kim Kardashian has done in Skims. I'm not knocking them. They've done an amazing job. They've gotten great traction. Good for them. But if you look at the biggest businesses in their space, the way they make money is old school systems, processes, distribution. You can't forget about those other channels because those other channels are what's built timeless companies that are worth 30, 40, 50, 100 plus billion dollars.

22:10All right, so that is it for today. And go to marketingschool.io slash agency to sign up for our agency owners association. The group is continuing to grow. And by the way, we're upping the price every now and then as we continue to increase the value there. So go check it out if you want to grow your agency faster. Marketingschool.io slash agency. Don't forget to rate, view, subscribe. It helps us grow. And thank you for your attention. Check us out on YouTube as well.