MrBeast's SaaS Decision - A Mistake?, Pay per Crawl Launches for AI, Listicles Are Back, Why You Need Them for LLMs, How LLMs Will Rank You in the Future, AI Content Farms Are the New Arbitrage?

0:28How about this Mr. Beast sass decision? But apparently it's, you know, so apparently I think Mr. Beast will partner up with you, but like you'll get a very small chunk of equity, like 1 % or something like that. But so Mr. Beast, he posted this to Twitter. Really quickly, ViewStats gets 2.1 million visitors. Wow. According to SimilarBlade. SimilarWeb? I mean, SimilarWeb, sorry. SimilarBlade. SocialBlade. Okay. So ViewStats, it's actually a great tool. I pay for it. and it shows you like, it'll come up with like thumbnail ideas for you. You'll see outliers and things like that. It's a great YouTube tool.

1:03You wanna say something? No, okay. So he tweets this out. This is on June 26th, right? So not that long ago. So, hey guys, thanks for your feedback on ViewStats AI thumbnail tool. We pulled it and added a funnel for creators to find real thumbnail artists to commission. What happened was he launched an AI thumbnail creator in the product, right? Which I don't think is a bad idea. But a bunch of YouTubers pushed back or creators pushed back saying, oh this is uh this is not good for us is it going to take jobs whatever and so he's like oh so he removed it and they created a funnel for creators to find real thumbnail artists to commission i think this is an impulsive decision um and that's a bad decision right after that a bunch of people just started creating a giveaway for free yeah yeah i'm like i'll go back to that this is reactionary right and so um i think mr b is fantastic i think this is a situation where it's like, hey, when you're in SaaS, you typically want to validate it by how people are engaging with that specific feature.

1:59And you could look at the qualitative numbers and you could also look at the, which is the feedback from people, but you also have to look at the quantitative numbers. Yeah. So he should just do what's best for the software. If he does what's best for the software and what's best for the end users who are paying, he will make more money and create a better software. and if he doesn't do this to please people, someone else will and start eating his lunch. Yeah, and I think that is the thing. Like I think it's sometimes you might apply the lens of, oh, if a video is loved by many people and has a lot of views, like it is important.

2:30That part's important, but you can't apply that to SaaS. Because usually like it's like the Henry Ford thing. It's like, okay, if you ask people, they wouldn't want a faster horse. Like people don't know what they need sometimes. Correct. Yeah. Yeah. All right, what's the next topic? What do you think about that Cloudflare paid to play paper crawl launching. What do you think about that? I saw it. I don't know how well it's going to work. I think it's a terrible idea. Yeah, I don't know. I'm not a fan of it. I'm not saying it won't work. I'm just not a fan of it. So my take on this is if you're a big publisher getting millions and millions of visitors per month, maybe this might make sense.

3:11But if you're someone, like they power 20 % of the internet. That's a lot of people, right? But most people don't have big websites and website traffic is going down over time. You might as well get crawled by everything. Correct. And like have a chance, a fighting chance. Because otherwise you would turn paper crawl on, you're not going to get crawled and you're going to make what? Pennies? Not just that. You're then not going to get recommended by all these AI platforms and then someone else is going to take your business. Yep. The crawling should be free. this shouldn't be a gatekeeper. I get why Cloudflare is doing it because they control so much of the web's traffic that they can be like, oh, this is another easy way for us to monetize and make another way for publishers to monetize as well.

3:58But if I'm a publisher, I'm like, so I'm happy with this model rolling out. I know that sounds bad because this means that a portion of the people aren't going to be getting crawled because they're not going to get paid. So they're not going to be happy. And they'll be like, no, you're not allowed to crawl. And that makes me happy as a marketer because it just means I have less competition. Yeah. I don't think many people are going to turn this on. I think they'll make some revenue from it. I don't think it's going to change Cloudflare's business. And by the way, I think you and I both use Cloudflare.

4:28I think it's a great company. But you actually had, their stock is still doing well. I think you had a piece. All time, not all time high. In 2021, they were higher, but for the last few years, they're at all-time highs. I thought you had a post in here or a topic in here where it talks about what you actually need to rank in LLMs, right? I posted that on Twitter. Oh, you did? Maybe it's worth talking about here. So when you think about LLMs, I kind of had one topic in here, and it's about listicles. Yeah, just go for that. When you think about listicles, we're seeing with a lot of these LLM platforms, they're not as sophisticated as Google.

5:11I don't mean that in a bad way. When you look at Google and someone's typing in or you get a link from someone, they know a New York Times link in theory is more valuable than a link from neilpatel.com. Just the reality, New York Times has much more authority. If your company is around marketing, sure, a link from Neil Patel can be very valuable because it's a similar audience. But outside of that, a link usually from New York Times is always going to be neilpatel.com. Now, when you look at Google, they also know an article from New York Times is better and more trustworthy than abxyz.com. I'm making up a domain name, right?

5:55Because New York Times has more authority. But what we're seeing with the LLMs is if I just bombard the internet with listicles of like the best ABM software and I keep mentioning your product and it's on websites that have links. You don't need a lot, but enough where they're getting indexed and I bombard it and there's like, I'm creating like 20 articles a month consistently. And there are other competitors, but you're always number one and you're praised the best. the alums are just pulling and you're getting placed way higher. From everything we're seeing, it is the easiest way to get the alums to recommend you.

6:36It's called guest posting, which is old school SEO tactic. But instead of a link, you're just having them talk about your company or technically your guest posting. So you're just mentioning your company and you're mentioning it at the top and why it's the best. And then you're mentioning other competitors and you just bombard the internet with it. and the LLMs are just pulling from it and they're saying you are the best. Dude, I have a thesis on this, right? So, okay, here's how I think LLMs will rank you in the future. So when I use GenSpark or Manners or any of these super agents, like Perplexity Labs or Deep Research or whatever, they're so powerful at quickly crawling videos and crawling anything, crawling your social profile, where I'm like, they will just look at a brand.

7:18Instead of looking at links all the time, it's very easy to tell if this brand is legit, right? So if what you're saying is true, that listicles are back and you just need to bombard the internet with them and then maybe have your company number one or whatever. But if you're also a strong brand yourself, like a personal brand like yourself, for example, or like use your name as the author for these, I think you get a double whammy there. You get a double plus. So I'm like, man, we should test this for like 30 days or something where it's just like every article that we put out. Oh no, I've already tested this out.

7:46Okay, how's it going? It works. It works. Yeah. There you go. So I do think LLMs are not going to rank so much on links. I think links will still be important, but I think your brand is going to continually rise. And it's so easy for these things to just quickly figure out who the heck you are instead of relying on link signals. Yes. And if you can just end up, like if you bombarded the internet with a thousand articles talking about different variations, think about prompts people would use and you're always rated highly and talked about the best and it's thorough. It can't just be a crappy. Make sure it's quality guys.

8:16Yeah, it has to be quality. And it's authentic and real and they can look at other places and see similar stuff. Like, you know, I say the last part because you want to be ethical. Of course, you don't want to just badmouth the competitor. You want to be honest. It just helps you get mentioned in all the elements and do well. I do think eventually they will adjust and they'll put different weight on different types of websites. Yeah. Dude. And they could say they're doing that right now, but we're not seeing that. Just being honest. But seeing what? We're not seeing them put a lot more weight on different publications.

8:49We're just seeing that you just blast the web with listicles and you rank for like best ABM software and variations of that. Like what software's, what's the best software for B2B SaaS companies to use? You know, and you just always list you in different variations of your ideal customer profile. Yeah. And then you just get customers. This is how it's been early days of SEO guys. But we would just say you want to shield yourself by making sure it's quality and having a human in the loop, ideally. Yeah. Don't just spam. Correct. The short way is usually not the way. But this is still a shorter way.

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10:04And it's becoming a new normal, right? And he's saying that, look, there's one account that got 2.3 million followers pumping out motivational content and it pulls like 500k views a video. And that's pretty significant. That's a lot. And so he's saying, look, we've crossed a weird territory where AI accounts can outrank most humans and followers. People form real emotions with bots. Engagement is higher on synthetic content than on authentic posts. Nobody notices or cared as fake. I think that works for like if you're doing like travel content or like wide time content, like health content, motivational content, maybe that works well.

10:36I don't know about health. Depend on the health. Yeah. You want to get it from like a legit doctor like Andrew Huberman. It depends unless it's like health, like why you should exercise more. But travel or like even generic relationship advice is what he's saying here. And so he says, look, it reminds me of the demand media era. And I don't know if he's calling it demand media, but that reminds me of eHow. And so my whole thing is, look, if everyone starts making these faceless channels and things like that. So he's like, your competition now is the Asian farm that never sleeps and never misses trending audio.

11:06So I don't know about that yet. I don't know how I feel about it. I don't know about it yet, but this is where I kind of disagreed with it. And he's like, builders who move fast might be the biggest attention arbitrage ever. But then I was just like, we tested this with pure AI content. It just doesn't do as well. And I was looking at some of these channels. It's like, most of it doesn't do that well right now. I'm all for it if it does well, but even listening to Brett Malinowski and that CEO of Clearly talked about, they're like, it's just not there right now. So I think it's a little overhyped in the moment.

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13:49I don't think it's a new arbitrage yet. I don't think it's a new arbitrage yet. And then go find out how easy it is to monetize this content. it is not easy to monetize it. The way I've seen people monetize it the most, and I'm not recommending this, is people creating, and I'm not saying there's anything right or wrong with this, I'm not judging, is people creating AI content and monetizing it through OnlyFans. I've seen that. Does it work? From the data that some of the articles I've read, some of these people are making eight figures a year from that. Wow. Because remember we did dinner in Germany with a guy with a marketer.

14:24He managed real OnlyFans people. He managed real OnlyFans people. Yeah. And what was his number one issue? They were too much of a pain to work with. Because when he started making the money, they would go off and spend the money. They're unreliable. And they wouldn't keep working. So then he couldn't make consistent income on his end because he was taking a percentage of the revenues. So then with AI, you don't have to deal with the person just taking a vacation. You can get them to continually produce. You get the cut. And then imagine someone paying you a lot of money. I don't know how OnlyFans work, but let's say there's a premium feature.

14:57I don't know if you can like, someone can get personalized content or FaceTime or I don't know, whatever it is. And you can now have AI personalize it for that individual because your cost isn't really there and you can scale to not just 10 people or 50 people. You can scale to millions of people and you can make even more money. But I read an interesting article. I believe FaceTime is blocking nudity. Was it FaceTime? FaceTime? Is it FaceTime? Yeah. Wait, they block nudity? Wait, how do you block nudity on FaceTime? Of course they're usually. It's not necessarily... So it's not the app. And when people are doing nudity, are they sharing like, you're single, or you know people, is it like they're FaceTiming someone else and they're like sex talking or whatever it's called?

15:48Is it called sex talking? I don't know. Sex talking? Yeah. So I'm monitoring a lot of this. live yeah see no one knows his stuff here yeah no one knows his stuff yeah anyway well okay but look i think this will proliferate in certain areas and i think it'll it's just not there in a lot of other areas so we won't call it an arbitrage on this podcast until we feel like it's an arbitrage and we've seen it where i also think ai not to say content farms but ai content will help is when the quality is there be content having someone who's the ai face of a corporation will be really useful. Yeah, because what we face right now when we talk to a lot of companies is they don't have a person who could be the face and they struggle to find someone and they don't want to like, oh, well, they could leave and there could be issues.

16:37And then when you have an AI person, it just eliminates a lot of that. I think the model right now is you hire in-house influencers and you pay them and try to incentivize them to stay. Or I do like the Clearly model. I kind of want to test this where they have 50 content interns and they hired these people. They paid them$20 to$40 per video, okay? And they get bonus if they make a video that has over a million views to get$1 ,000 for that. That's a good deal. And his whole argument is, if you're like 18 to 21, if you're a broke college kid or whatever, you know how these algorithms work and you want to hire the people who are up-and-comers.

17:07And so you just look at your For You page or whatever and you hire these people and you get 50 of these content creators, right? And then eventually, I think what's going to happen is you're going to have like an AI spokesperson. But I think right now, especially if you're creating, you've got like a consumer app, I think you can do this 50 interns thing and just see how it goes. I don't know if it'd work for us. I don't think it works as well in B2B. I think B2B, the best thing we can drive it to is probably our newsletter, but like not our software or not our services. Yep. Yeah. But okay, one more thing before we go, because we're on this topic right now.

17:38I don't know if you started doing this. I feel like this is something you're doing too, but this guy talked about this whole concept of GTM engineer. It's basically like, you know, you have like a person who will, you know, help with reporting on the sales side, more doing, they'll, they'll work with tools like Zapier, Clay or NN or whatever to build these workflows. And I'm just like, we should hire AI automation interns. And so we've been, um, the, all these people, we put this job post up, just a job post and it's all developers that are applying for it. And we just hired someone. I think we might hire two more.

18:10Um, but they're all in on building these workflows, all of them making things more efficient. I'm just like, Oh, this is great. And they're like, dude, we just want to learn. We just want to work harder right now. And the things that they're building are really sophisticated. And I'm just like, how do I get more? Because one of our mutual friends, he's like, they hired these two kids out of college and they're all in on AI. They sleep in the office. And I'm just like, oh, this is great. We don't have it to that extent where they sleep in the office. But yes, we have a team of people that just do that.

18:41But are we talking AI automation interns where they're like super young? They're not interns. Okay. These are full timers. They're full timers. And their goal is to automate workflows and systems and processes and stuff that people are doing. We start with mundane, boring stuff that's easy, replicatable, that has very little ambiguity. It's more black and white. There's not really much gray. That's the stuff that we have them focus on first because then it's more likely to succeed. I think we're, for this team, it's going to be, we're probably going to have AI content operators joined too, which can help like chop up content or even like do a content farm if possible.

19:18But I think this is a nice way if you don't have a team like how Neil's established right now, you can have these people that are AI native and then probably have them report to someone technical and then they're just fixing things throughout your organization. And maybe you're bonusing them on things fixed. How are you bonusing them right now, if at all? I don't even know how they get paid. I just know we've been doing this for more than a year. Yeah, so I think this is great. I think it doesn't have to be NNN. It doesn't have to be like Zapier. you can figure out what you want to use. You can even use clay for this.

19:48But I think my vision of this is this team is AI native to start with. And then eventually in the next six to nine months, we want the entire team to be AI native. So anyway, anything else from your side? I think that's it. It was a fun session today. All right, that's it for today, guys. We will see you tomorrow.