The Fall of CNN

0:28How about the fall of CNN? TV staff. NBC is also looking to cut about 50 people or so. And the other day, someone was interviewing, I think it was a speaker of the house. And the CNN anchor was like, you're on the news, sir. He's like, dude, nobody watches CNN. People go to Cartoon Network and watch reruns instead. And I just think this is an example of a brand that has been going in the wrong direction. And I think eventually the nail will hit. What's the expression? The nail on the coffin something like that yeah but you get what i'm saying when i was younger i loved cnn mainly because this is a little bit skewed to me and self-promotional when i was young i lived in a hotel in seattle you remember that right you've been to a long time ago i had a condo all of eight by uh hyatt and they wrote an article about that and i got tons of press on the home page and that was cool whatever i got on also one of their tv shows and it was a business segment during Thanksgiving years and years ago.

1:29So overall, I had a good experience with CNN. The reason I'm not a fan of CNN isn't because of what they do or they don't do. From a general perspective of people saying it's fake news or not, I stopped liking CNN because they said I was running for senator or governor or something. And they took my picture and put it on and said it was me who was running. There's a lot of Neil Patels in this world. I technically was not running and I forgot which state it was for. So I was getting bombarded with text messages, phone calls, and they were streaming me on TV and my picture all the time. They'd be like, Neil's running.

2:07And they weren't saying really much about me, but enough people watch CNN, at least back then when I was getting tons of phone calls. And I was like, man, these guys can't fact check to actually see which Neil Patel it is. And I was getting irritated. And I even tweeted at him back in the day. They didn't remove it. And I was like, man, screw these people. And I literally got probably 100 to 200 phone calls and messages. Wow. Congratulations. Yeah. And people are like, oh, how can we support you? And I had to keep texting people back. And they're like, ha ha, stop joking. And I'm like, dude, this is just getting irritating.

2:39Dude, this is the thing with legacy media, right? They're still trying this stuff. And then the whole like, you know, the salute, the whole Elon salute thing this week was just nuts, right? By the way, I talk to my younger staff and I say, hey, do you trust the media? They're like, no, we don't. People have woken up, they've gone over it, which is why you're going to see this continued fall of legacy media because they continue to play these games. If they just focus on making the product better, they still have a chance. There's still a chance. But if you keep trying to play these games like, oh, so-and-so is, we're not going to use the word, Elon is this, Elon is that.

3:16It's like, dude, that stuff is like, you might as well go do something productive. And I think what's going to end up happening is if you end up going away from what you know or skewing things, you're going to end up losing traffic and trust, which actually brings us into a really good topic of HubSpot's traffic going down. You saw the pages that cause HubSpot's traffic to go down 100%. This is according to SEMrush. And disclaimer here, it's not actually HubSpot's Google Analytics. So what percentage do they go down? Who knows other than HubSpot. I actually don't think their SEO traffic going down is going to affect their business one bit.

3:58Yep. Well, at this point, you want to talk about like they are known, they're known. And a lot of their sales are, they've been going up market for a while. and again, they're a known entity in the CRM space but I'm looking at some explanations here by the way in the comments so this was tweeted by Ryan Law and my friend Gaetano tweeted this morning so HubSpot lost 80 % of their SEO traffic or something like that but it's highly unlikely due to AI because we would see similar patterns across other sites but the most likely explanation is the algo change that happened recently and so they were ranking for a lot of unrelated top of funnel things And so it makes sense to cut that.

4:37You should lose that traffic. And to clarify, these unrelated terms were things like famous quotes, small business ideas, quotes, cover letter examples, letter of resignation, how to make a graph in Excel, leadership styles, PR, website development, real estate license. These are all things that HubSpot really doesn't do. Yeah. Look, HubSpot's a great company. They have a great SEO team, but just know now a lot of their stuff is driven by sales motions. And then the other thing is Dharmesh is going hard on agents. And I think he's going to be able to capitalize on that. Somehow I think that's going to drive traffic and conversions.

5:18And that's going to relate to HubSpot in the long term. So I think they'll be fine. They have a strong team. They have a really strong team. You and I are on the same page. We don't really check our analytics that often. The update happened in December. Did you check your analytics since then? No. I haven't either. Did you check it the day after the update either? No. And I don't even know when the date was. So like, yeah. But I do put pressure on the team just for them to check and then for them to keep things updated. But that's about it. Yeah. And I keep up to date with what the updates are and what's happening.

5:48But for us, we generate most of our revenue from RFPs, referrals, whether it's from employees, clients. So we focus on the channels that drive majority of our revenue. We do keep track of our SEO traffic for the page that drives leads and the keywords that we rank for that drive, you know, real customers. Like we used to rank on page one for the term SEO and our team used to spend a ton of time updating it. So I asked my team, all right, go back for a whole year and find out all the people that we got as a customer from that page. and we did this for a few years and it was a whopping zero. And I was like, cool.

6:29Who cares if you're using it in a pitch presentation, stop wasting your time updating this page. They're like, you sure? And I was like, anyone who's typing in the word SEO is usually looking to learn about the subject. They're really, really far off from paying us to do their SEO because we tend not to work with smaller businesses. I'm like, this is just going to be a waste of time. Intent matters. You know, interestingly enough, so I had my head strategist today, he shared a call with me and then he was on a pitch with a prospect. And the prospect was like, hey, look, great presentation and everything, but come on, I can do a lot of this stuff using Claude and AI now.

7:07And I just want you, I want to understand from you guys, where is your business going to go? And sure, we're paying X amount here, Y amount here, Z amount here. But isn't this stuff just all going to be like machines in a couple years. And so I think that thought is probably pretty prevalent. And we should probably talk about at some point how to optimize for search everywhere optimization. Yeah. But going back really quickly to HubSpot and no, people complaining like, hey, isn't Claude or ChatGPT just going to take over a lot of this stuff? We used to get that when some of the stuff came out.

7:41We don't really get it anymore. I don't know you get it often. No, that was only the first time. So he, he said, and I didn't like the team responded beautifully to it. Um, and so I, but I think the people that do understand that machines will replace repetitiveness, but they won't replace creativity. Funny enough, this will go live on my ex profile in a few days. We did analysis of this and, uh, what Eric's looking at is how long are people spending to write a blog post that actually ranks on page one of Google. And I remember at our agency early on, people used to tell us, hey, we don't need you for content.

8:19We can just end up doing it. And we ended up losing some revenue over it. Majority of those customers ended up either A, coming back or B, their traffic just declined and they didn't come back and they felt that they can figure it out and they're just going to keep doing it through AI. But we didn't really see anyone successfully just transition with pure AI related content. So we were starting to look at data on how long it actually takes to write a blog post. And back in 2015, the average was around two hours and 10 minutes. This is for blog posts that actually gets traffic and ranks right from SEO perspective.

8:54Go to 2022, it ramped up all the way to three hours and 52 minutes. That's a huge difference. That's almost double. And the big reason being is blogging and ranking on Google has gone more and more competitive and it's much more saturated. There's only so many results on the first page, whether there's 10 results, eight results, or 12 results, it doesn't matter. There's still only so many results. And there's only so much people are going to scroll down. So you got to put in more time to do the research, create something that's a masterpiece, something that's amazing. So that way it can actually rank high.

9:26When AI came out and in 2023, it really started taking the worldwide ice storm, it went from in 2022, three hours and 52 minutes that people were spending two hours and 11 minutes to produce a blog post that ranked. But what we were finding, because we were working with a lot of these contractors and companies is those blog posts didn't do as well in the long run. So you shoot up to 2024, the time went to two hours and 51 minutes, which is still more than 2015, but less than 2022. 2025 is forecasted on our end through our surveying and internal data around two hours and 59 minutes, so roughly three hours.

10:04What we're finding is AI can help you save time, but it's not at a place yet where you can just click a button and it can just replace humans. It's far from it. And counterintuitive, even though AI is getting better, people are actually spending more and more time to create content, even though AI is getting better. And the reason being is this more competitive than ever. And you need that special touch of originality, which you're not getting with AI. Like I said, machines for repetitiveness and humans for creativity. We're going to give you some hard numbers on AI customer support. So Ankur Nagpal, who sold Teachable, so he just, he tweeted something out.

10:44He's just trying to get a sense from people that have gotten good at using AI for customer support. So the CEO of Intercom said, so fin by intercom has 3 ,900 customers. So that's their customer support agent, I'm guessing. So on average, it resolves 54 % of queries sent its way. When properly configured, it increases CSAT. So that's customer support something score. You know what CSAT means? Okay, so that's that. And then I believe Salesforce said it's 86 % or something like that. And then this other guy over here tweeted, he says, giga ML, our resolve rate is 81 % of tickets. for Zepto, they get 60 ,000 tickets per day, 1.8 million per month.

11:25I think the numbers and the percentages of the quality resolved tickets are lower than what some of these people are claiming like Salesforce, et cetera, because they're pitching the solutions. But I do think it is great and it can help you solve customer success and it'll get better and better over time and solve more and more of them. When I first started my business, the overwhelm was real. I didn't have the tools to help me scale. If only I had Shopify from the start to handle all the behind the scenes work. Shopify is the platform behind millions of businesses globally from huge names like Mattel and Gymshark to the smallest brands just getting started.

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14:17And I think that's, at least from a marketing perspective, that's a big thing that we're not really seeing too many companies leverage yet. Dude, there's a tool, you know, have you heard of Hume.ai? Yeah. Okay, so Hume is the most natural conversation that I've seen that you can have back and forth with it. So I messaged them. I was like, hey, when are you guys going to have like 11 labs integration? And also, hey, Jen, as well, because if you can do that, then like, okay, game over, right? Then you put on your site and it's just like a Neil Patel talking to you all day. Yeah. It's Eric Su talking to you all day.

14:44And it's also an infinitely patient Neil Patel and an infinitely patient Eric. You can ask me however many questions you want. It's okay, I'll be there for you. So I think that's going to be great. Let's talk one more AI thing. This is from Paul Graham, founder of Y Combinator. So he said, I talked to a CEO of a moderately big tech company who said they've replaced Figma. So Figma is like Adobe, you're doing design work, you're collaborating. He says they've replaced Figma with Replit. So Replit is a code editor. It's an AI code editor. I've been talking about it quite a bit. You can build prototypes.

15:18You can design landing pages. And he said, this surprised me because I don't even think of them as being in the same business. But he said Replit is so good at generating apps that they go straight to prototype now. And then Greg Eisenberg, who's also speaking at the YPO Global Marketing Summit, he's like, dude, they'll sit in a meeting now and then one of the engineers might just be prototyping using Replit. And then by the middle of the meeting, he's like, hey, I got this prototype ready to go. I love it. Yeah. guys the age of the ai introvert it's here i don't know if i told you this last week but the biggest problem we're facing in our company right now when it comes to product is uh not engineering anymore it's product and getting the product people to move faster to keep up with uh engineers because engineers are using ai to just do their job so much faster yeah product people need to use ai as well and we have product people that are using ai but you still need um them in the loop.

16:11They're just not moving as fast as engineers. That'll be solved on R and within 30 days, Mike's going down to Brazil to solve it. You've got to be involved and you've got to be the pusher. You've got to have, ideally, multiple pushers in the company. I saw a tweet about this. It's the same exact point. If you use something like a cursor, you're going to be 5x faster as an engineer. If you use Devin, you can multiply these. One engineer can become 10 or 20 engineers. The thing about product people, the tweet said, look, product people are basically screwed unless the product people become enabled by AI.

16:47Then one product person can become 10 product people. But if you don't fix this now, you're basically screwed. What we found is with AI and product is you still need the person to be methodical and just create the best experience out there. And AI is great. It's not perfect yet. It goes back to what Eric and I have been saying for a while now, in which if you combine AI with the human, you're going to get much better results. And I showcase that in one of our earlier episodes talking about how long it takes to write a blog post that ranks on page one. And people are still spending more time. You know, AI has helped reduce time.

17:22But from 2023 to 2025, people are spending more and more time because you need that human touch in there. The same goes with product. You still need it in there. But if you're not using these tools to become more efficient, you're just making a big mistake. I'm very optimistic. I mean, I'm very optimistic about business in general in 2025. Basically what Stanley Druckenmiller said. We'll end on this note. So you saw what the Anthropic CEO said about AI, right? It depends what you're saying, but I also know they just raised a billion, a million, was no, billion dollars extra from Google. I believe that is a 60 billion valuation.

17:54So he said, over the next two or three years, I am relatively confident that we are indeed going to see models in the workplace that consumers use and that gradually get better than us at almost everything. Almost everything. And he said, look, he said, my philosophy of talent is that talent density beats talent mass every time, which is what we just said earlier. He said, you want a relatively small set of people where almost everyone you hire is really, really good. He's like, these models will go off and do a bunch of things and check in with you every once in a while. Think of it as having all the piping, all the inputs and outputs of a human operating virtually.

18:28I do think AI is going to change a lot of businesses over the next three years, but at the same time, whether it's Anthropic or OpenAI or NVIDIA, it benefits them to push AI. I think there's going to be some sort of in-between. I think it was a Google CEO or Elon Musk that said a lot of what we've seen with AI has pretty much come out. There is going to be a lot more changes, but the other changes that are going to happen in the future are going to be much more harder to accomplish than what we've seen since the early days because a lot of the low-hanging fruit has been done and now it's really the hard stuff that they're working on.

19:04You know what I think AI is eventually going to do? I think what it's going to do, it's going to make all people realize that being on the beach, it gets boring really quickly and it's going to unlock creativity because the thing is entrepreneurship is creativity. Being an artist is creativity. It's going to unlock creativity for almost 100 % of the world and they'll realize that's the point of everything, not retiring on the beach. Yep. All right. So that is it for today, guys. Go to markingschool.io slash agency to learn more about the Agency Owners Association and that's the group where you're going to see our churn numbers get even better.

19:37Goodbye.