2025 Ecommerce Data Exposed: DTC Spend, Revenue & Platform Trends

25:38That's a huge winner. That's it. Yeah. Yeah. Like there'll be a brand like Eight Sleep that goes from zero to$100 million or whatever. It's like the VC model, right? It's like you've got a portfolio of companies in your data set and that you have a plus 38 % because two of them went plus 2 ,000 % or something, right? Yeah. That's just kind of how it flies that way. So, Sean, another thing I see in here that is of interest, I think, to you and I, you know, you're getting involved in health and wellness. I've gotten involved in health and wellness. As I kind of peer in these numbers, it is very interesting in health and wellness.

26:15If you look at the MER for first time on health and wellness is down 19%, which was the worst number in the data set by a lot. But the conversion rate on health and wellness was up 11.45%, which was the best. So basically, one industry had the biggest increase in conversion rate. That's positive. And had the worst decrease in MER, which is negative. And what that shows is it shows that's an industry where prices have been really high relative to the cost of the product. And as more competitors are coming in, companies are having to cut prices to continue to acquire customers. And that is a downward pricing pressure.

26:59Does that seem consistent with you, Austin? Yeah, that checks out. It's a very competitive space. But, you know, another thing that's interesting in there under health and wellness is look at the revenue. And I'll call it out for people. So the revenue growth year over year on the median in health and wellness was 4.26%. But on average, it's up 24.18%, right? So what does that mean? The outliers, right? There are some people. It's like technology. The big winners in health and wellness just crush, right? It's almost like, yeah, it's like technology. There's a couple of disruptive players that grew a ton by being more aggressive with pricing probably in your data set.

27:40But and just as a side note, experientially being in that space, that's what I am seeing on the ground is that it's a place where margins have been too high. And if you want to produce the explosive growth, you need to bring value to the market. So that's interesting to see that borne out in a larger data set. I think this is a great set of data because what we can do is talk about the pros and cons of each one of these industries. It's like what you can see is that babies and kids, it's a pretty steady industry. the average and the median are pretty much in lockstep together right and what you could see is fashion accessories where i think which would be and probably simple modern would fall on fashion accessories it's like the probably the most boring of all these categories it's like there's there's there's not a big delta between the median and the and the average right where food and beverage health and wellness uh technology technology have these breakout winners that like we could all name right?

28:38Like if you're in food and bath, there's always like something exploding, right? Or in health and wellness, we just had instant hydration on there. They would drive the whole thing up on terms of growth rate because last year they were$0 in revenue. This year they're going to do nine figures or whatever, right? So massive, massive growth is just like commonplace in some of these categories where other ones, they're not. We've seen this shift in dollars go from fashion and beauty into sports goods and fitness. Like fitness has been a super cycle trend for 10 years at this point. Right. And it's still a great place to build a brand.

29:13What you see is that you can grow 16 % of revenue where, you know, in beauty, you could grow three. So it's a great place to be putting dollars and energy is launching these fitness brands. Yeah. A little caveat there, and we'll get to it in the data later is the top performers in beauty, right? Like the top 25 % quartile do really well, right? There's some nuances in beauty as there always are in different industries. It's all reinforcing a point, Austin, that I think is important for everybody listening to this to hear, which is no matter what industry you're in, you need to be able to be a top quartile performer.

29:47I think actually winning a market is probably overrated in terms of its importance, but you have got to be in that top 25%. And that seems like that's coming through regardless of the industry we're talking about is that if you are a 50th percentile, 40th percentile performer in an industry, it is just going to be really difficult to run a profitable business or to generate much return. It's the vast majority of the returns are always going to accrue to the top 10 to 25 percent of brands in a space. And you need to be asking like in my current business, what's it going to take for me to be a top quartile performer?

30:25Is it even possible for me to be a top quartile performer? Because if not, it's just going to be the advertising dynamics are going to make it very, very difficult for you to run the kind of numbers you're going to want to and to be as profitable as you're going to desire. Mike, well said. You know, this isn't in this data, but my natural question would be, it'd be so cool to see the MER buy industry, right? Like we have spend, we have revenue, we have what their MER is changing over time, but you have to imagine a fashion accessories brand is probably running at a 3x mer where a health and wellness brand's running at like a one like like and that could that could just be interesting to show people like how come back with it i would love it if you guys added that to the data set because honestly uh sean to your point i had experience in you know whatever this accessories category fashion accessories i guess what we're calling what you and i do and it was like, hey, with the margins we run, we need to be at a three or four, you know, MER for new customers or something.

31:30And I got into health and wellness and I realized like, man, you know, I see people on X that are posting screenshots of running at 0.5 ROAS. And I'm like, really? Okay, well, that's, I need to shift my expectations. But this is one of those places where understanding your industry and understanding averages like this in this proprietary way helps to set expectations for like what is a good performance dude totally and you know it's what we'll probably see is that there is white space like technology companies probably run at like an 8x mer or whatever right and it's like that's probably white space in the market so um all right guys we've gone through a lot of great data for the entire industry we've gone through a lot of great data based on revenue buckets okay we went based on industry.

32:17Now we're going to get into even deeper, deeper data, a little more insight. And if this is hard to listen to, I totally get it. Go watch it on YouTube, right? You can go and look at these charts with us in real time, or North Stream is going to release this as a downloadable report. So stick around for that. That's going to be here. We have more hot takes coming. Let's talk about AOVs. So next like cohorting or segment that we have is based on average order values. First one is under$50 in AOV. And year over year on the median, they saw about a 15 % increase in total revenue. Next one is$50 to$100.

32:53They saw actually a reduction year over year. So they were down 0.86 % on total revenue, 100 to 150. The shift that we saw for revenue was 3.75%,$150 to$200 up 5.17%, and then$200 to$500 up 9.46, and then$500 plus AOV was up 10 % year over year on the median. This totally makes sense to me. I mean, the under 50 maybe doesn't make as much sense to me that it's growing so robustly, but we've talked about on the pod, there are a couple of dynamics that make this really easy to understand that basically the more expensive the AOV, the higher the growth level. One is that tariffs and the amount of inflation that they add goes down as your AOV goes up in general.

33:44So as a percentage of inflation on hex clad, tariffs are going to hit them much less than like Simple Modern, where we're selling $35 water bottles and they're selling$500 sets of pans. The other big trend that we've been talking about, and this has been going on for a while, and I really don't see any reason to assume that this is going to stop, is that the top 10 % of earners are now more than 50 % of the spend in the economy. And so you really do have different economies. The type of people that can afford a $500 AOV are still doing quite well and are not getting pinched by some of the things that are pinching other parts of the country.

34:24And it looks like they're happy to continue to buy really high dollar carts. So it's interesting to see those two things converge where I don't understand why that smallest bucket, it grew so robustly, but it's just almost perfectly laddered. That is the order value got more expensive. The growth, the median growth went up. Well, I'll explain the lower AOV. I mean, I think it's TikTok shops. Like TikTok shop is the internet's dollar store. That's a great point, Sean. You've got a different disruptive force going on there yeah yeah so it's like who's who's winning the biggest from an aov perspective it's people who uh can make their like things work as impulse purchases so this is a 10 to 40 purchase or when you get to 500 in aov everything mike said is right rich people are going to be buying that but also meta doesn't care about mer it doesn't care about like taking a percentage of your sale.

35:24It just wants nominal dollars for driving people away from their platform. So like clicks are going to cost what they're going to click. And when you get to$500, you don't care if a click is$2 or$4 or$6. But if you're at a hundred bucks, that's life or death. Ridge, Hexclad, and hundreds more. What do these brands have in common? They're all using Revo, the number one retention, accounts, loyalty, memberships, referrals, cashback on Shopify. It's the next generation of SaaS and Steward is hands-on, helping you achieve all of your goals. They are the number one accounts platform, loyalty platform, membership platform, referral platform, cashback platform, and more.

36:05They're bringing all of those tools to Shopify for one easy low price. They've just launched Wallet Passes and it's a brand new product. It's free for everybody forever on Shopify Plus. Revo is modern. They are quick. They are fast. And they're trying to cram value into this Shopify app. I love them. Check it out. You know, another thing that's probably hidden in here, Sean, is that what we can't see is what's flowing to Amazon. And I just think increasingly e-commerce is getting to where you want to if you're selling something like, say, you know, below$30, you want to sell it on TikTok shops.

36:41If you're wanting to sell something 30 to$75, you should sell it on Amazon. And if you're trying to sell average order values that are like above 50, above 75, above 100, whatever, you should be doing D2C. Because like we went into this problem all the time with Simple Modern. For a long time, I looked at our D to C sales and I'm like, why are our D to C sales kind of so anemic, in my opinion, as a percentage of our revenue? But the answer is really straightforward. It's a better deal to buy from Amazon than it is from our website most of the time because of the dynamics of shipping and other things.

37:15And so what we can't see in this data, I'm assuming, guys, is we can't really see what's going on to Amazon. But another way you could interpret this data is not that that like 50 to 100 quadrant shrank across the entire market, but that that's all getting gobbled up by Amazon and it's not flowing to kind of the D2C operators. Is that a reasonable interpretation? Yeah, I would say Amazon is included in this data. So when we look at the shifts year over year, Amazon is part of it. So it very well could be what's driving some of those smaller segments. We don't have it broken out, but I'm sure as Austin's going to say, we can always try to add that into our report.

37:49I could add that in, but I would say, look, I mean, I'll call it out for the audiences because, you know, they're not staring at the screen sometimes, but basically less than 50 bucks an AOV, the average, the median revenue growth year over year was 15.77, so almost 16%, 50 to a hundred dollars. So overall, if I was listening to this podcast, here's what I would do. I would go, I would download this data set, and I would look at where are people in my industry at my average order value? Where are they spending more money and where are they spending less money? And then I would look at where are they trying to drive that traffic?

38:29What channels? I don't think the channel revenue data is in this particular data set that we're looking at. But you guys are the geniuses that have all the information and you're going to add it. By the time you watch this podcast, it will be in there. But guys, I can't overstate how many times I've said, man, I wish I could see the industry's numbers. I wish I could see other people's income statements. I wish I could see Meta's dashboards. This is as close as you're ever going to get. and what defines great operators is that when they get an opportunity with the data set like this they're able to take it and they're able to do some meaningful things with it guys take this and upload it to a like gemini or something and upload some of your information and say hey what what inferences would you draw about where i should spend money how i should grow my business it's it's literally all right here and this is one of the reasons why we've been such big fans of the work that you guys are doing at North Beam, because it really is an opportunity to run your business better.

39:28For most D2C companies, this is your biggest line item of how you're spending money. And this really is the key to understanding with the people I'm competing against, what's the best way to do that? So I just think it's a pretty fantastic data set. Even as we've gotten into this conversation, I'm starting to get ideas. I'm like slacking my team and being like, hey, you need to look at this because there's just a lot of opportunity to apply this and run your business better next year? Yeah. What I want to say is this is the unique power of a Northbeam because Shopify has Shopify sales data. They could release a more complete picture because they have every store, but they don't have Amazon.

40:05They don't have TikTok shop. They don't have your spend data. And because Northbeam is the single source of truth for all revenue and all spend across thousands of brands at this point, they're able to put together these analysis that just like blow it out of the water. So we just went through revenue by AOV. We also have revenue by company size based on spend. So we have the biggest spenders, they're growing 13%. If you're spending more than$3 million a month, you're growing 13%. But the other thing that we're going to get into now is we're going to get through monthly performance. So if you're curious how you stack up on a month by month basis, you can look at this right now.

40:44So what we see in this monthly data. And we're going to go through monthly data. We're going to go through monthly data by industry. And then we're going to go through monthly data by spend. I mean, it's crazy how actually detailed all this is. We won't be able to fit into an hour. That's why you have to get this report. You have to download it. You have to send it to your teams. But just some quick calls out is the actual cohort of the data, the fastest growing month was March. On a median level, that grew 9%. So March 2025, the fastest growing month, I think that's because that's right before Section 321 went away and there was a big rush to ship stuff before tariffs kicked in before Liberation Day.

41:23But what do you guys think? Yeah, I think that's got it. I mean, that's the only logical conclusion. Yeah, I know a lot of people are really pushing, you know, knowing that prices, you know, we're going to take a hit, right? So it makes a lot of sense. Andrew, anything else you saw digging in? The summer months, like May, June, July, some really good strong growth months. like May was 6.8 % up, June was 8.8 % and July was 8 % up year over year. It also looks like one of the only times where we were seeing a positive shift in terms of efficiency as well. So those were the three months and then including August and September where we were positive in terms of efficiency.

42:02It looks like some of those earlier months and the worst one actually coming or second worst coming in April, right after that sort of liberation day that you guys are talking about, where we saw a 4 % drop in MER year over year. Yeah, that was super interesting. And if we go to the next section of data, what we're going to see is, this is the only place you're ever going to see this data. It is by month, by industry, and you could see spend, revenue, MER, the whole thing. So like if you're a baby and kids brand, you could be like, yeah, September was horrible year over year, right? In terms of a spend perspective.

42:37And let's see if there's any other high call outs on this. It looks like for beauty and personal care, February is up 12%. August was up 10%. Some of the stronger months there as well. It looks like summer actually, in terms of like spend was a little bit lower for them where they pull back. And it looks like part of that probably came from April being the lowest year over year revenue month where it dropped 8 % year over year for beauty and personal care. What's so cool about this is just being able to see how different businesses have different peaks, right? health and wellness, which was like probably the best category of 2025, December was down 8 % year over year on a median revenue basis.

43:16We have revenue decreases there, but then you look at home and furniture every single month, positive and green. I can't overstate that there's no other place to get industry level beta like this on a monthly basis. So Mike, any, any call outs before we move to the spend side? Just in general, like if my overall feel right now is that the two meta themes going on in people's lives are the disruption of AI and the advances that we're making in medicine and the kind of higher awareness about your personal health. I think those both show up in this data, basically. Like, I think you definitely see it.

43:52The technology spend numbers are really robust. Like, seeing the average for the year is one thing, but as we talked about, 2025 had kind of some different epochs in it that worked very differently. And you look at like the last five months, technology's on an absolute heater, whether you're looking at, you know, including the outliers or even just the average, and you're seeing, you know, things associated with sporting goods and fitness are on an absolute heater. And then as Sean mentioned, health and wellness had some really, really strong months, especially to like kind of close the year. It's actually interesting to me that getting in the month by month data in this particular case is, I think, more helpful than looking at the entire year data because we're capturing some of the momentum of, you know, you said this, Austin, but it's not even so much like where was the puck?

44:40It's like, where's the puck headed? And I think you can see some trajectories really by looking at these Q4 numbers about like, OK, it's very clear what the kind of secular trends are and that those secular trends are driving a lot more opportunity to spend and gather revenue. in some places. Category matters. Fashion accessories is the worst category, just objectively. You can look at the data and it had the most anemic growth throughout the whole thing. But Austin, before we move to the spend data, maybe put a bow on all revenue for us. What's your take on the year? Yeah, my take on the year is that people that didn't give up on top of funnel, people that still invested in growth, didn't give up on meta and all the other channels kept their top of funnel live and kept iterating on creative, they were the ones that that succeeded the most.

45:30Okay. So that's, that's kind of the big story for me is that people that know how to market direct to their consumers, understand the value of top of funnel and don't give up on it. Those are the folks that won the most. And we just saw it. If you look at that top core top, that top 25%, those are folks that understand, Hey, we spend money on meta app loving YouTube. It drives revenue on DDC and retail and TikTok. And like, they're not giving up on their top of funnel. They understand that it takes time. They're building towards the sweepstakes if it's like a ridge, right? And they know how to build a wave of momentum and capitalize on it.

46:08Easier said than done, right? You need the balance sheet like Mike talked about, but you also need a marketing team that has the trust of the CEO. And there's that dance of like, hey, Hey, MER isn't as strong this month, but we're building awareness. New customer traffic is up. Like a lot of Northeem customers will look at their new customer traffic or email signups, like leading indicator metrics that we know that show that, hey, we're building the funnel, even though MER isn't really that strong. And that's when I think about that top core tile. Those are folks that understand how to do marketing, which is a dwindling bunch in today's world as it gets more complex.

46:44I have a new hot take for 26, but it's going to get even harder. Okay. The big takeaway is the people that know how to build and maintain a funnel and know how to big wave surf, they win. The people that are just paddling around in the shallow water, they're not going to get the big waves. They're just not going to do it. And that's just how it goes. Yeah, okay. If you want the big waves, you got to be in the deep end. Yeah, yeah. That's it. Okay. So we're just going through the next 10 minutes just going through some of the spend level data because I think it's so hard. this is really probably six hours of podcasting to unpack all this.

47:19And you know, Taylor Holiday is going to do it. He's going to spend six hours going through this data. So let's go through platform level insights based on our cruel clicks only data. So this is spend platforms. And maybe Andrew, could you explain revenue cash versus revenue one day for everybody? Revenue cash is going to look at how much revenue came in over the course of the entirety of the year. So across all of 2025, regardless of when those touch points occurred. So it could include some of the great work that you do at the end of 2024 on Facebook that bleeds into 2025, that one day revenue number is just looking at how much impact you're making within 24 hours of when the click or the event took place for each of these platforms.

47:59So a little bit longer term window based on the entire year versus what are we seeing on the immediate short term impact. So this is spend across all platforms. And just like earlier, we have spend by company size, We have spend by industry and cohort. If you want to know what beauty brands are spending on AppLovin, they have this data in front of us. But just at the very high level, this is just the entire industry, the entire business, where are they spending money? What you see is that AppLovin is obviously a breakout hit, right? The spend on the platforms of 176 % year over year. It's the only thing growing by double digits, let alone triple digits.

48:38And that's just because it's so new, right? It did not exist in 2024 for most people. So it does not surprise me that it's this big breakout star. Facebook ads are up 4 % in terms of spend for the median. Google ads are up 4%. I think that's basically just GDP. If you're going to be on Meta, your spend is going to go up 4 % every year, even if impressions are not up 4%. And then let's talk about the declines. I think that even tells a more telling story. Microsoft ads, it's a dying platform. like Bing has some users and they're getting, they're getting older every year. Um, Pinterest, people have been so excited about Pinterest for so long, but I've never really seen brands crack it.

49:19There's always a whisper, like it's working for somebody, but I've never seen it actually work. What this shows is the data is Pinterest was down almost 16 % year over year. Um, Snapchat spend was down 46 % year over year. This is probably the biggest opportunity for brands start spending on Snapchat, right? Like if all these people are pulling out, I think Snapchat has the same audience as TikTok and you probably can get very cheap CPMs. So I would rush in and fill that gap. Let's start spending on Snapchat. TikTok spend was down 7%. Does not surprise me because as they prioritize shops, actually spending on the ad platform goes down.

49:55And then YouTube ads down 24%, another one where I think people should be rushing in and spending. So those are my takes. We'll kick it to Mike. We'll kick it to Andrew. We'll kick it to Austin. Mike, What do you take on these spend numbers? I'm trying to digest all of this. And one of the things that I think is really interesting is understanding how companies of different sizes are interacting with these platforms, which is one of the graphics that we have in here where it says, okay, for each of these platforms, for AppLevin, for Facebook, for Google, how are we seeing spend allocation depending on company size?

50:26And one of the call outs that is just fascinating is that the bigger you get, the less you spend on Google ads. It is just like really robustly in the data set. It ladders almost perfectly that as you scale, you're spending less on Google ads. My assumption is that that's because the smaller you are, the more you're in a niche industry where like AdWords is kind of how you're making a lot of your bread and butter. What's interesting is that Facebook ads don't go that way. Facebook ads actually are pretty strong across all the cohorts. And even the biggest companies are spending almost 60 % of their budget there.

51:01Sean, you've said this kind of famously, like, hey, you can scale to, you know, like you don't need to be diversifying ad channels. You need to be scaling if you're under nine figures, you know, and you can continue to scale Facebook. And it's pretty much what the numbers show. But what's also interesting to me is where are the bigger brands, the biggest brands, the 100 million plus, the 50 million plus brands spending the most is a percentage of their spend. And, you know, you just mentioned Snapchat. The biggest brands are spending by far the most as a percentage of their spend on Snapchat. That's interesting.

51:38TikTok, the biggest brands are spending by far the biggest percentage of their marketing budget on TikTok and YouTube. all three of those basically the bigger you get the more you spend on those so i don't know if that's you kind of tap out on google and then you have to kind of diversify or if that is that it requires bigger teams to really effectively go after that channels but it's very clearly in the data that the companies that are really at the biggest scale and winning the most are are spending the most in these smaller uh relatively smaller channels in order to execute well on some of these, as Connor likes to call them, tertiary channels, right?

52:20Connor at the Ridge, you need to specialize, right? So therefore, to your point, Mike, you need teams that are like, oh, okay, we've got to create ads for Snap. We have to do them for Snap, right? You know, you can't just repurpose everything, right? So the people that know how to build creative for each platform and invest in it and execute, those are the ones that we see do the best on those platforms. Kind of obvious, I guess you could say, but not so obvious if you don't have a large team or expertise to execute on all those individual channels. Yeah, I think that the laddering down of Google was the most shocking thing about how clear it is that Google goes from being like as important as meta when you're really small to as you scale, Google is really almost a tertiary channel.

53:04I moved Pili Case to Rich Panel and I want to share some numbers. So the first is CSAT. We're well over 90 % since moving. We used to actually struggle with Trustpilot. RichPanel turned on their integration so that a lot of our customer reviews were now going over to Trustpilot, not just all the fake crap that was there. So that's a win. Other thing is our customer self-service rate is over 50%. That helps our team out so much with workload. So if you're looking to improve your customer support stats, get higher ratings on Trustpilot or Google, and you want to save some money while doing it all, I highly recommend you book a demo with RichPanel.

53:34They're awesome. Head over to richpanel.com slash demo. Also, please tell them you came from the Operator's Pod. Promise it will help you. And so the chart we're looking at right now is by company size, spend by channel, and how much of your total spend is it making up? I totally agree with Mike's thesis that as the bigger you get, Google's really good at letting you capture some existing demand. But like if Google tries, if Rich tried to spend all their money on Google ads, like there's not many wallet searches out there. Like I have to go out there. I have to go to Meta. I have to generate my own demand.

54:07And this is just like, the proof is in the pudding. Google does not let you generate that much demand. So I think brands are probably overspending on Google. The bigger you get, the more you have to diversify. That's the other thing. Out of all spenders on Snapchat, big brands are tending to spend more money there than smaller brands. That's just because they need to diversify. You can only reach so many people on Meta. You can only reach so many people on TikTok. So the bigger you are, the more you have to diversify out, and one channel becomes less important. I'll just call it the math, right?

54:35So on Google Ads, of people doing less than$5 million a year, Google makes up 53 % of their media spend, right? Over$100 million, to Mike's point, 14%. Okay? So that's a dramatic difference, right? Just for the audience, people listening. Can I ask you guys a question? Do you have, Austin and Andrew, do you guys have insight into the Amazon ad spend that is happening with these companies? Yeah. Because that's not in here. And Amazon as an ad platform is absolutely, I think I would consider a peer and a competitor with these other ad channels. And I would be very, very curious how that not only how does it compare as a channel across the entire data set, but I'd also be really interested in seeing the bigger you get, what happens to your Amazon ad spend as a percentage?

55:24How does that move around? I do have that data. I don't have it in this view, but we can definitely pull it into the report. Let's pull it to the report. Yeah, we'll add it to the report, Mike, so that when you get the report, It'll be there. And again, I'm going to make the recommendation I made earlier. Design a prompt. That's a couple of paragraphs giving a bunch of stuff, a bunch of context about your company. Upload some numbers from your company. Take this report, upload it, and then try and parse through it. Because you could probably spend four or five hours pulling out interesting things about how you compare to other companies that are similarly situated.

55:56And I think that's really what people are always concerned about is like, I know my business's numbers, but I don't know all my competitors' numbers and what they might know that I don't know and how they're acting. where there are opportunities that I'm not taking advantage of. This is a great way to find some of those. I want to go to the very last set of data in here. So we're going to skip over a bunch of spend data that you need to get those reports you can look at. But at the very, very end, what we see is this is the first time you're ever going to see this data, AI search data across thousands of stores.

56:25Lots of people put out spend data. Meta is going to put out spend data. They have earnings reports. Nobody else on earth has AI search data. So maybe Andrew run through this And we'll just spend five minutes here and then let's move to the hot take section. So how'd you pull this? What is it? Summarize it for us. Yeah. So this is looking at AI or LLMs as a percentage of total visits and revenue as the months have progressed through 2025. So from a visits perspective, at the start of the year, it made up 0.01 % of the total visits that we saw across all of our customers. By the end of the year in December, that was up to 0.06%.

57:02And it kind of shows this rapid growth that we're seeing in AI. And I actually pulled some numbers for 2026. Interestingly enough, in the four days when I pulled this data, it had already surpassed the number that we saw in January for 2025. So it just is continuing to grow in terms of how much demand we're driving from these different LLMs and where they're coming from. And then on the revenue side, it looks like even more growth from that 0.01 % of total revenue on a cash basis coming from AI search all the way up 0.14 % by the end of the year in December. I think the call out here, if you look at that year over year growth in visits in December, visits coming from AI were up 1000 % year over year.

57:45And the nominal number is still really small. I think that's my first headline is it's still a really small number. Like, if you're thinking about this, you're ahead of the game. But it is growing very rapidly. In a data set where most of the numbers are like 3%, 5%, you don't see many plus thousand percent numbers. And it reminds me of Jeff Bezos, like when he was thinking about leaving to start Amazon, the thing that triggered it was he just saw the month over month growth rates of the internet and was just like, wow. You know, even though it's maybe kind of in its infancy now, anything growing at that rate eventually is going to be very, very meaningful.

58:20So my takeaway from these numbers is if you're like, hey, you know, search traffic from Gemini and and Chad GPT is going to change my life in 26. It's like it's not. But if you're a bigger believer in like, hey, three to five years from now, this is going to be a really meaningful source of how people get to your your store and how you sell things. That looks like it's absolutely on point. Yeah, I think that's dead right, Mike. Yeah. Not much to add there other than just what Andrew just said, that the growth is fast and it's increasing rapidly. So we could check back in a quarter midway through the year.

58:57These numbers could be very different. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the fact that four days have already passed all of January, it's like, okay, so that means, yeah, probably by the end of the year, it won't be 0.14 % of all visits. It's going to be, you know, 1.4 or whatever. It's going to 10x again. uh now and it's the same power law i mean chat gpt is still the 800 pound gorilla like claude code is awesome and gemini is is great at a lot of different things but in terms of actual raw traffic numbers everything i've seen outside of this data set and then this data set says that it's it's chat gpt is where you'd want to focus if you were picking one place to start hey you know what's important to your business understanding it that's where saracen aletus comes in.

59:44That level of precision can only happen if your data is rock solid and in one place where you can actually pull it from. I'm looking at my contribution margin. I'm looking at my sales breakdown, my sales by product type, and it really just starts shining a light into the black holes of your business. Everything is at my fingertips. Our dashboards pull in from everywhere. I just had to set 2026 financial budgets. Serious Analytics made that data available in four clicks compared to 40 hours. It's like AI for your business knowledge. And if you want to check out That is S-A-R-A-S and see how daily precise data can transform your profitability.

1:00:22Guys, this has been awesome. Let's stop sharing and let's spend the last five minutes hearing the predictions of 2026. The guy's batting a thousand. He got it totally right. What's going to happen in 2026, Austin? Yeah, I think 2026 is going to be the, I call it the year of creative, right? I call it, I did a Hot Takes episode yesterday with John Shanahan, who runs growth at TRX. If you know the fitness company, you know the fitness companies. They do a lot now, straps and more. And he's really innovative. He's generated videos himself, hundreds of millions of views as a creator himself in the past.

1:01:03So he's a very experienced creator. and this is a teaser to what we talked about which is that he's now using ai to like basically take creator content so like an initial pass on a video content uh piece with straps that are very you know complex to use and then he's iterating on actual real creator content with ai models to generate mass volumes of epic creative that even he is shocked at the quality right now we all know this is coming, but what does it mean? It means that if you're an innovative company that doesn't just hand off a prompt to build AI video, but you actually blend live action content like real humans and use AI tools, and you're able to leverage the new creator economy, which we talked about yesterday, and you're able to execute on that at scale with all of your creative initiatives, you will have an outsized win, assuming you do a good job in the creative course, right?

1:02:06But like, if you can leverage technology and generate more creative, you will win relative to your competition. And we know this has always been true. I mean, since I've seen you, Sean, you know, from the early days of the Ridge, you guys have always been at the absolute peak top of that always, right? In terms of generating new creative, of reaching out to people, iterating. And it's just getting that ability to do that, is my prediction, is the people that do that, on YouTube, everywhere, YouTube, Snapchat, TikTok, the people that are able to hit the market on the top of funnel, AI too, by the way, AI platforms, publishing on AI platforms that are now launching, the people that are able to execute well on those platforms are the ones that are going to succeed.

1:02:54and I think we're going to have a great year as a result. I think it's going to be great for companies that execute well. And my prediction is not necessarily only the small companies are going to suffer this year, but here's my hot take is legacy, slow moving folks that use archaic business models are going to get crushed. The folks that say, we don't care about DTC. We're just retail. Like the people that don't understand this new omni-channel universe that's building. Glasses coming from multiple people. Snapchat's launching glasses. Meta's pushing harder into there, which I have. And people that are living in the past are going to live in the past.

1:03:35And so this new omni-channel AI-powered universe, those folks are the people that are going to win in 26. And I actually think a lot of legacy folks are going to suffer dramatically. That's my big hot take because I'm in meetings where I meet with legacy players and they're not innovating and i think that when i see folks like john shanahan at trx or folks that i'm meeting with that are that are constantly innovating and learning and leveraging these new tools to succeed they're going to be the winners that's my prediction i agree completely infinite creative at basically zero cost and it's just like creativity is the is the balance now um and creative creative has been the new targeting that's whatever that's that was met his line from 2024 and it's like yeah creative is the new everything it's like how are you going to reach people and how are you going to stand out but also on the channel sean like people that are giving up on things and just like oh we're only this or only that and like people that aren't understanding the universe is broad it makes sense sean i mean you're doing that what we've been calling it is agnostic commerce i do not care where the sale comes from i'm going to try to sell everywhere to everybody because it used to be this thing where you would go in there and you'd tell facebook no my customer is 25 and they live in Los Angeles.

1:04:50I'm like, well, would you be mad if a 60 year old in Kansas city bought your thing? Like the answer is no. Right. You'd be stoked. And it's like, would I be mad if I had sales coming from Walmart? I don't care anymore. It's like, people are going to be checking out on glasses. People are going to be checking out on like, you know, iPads, you know, that are just like in bathrooms. Like who knows what the future commerce is going to look like, man. So you just have to be everywhere. I got to be everywhere, but people are giving up. I see legacy folks living, just giving up on certain things. And I think that's going to be hurt them dramatically in 26.

1:05:24I think you're totally right. Parting words. We'll go to Mike, we'll go to Andrew, and then we'll wrap it up. What's up, Mike? I think what you're saying, Austin, makes sense because for some of these things to work, it's really clear that you have to have kind of an omni-channel ecosystem view. Like I've, we've had probably like a top 10 top 5 % kind of amount of revenue we've generated from tiktok shops but it's like you just don't make much money on tiktok shops and if your view is we're going to drive contribution profit through tiktok shops then like you're just going to you're going to drop it eventually like one of the things i was just talking with my team about um yesterday is kind of social shopping and we've played around with it on tiktok shops and like the return on investment didn't feel great right off the bat.

1:06:09But you know what my son did over the break? My son downloaded Whatnot on my phone and he used 100 % of his Christmas money on Whatnot. And so like this social shopping thing, it's here, it's real, it's disruptive. And we're going to have to figure out how do we adapt to that? That hasn't been part of our selling before, but it's going to need to. So I think you're right. I think the world is more fragmented and more omni-channel than it ever was before. And brands are going to have to have a strategy for that because the idea of like, well, we've always won an X channel and we can just kind of keep showing up and doing what we do there and it's going to continue to work is probably not true.

1:06:45Totally right. I'm glad you brought up whatnot. The channel to watch in 2026 is whatnot. Andrew, you'll have the last word. Austin, Mike, what you guys are saying makes a ton of sense. I feel like being willing to try some of the newer formats too and leaning into those. Some of the most tested platforms that we saw between 2024 and 2025 were AppLovin, TikTok, GMV, and even DemandGen for Google. So I think the more you're willing to experiment to Austin's point, bring that creative across formats using AI to make it not as big of a lift, the more you're going to be able to find these different pockets where brands can win and not always be at the beck and call of the Google and Facebook and what they're doing and the earnings they're trying to drive.

1:07:24Fantastic data. Really hats off to Austin and Andrew for putting that together. It'll be available to the entire community. You guys need to dive in there, spend hours pulling it out. There's way more we didn't cover. You can't cover it in an hour. You have to spend forever working on this. Austin promised to even add more data just for Mike. So maybe you'll see some Amazon data in there. But seriously, guys, world-class chef's kiss. You crushed it. This is the information the industry needs. So thank you, Austin. Thank you, Andrew. Mike, always a pleasure wrapping with you on the pod. I'll talk to you guys later.

1:07:53Goodbye.

1:08:00Thank you.