Welcome back to another episode of the Niche Pursuits News Podcast!
This week, Jared Bauman and guest host Thomas Smith are back at it again, bringing you the latest headlines about AI, Google, and content creation. They cover a lot in this episode, so you won’t want to miss it.
The news kicks off this week with TikTok.
After providing a high-level timeline of events surrounding the TikTok ban, Thomas shares his experience discovering ban-related news and other related events that surprised him.
Although the app has been reinstated, the uncertainty surrounding its future certainly hasn’t gone away.
Listen to the Full Episode
Do you agree that it’s like a game of chicken? Do you think a merger is in its future? Or might it go away forever?
Jared and Thomas make a few predictions about the future. Do you agree? And what are the implications of this situation for other players in the industry? How do you feel about Jared’s comments about platform risk?
Tune in to hear the full conversation!
Moving along, they talk about how Google has been blocking SEO tools.
How was it discovered that they were being blocked? Have you had an experience similar to Thomas? Do you agree with his theory about the crackdown or about how companies like Ahrefs and Semrush will respond?
The next item up for discussion is the new $500 billion AI company called Stargate. Thomas explains the project and a bit of the drama around it
Do you agree with Jared’s takeaways from the story? Or with Thomas’ burrito analogy?
Lastly, they talk about how Google rejected the EU’s fact-checking requirements.
After Meta eliminated its fact checkers, Jared and Thomas wonder if there will be a domino effect. They talk about the different restrictions and requirements in the US and the EU, GDPR, cookies, and how this decision could affect content creators.
Moving onto their Shiny Object Shenanigans, Jared goes first and talks about his two calculator websites. He shares rankings and traffic after being live for just two weeks.
How are they doing so far? How have his plans changed? What interesting ideas does Thomas suggest?
When it’s Thomas’ turn, he gives a quick update on his Toaster Guy YouTube channel, so tune in to hear those details, and then he talks about another side hustle he’s working on: his food newsletter.
He talks about new subscribers and how he’s getting them, and also how he’s monetizing the list. He shares his strategy for new content he’s creating and some calculations to determine how much he could be making if he were to scale this project.
He and Jared draw some interesting conclusions from this project. Listen to the full episode for all the details.
As for their Weird Niche Sites, Jared goes first with a water site, which is essentially a drip calculator that answers the question: how much water does a leaky faucet waste?
They talk about how it works, where it could be used, and what other ideas it brings up for them.
Thomas shares his site, he shares OzBcoz, a ukulele and guitar song database site. How much organic traffic is it getting? What lesson does he take away from this site, whose design leaves a lot to be desired?
He talks about the site’s content strategy and monetization and why he thinks it’s doing really well.
And that concludes another episode of the Niche Pursuits News Podcast. Thanks for listening! Let us know what you think in the comments.
See you next Friday!
Transcript
Jared: All right. Welcome to this week in niche pursuits news. My name is Jared Bauman. Last week, we, we left you on a bit of a cliffhanger with the impending news of a TikTok shutdown. Well, a lot’s happened in the last seven days. Uh, as Thomas and I were spending the first part of today going through it to make sure we had it in the proper order from shutdowns.
To restarts the whole nine yards. We will cover the timeline along with really what’s next for tick talk. That’s our big story today, but there’s a lot of other things that are happening. The news, um, Google has been causing chaos for SEOs by blocking third party tools, so we’ll dive into those details.
We’ve got some brand new AI news, uh, brand new to the tune of 500 billion. So that’s kind of big. We’ll address that. Uh, I teased it. I’m joined again today by Thomas Smith. So, of course, we’ll be talking all about side hustles and our weird niche sites as well. Welcome, Thomas.
Thomas: It’s great to be here.
Jared: You picked a good week.
It’s a good week. Um, we kind of had to start cutting stories as more kind of crept up throughout the week. And even today we were adding stuff. So, uh, let’s try to get through it as quickly as we can. Let’s dive into the big story. Tick tock. So last week, obviously we were going into the impending shutdown that was going to happen on Sunday, you know, Saturday to Sunday, and no one really knew what was going to happen.
Although it was getting, it was looking increasingly likely. That we were going to have this shutdown. So what ended up happening? Let’s just quickly go through kind of a high level timeline of events. And then we’ll get into, um, we’ll kind of get into some of the details of what it means. Um, I have it up on screen, an article by the BBC.
I’m also going to look at an article by Forbes. There’s a great article by Forbes with a timeline. So midnight. Um, Eastern time on January 19th, the nationwide ban took effect and, um, basically TikTok has started shutting itself down and pulling everything in the hour before that. Um, uh, let’s see, at 10 a.
m., uh, the next Sunday morning, basically, uh, uh, Trump, at that time, you know, the incoming president of the United States announced that he will sign an executive order. On Monday the 20th that would delay that ban. Um, uh, there was some feedback about this. Um, that allowed basically TikTok to start restoring, uh, their, uh, their, their, their app.
Uh, by 1 p. m. Eastern on January 19th, some TikTok reporters, uh, users have reported the app was back online. Um, and then we started basically going into the following day, which is where, um, uh, let’s see, I’m trying to find the right time, but basically on January 20th. Uh, at 8 20 p. m. Eastern, uh, Donald Trump signed an executive order halting the tick talk ban for 75 days and basically was saying, um, with the intent to determine that appropriate course of action with respect to tick talk and about, you know, we were dealing with this whole.
50 percent ownership controlled by U. S. Interests. Um, there’s a lot of other details there. That’s the high level of what happened. We’ll get into what happens next. Uh, thomas, you were kind of watching this in real time. Almost. We have actually a personal story of yours to share here in a second. What did I miss out on?
What did I leave out? What are some details you think are important in this?
Thomas: You know, I think one thing that startled people is everybody was kind of expecting this band to go into effect on sunday and then saturday night if you’re on the on the west coast. All of a sudden you got this message saying, Hey, tick tock is down.
All these news outlets started to report it all at once. And I was kind of expecting, like we were hinting at it, the last podcast, wake up Sunday morning, you know, check the phone, see if it’s still going. And I got this message. So Saturday night I was scrambling, Oh my gosh, what happened? And pulled it up and sure enough, you know, pulling up the tick tock app on my phone.
You had that little message that said it wasn’t available. It took down some other stuff too, which to me was even a bigger deal. Um, CapCut went down, which is their video editor that I use for stuff, even though I’m not really that, that active on Tik TOK, uh, and then, you know, of course there was the reversal of that on Sunday that you mentioned, so.
I think there was a lot of swings around and a lot of people didn’t realize the timeline. It was going to happen so much earlier than they were expecting what I did, though, which is what you’re seeing on the screen here. If you’re watching on the video is the 2nd. I saw that that alert come up. Um, my sort of day job is as I run a.
Agency, a content agency. We do a lot of news photography. So I pulled out my camera. I snapped a picture of my hand holding the phone with that little message on there and submitted it to all of our different content agencies and woke up the next morning and found it basically on the cover of Wired magazine in a news week.
So I feel like I got my got my mileage out of this thing. But I think for people who are Our big creators in the platform, it was very destabilizing. And also the kind of unexpected swings back and forth were probably even worse than the couple of hours that the app turned out to be down.
Jared: You know, it’s interesting you mentioned that because the, the reality here is that it went down on Saturday night.
And certainly if you’re on the West coast, like us or in other parts of the world, it would happen Saturday. You know, we’ll call it late evening, but certainly while most people are still awake, but if you’re on the East coast, it happened, you know, kind of 11 midnight, you know, around that time, if you’re in Europe, it was happening in the morning if you’re in Asia was, so it was happening in real time throughout different time periods, but it was only really down.
I mean, how long was it down for like 10, 11 hours in total in the end?
Thomas: Yeah, not long, but I think it’s still all that uncertainty that we had raised at the last time we recorded last week. None of that has really gone away. It’s just kind of been pushed a little bit further down the line, like they kicked the can a little bit further, but all the questions about what ultimately happens with the platform, I think are still out there and maybe even intensified because it felt like this game of chicken, right?
Where the courts were saying, we’re going to shut you down and ByteDance, the company behind TikTok was saying, we’re not going to sell. You know, we’ll close the app if we have to. No one really knew who was going to kind of give way first. Ultimately, neither of them did. Uh, you know, the courts let the ban stand.
That was something we were speculating about last week. And TikTok, lo and behold, shut down. And really, it was just this, this executive order that kind of kicks things. I think it’s 75 days into the future that. Gave us a little bit more of a timeline, but the same problems are still there. And the same uncertainty, I think about the future of the app is still there.
So I think what, what we have to look at is will there ultimately be a sale or a merger of TikTok into some other, probably U S based company. And one other detail was that, uh, people saw that the CEO of ByteDance was at the inauguration, the new president on Monday. So that suggests that there’s some, you know.
Uh, support there and maybe there’s going to be some kind of a merger that will keep the app going, but I think nobody expected necessarily that either side was going to keep going and nobody blinked and that was really the biggest surprise to me.
Jared: So the executive order was to give 75 additional days for a bite dance to, um, sell a stake in the platform or reach a deal with new president.
Donald Trump. Um, and so there’s kind of two options there. You kind of mentioned like what’s going to happen. Um, uh, I, I think the, the push is for them to sell a 50 percent stake to a U. S. based group here. We have an article that got published on Saturday night and then was updated, um, uh, earlier this week on Tuesday.
And we’re going to probably start seeing a lot of this. I’ve seen a lot of different rumors about who might be in line to look at purchasing part of it. Uh, this is perplexity. AI makes a bid to merge with TikTok U. S. Apparently they submitted a bid on Saturday to TikTok parent ByteDance proposing the merger.
The new structure would allow for, you know, the existing investors to redeem their equity stakes, but would bring more video to perplexity. Um, uh, you know, and so there’s just kind of all these different theories about different people. You talked about the inauguration and who was there. Um, but basically we have like two and a half months, um, to, to figure something out.
Again, we talked about this last week. It sure feels like we’ve got to have a TikTok in the United States. Um, it would be crazy to me to, I’m surprised it actually went down for 12 hours, but it would be crazy in the big scheme of things for, I think, TikTok to go away permanently in the United States. And, uh, uh, you know, several articles are according to the same numbers we reported last week.
170 million users. Feels like something’s got to give, and we’ve now got two and a half months. So if I’m doing my math right, we’re into January. Uh, February, March, we’re looking at kind of early to mid April, something’s got to give by then.
Thomas: Yeah, I mean, I think a couple things stand out to me about the future here.
One is that if TikTok actually merged with Perplexity, that would be, I mean, that, that’s a huge threat to Google. That’s a huge threat to the players that are, that are in the traditional search space. Because when you think about Google, yeah, you know, you’ve got the search engine, obviously, and that’s the core product, but YouTube is a huge piece of, of Google overall in terms of video content, that’s really where they’re sending a lot of traffic, putting a lot of emphasis at this point.
A lot of people see video as the future, myself included, and think about if you took the AI power of perplexity on the one hand, which is very good, you know, they do a good job. I mean, they’re doing a great job on AI search and that seems to be the future of search. And then you’ve got the future video, which is vertical video is even, even hotter than, than, uh, you know, most of YouTube or a lot of YouTube is still the sort of traditional long form horizontal.
So you take the, the basically most exciting vertical video platform and the most exciting AI search, merge them together. You know, we might not need the justice department to take down Google’s monopoly. This, this is something that really stages some real competition that comes along.
Jared: I mean, I’m not an expert in mergers and acquisitions.
You know, the ma world is, is, is, is not our, our cup of tea here, but it does feel surprising that, you know, this has been around since April, this, this, uh, upcoming ban and need for, uh, tick talk to diversify its ownership group, and obviously we know that it’s gone to the courts and that was something that needed to happen and it’s being resisted by bite dance and those kinds of things, but nonetheless.
To some degree, why haven’t we seen more suitors line up? Why haven’t we seen more big tech companies line up to, to kind of get access to 170 million people? Yes. There’s a lot of crossover. It’s a meta and, and to, to all these other companies, but nonetheless, like TikTok is the hottest thing around right now.
Vertical video is clearly seeming to be the future. Like I’m surprised by perplexity AI. Kind of the first bigger player we’re hearing about, and they’re not big players up against a Google or a Meta or these other large, you know, kind of fang companies as they call it.
Thomas: Yeah, you know, I think what happens with these kinds of court cases is nothing for a long time and then everything all at once, right?
So like years can pass where there’s talk and there’s legislation and there’s hearings and everything and everybody goes, eh, you know, we don’t know, we’re just going to watch it. And then all of a sudden it can change everything. And so what I’m looking at beyond this. Is okay. Tick tock. Yeah. That’s a big deal.
I want to know what’s gonna happen with that. But what does this mean for some other long court cases that could all of a sudden have a result? Like,
Jared: yeah, obviously the
Thomas: Google antitrust, but also there’s all these pending cases against open AI and there, you know, other kinds of. AI companies over copyright and other challenges around that.
And everybody, I feel like, is just kind of waiting to see how that plays out, knowing, well, that’s so far in the future, we’re not going to worry about it. But what if something similar to this were to happen there? I mean, the courts pretty clearly showed here that they didn’t care about politics, they didn’t care about users and the vertical videos that they want to see.
They were just going to follow whatever directive they were going to put down. And they didn’t really worry about the timeline or anything. They could easily do that for any other big player in the space. And we could see probably even greater disruption overnight. I mean, what would happen if they suddenly decided there was something wrong with the way OpenAI has trained its models and said, Nope, no chat GPT, you know, order shut to shut that one down.
It could happen and it could happen just as quickly as this. So that really, I think to me shows, um, There’s risk here, and these kinds of changes, even though they feel slow, it feels like, eh, nothing’s ever gonna happen. We’ve seen here firsthand. It really can make some big changes.
Jared: It does set an interesting precedent for what’s coming forward.
We know that AI is, is, is in all the governments in all the, the, you know, with lawsuits and government interaction and stuff like that. So it does kind of set a precedent for the fact that if they’re willing to do this over something like TikTok, which. I don’t really have a problem with TikTok itself, just its ownership structure and some of the, the, the, the data, uh, that the data that it has and has access to in terms of national security, if it, if it can adjudicate in that sort of environment, what would it do in an area where we’re dealing with, uh, other types of things that AI can have a, have an interest in a role in.
So, uh, well, we’ll keep following along here. I mean, I don’t think you need to hold your breath anymore. Uh, I think the crazy week is now going to settle into, uh, we’ll get updates as we get them, but, but it’s not. It’s not like it’s years in the future. Like we kind of feel with Google’s antitrust lawsuit, right?
When we got that result, we’re like, okay, it’s going to be a long time before we actually see the results of this. So I think that this, while you don’t have to hold your breath anymore, certainly we’ve still got a couple months of volatility ahead of us to see where TikTok is going to land. And, um, I’ll just close out because we have so many stories we got to get to, but I’ll close out with kind of thing you said.
Last week and something we got to hammer down, like we all are so familiar with it. Just platform risk. And just, I think this does not help reduce that platform risk or the trepidation that comes with, with that for, for Tik TOK users and certainly people who use Tik TOK to market their business or use the marketplace to sell their products and so forth.
It’s going to be a kind of anxious, nervous couple of months as we wait for the final results there.
Thomas: Absolutely. Yeah. Diversify, get on multiple platforms. Definitely.
Jared: Got a couple months here to, to, to, to, to the next thing comes. Um, okay, let’s get into our second story. This is one I teased at the outset as well.
And this is a Google appears to be blocking, um, SEO tools, SEO rank checking tools, um, and really I’ve got a couple of stories I’ll go through. Um, from a high level, this isn’t something that’s been reported per se. This isn’t something that’s been confirmed by Google, but basically, let me scroll down here, there’s a great screenshot here.
It is like basically all of a sudden, starting in mid January, about January 9th or 10th, The, um, you know, SEMrush and similar web, they all have these tools that show overall SERP volatility and, you know, in the weeks leading up to it, uh, for example, we’ll use SEMrush, um, activity, uh, uh, volatility had been in the very high range.
Um, you know, uh, it’s kind of scored one to 10 and it had been in a eight, nine or 10 level. For the preceding several weeks, uh, it then on January 9th or 10th dropped down into a very normal four or five period and kind of hung out in that four or five or six range. Now, normally that wouldn’t be all that weird.
You know, we have a lot of volatility sometimes, and then we don’t have volatility sometimes kind of calm, not a lot of changes in the, in the SERPs. But all of them were reporting the same thing, and it wasn’t lining up with what everyone else was seeing. Everyone else was still reporting lots of volatility, but all the tools were saying that the volatility had gone away.
And so, that’s kind of what led this entire, um, uh, kind of, you know, uh, I guess we’ll just call it a looking into of what’s been going on and it does seem that, um, uh, basically Google has found some additional new ways to, uh, to, to kind of restrict what these tools are able to, uh, to, to find and report on.
I’m going to share this story here. This story is a couple of days newer and it’s, um, it’s in search engine journals. Titled Google Causes Global SEO Tool Outages. And it says Google is blocking, let me get rid of this pop up. Google is blocking search result scraping, causing global outages at rank and keyword tracking services.
Um, I’ll just read a line or two, uh, and then see if you’ve had any, if you’ve seen any of this, um, uh, Thomas in real life. Uh, Google cracked down on web scrapers that harvest search results data triggering global outages at many popular ranking tools like SEMrush. that depend on providing fresh data from search results pages.
Um, what happens if Google SERPs are completely blocked? A certain amount of data provided by tracking services have long been extrapolated by algorithms from a variety of data sources. It’s possible that one way around the current block is to extrapolate the data from other sources. Um, There’s a lot of details here, but I’ll keep it high level and stop there, or at least pause there.
Uh, are you seeing this in real life, Thomas, um, in either what you’re doing or just what you’re reading online?
Thomas: You know, I think we’ve seen this a lot over the longer timeframe. I know this is when they’ve started to detect it, but there’s been a lot of times where everybody anecdotally has seen their rankings go all over the place.
And then you check these volatility tools and it’s like, yep, smooth sailing, all good. And I think we had all as an industry wondered, okay, are we just being targeted? Is it just us? And we’re so tiny in the grand scheme of things that we’re not showing up on the volatility. And that’s why it’s showing smooth seas when, you know, we’re all seeing huge changes.
And I think this shows that maybe there’s been more volatility than the tools are picking up because Google is actually actively blocking. The tools from picking up on that volatility. But to me, I think this is ultimately it’s, it’s AI overviews fault. I think that’s what it comes down to. And the reason for that is these tools have always existed in kind of a gray area.
Cause technically it’s against Google’s terms of service to scrape their results. Right. But they always tolerated it because it probably wasn’t that labor intensive for them to serve these extra queries. They probably didn’t feel like playing that cat and mouse game. bunch of technical ways to get around those kinds of restrictions.
So they probably just kind of let it go and figure this is a drop in the bucket in the overall scheme of things. But now that they’re doing AI overviews and serving each query might cost them a couple cents versus fractions of fractions of a penny in the old system. Suddenly, if you’ve got a bunch of these rank tracking tools, literally putting in every query under the sun to see where things are, and they have to make an overview for each one of those.
I think they’re waking up and going, okay, this is costing us a lot. We better put a stop to it. And so that’s what I think you’re seeing is Google doesn’t want to spend all the resources on serving AI overviews, which are costly. These tools that don’t click on ads don’t generate them many revenue. So we’re seeing a crackdown that we haven’t seen when it was cheap and easy to serve the queries.
Jared: Yeah. You know, it’s interesting. I, I think it does talk about AI overviews in these articles quite a bit, and I think you’re really getting to the heart of a lot of it. Um, uh, here’s an, uh, in that article, that second article, here’s a, a line that was shared. Um, they were quoting a LinkedIn post when they were referencing this, but they said it, this LinkedIn post noted that multiple twos.
Tools weren’t refreshing their content, but it also noted that blocking hasn’t affected all data providers. Systrix, MonitorRank were still working. Someone from a company called HaloScan reported that they made adjustments to resume scraping data from Google and have recovered. Someone else reported that another tool called MyRankingMetrics is still reporting data.
So whatever Google is doing is currently, is not currently affecting all scrapers. It may be that Google is targeting certain scraping behavior. So. That’s exactly out of the article, exactly to what you just said. It does seem to center around AI overviews, probably from a cost standpoint. You know, it’s always been in their terms of service, but it’s also making it very difficult though, for SEOs to do their job.
It’s already hard enough to do their job with Google search console data getting delayed and not getting reported at the same rate it used to. It’s also getting harder to do our job with AI overviews in general. And then. Now you’ve got this kind of stuff. So it’s, um, yeah, it’s a, it’s a bit of a mystery, but it’s slowly being uncovered to kind of learn exactly what is at the root of it.
Thomas: Yeah, you know, I think ultimately the, the The thing that’s going to fix this for these companies is probably ironically going to be AI. Because I mean, we just saw this morning as we’re recording this, that open AI released their operators system. They’re rolling that out. It’s basically an agent. So it’s essentially a, an AI that can go and do stuff for you on the internet, just like a user would.
And that is the kind of thing that you could leverage as even an individual um, website owner. To go and say, okay, go to go to the Google SERPs and scrape all my keywords and find out, you know, where I rank and it would pretend to be a person and go and do it. And can Google detect that? It’s probably going to use your own browser.
You know, you set it up and you let it kind of run for a couple hours and come back. And it’s like, you have your own private Ahrefs data essentially at that point. So I think It’s if they’re going this route, they probably took some simple steps to block the most obvious stuff, but the companies that really need that data are going to find ways around it and they’re probably going to leverage their own AI and we might end up in an arms race or might be that Google will go back to saying, nah, not worth it.
And we’ll see these changes basically just kind of kind of go away. Um, but it’s one more reason, I think, to look beyond rank trackers, right? We’ve already seen. That they don’t pick up a lot of kind of new keywords. It’s more, it’s harder to know where things stand with AI overviews. To me, I’ve kind of moved away from them a lot and just gone towards.
More understanding my own data and what my users want. I think that’s worked pretty well. Um, and it makes me think this is sort of like one more reason to not, not rely on those quite so much as I would have probably three years ago.
Jared: Well, I’ll have an example of, of that exact scenario in my, um, in my side hustle section today.
So that’s, uh, interesting to hear you say. Uh, I’m sure we’ll be talking more about that in the coming weeks as we kind of learn more information about that. For now, let’s, let’s move on. Uh, Thomas, this is really a story that it’s right up your alley. I’m going to turn it over to you here as I pull it up on screen.
It is about this new 500 billion company that is created around this idea of AI. Um, share the story with us.
Thomas: Yeah. So basically there was a big announcement this week of a new company called Stargate. And this is an AI infrastructure project, basically. And we saw it announced with Donald Trump, the new U.
S. president, along with Sam Altman from OpenAI. We’ve got Oracle up there, and it’s apparently partially bankrolled by SoftBank, which is a big investor in the tech sector. And basically the idea here is to create the infrastructure. That companies need to train and then run these giant AI models. And we’ve seen this happen probably over the last couple of years where new models have gotten more and more intensive to run.
So when the first GPT three, I think it was when, uh, when Chad GPT first rolled out, uh, was the kind of state of the art of LLMs, it didn’t use a lot of resources, it was certainly more labor intensive to train and to use. Then some other systems that were out there, like the traditional Google search, but now with models like, Oh, one from open AI, the reasoning model, where you put in a query and it might spend a minute or two running queries, essentially in the background before it responds, they use an insane amount of computing power.
And an incredible amount of electricity. And so this initiative is basically some of these big companies coming together, kind of doing this alongside the government, you know, imagine what like a railroad would have done 100 years ago. It’d be like, we’re building infrastructure. This is sort of the 21st century equivalent.
And the idea is they’re going to come together and build the data centers and the electrical grid tie ins and stuff to have a firm foundation to basically scale up these gigantic models. But there’s already drama as soon as this got announced, you know, Elon Musk started, uh, basically trolling Sam Altman saying, you don’t have the money in place is never going to come together.
You know, this is a big scam and then they went back and forth. So there’s a lot of kind of fun drama. I don’t know where it ultimately land on this specific thing, but it’s a reminder that as we kind of alluded to with AI overviews and the cost there. These new AI tools are so powerful, but they require so much power to operate.
And that’s just going to make it harder and harder and more expensive over the long run.
Jared: You don’t think about this kind of stuff when you go to chat, you BD and type in your query, or when you feed it, like. You know, 200 pages of information and ask it to, to, to give you different uh, data points and different answers you can pull out of it.
Like there’s so much computing power that goes into this, not only to build these LLMs, but then to actually kind of service the uses of them. And at some point, you know, someone’s got to put together a plan that helps put this together in terms of the infrastructure that’s needed. Um, to your point, it’s, it’s like, how does that affect us on a daily basis?
It doesn’t, you know, it’s just a lot of. Big businesses getting together and creating even bigger businesses, but it does at least highlight how important the kind of the underbelly of the AI future is and the fact that it takes an immense amount of resources. And I think that’s what that article really highlighted to me is it’s something that has to be paid attention to.
And you can’t just snap your finger one day when you need it and it’s there, you have to plan and prepare for it. And we’re already starting to reach the edges of what’s possible with the current data centers and infrastructure that’s in place.
Thomas: Yeah, you know, I think it’s, it’s big and nebulous and kind of political, but the thing, the big takeaway for our industry, I think, is that we’re getting an incredible bargain on AI that we’re using today.
Like, I think of it, I used DoorDash very early in its evolution, before the pandemic, before everybody was using it. And you could buy something you could buy a burrito or something for 2 and have it delivered across the city and it made no sense economically and it turned out that there was a ton of investment kind of trying to build the app and get it off the ground.
And so you weren’t paying anything close to what it actually cost. And then, of course, that shifted and now it’ll cost you 14 to have your burrito delivered. If you’re lucky. Yeah, if you’re lucky. Yeah, exactly. And I think we’re seeing a similar thing with AI right now is that we’re getting a huge bargain.
We’re not getting charged anything close to what it actually costs to deliver the AI services that we all can use. So if you’re implementing AI right now, like this is the time to do it. Get as much as you can when it’s cheap. You know, get the equivalent of a lot of those 2 burritos while you can, because ultimately this stuff is so expensive, the price is going to go up a lot.
And early adopters, like a lot of people in our industry, Who have laid the foundations, gotten good at using it efficiently. We’re going to be in a great, great shape to, you know, weather that.
Jared: Let’s just briefly touch on this last story and pretty much only because it was something that ties closely to what we talked about in the, in the weeks prior.
And this is a story in Search Engine Journal. Google rejects EU’s call for fact checking in Search and YouTube. Um, Google rejects EU’s fact checking requirements as it relates to Search and YouTube. Define the new disinformation rules. Um, Yeah, basically, I’m not going to spend a ton of time on this story, but it is relevant as we talked about a couple weeks ago.
Uh, or last two weeks ago, I believe that Metta was getting rid of their fact checkers. Um, and, uh, they were kind of, uh, moving on from this process they’d had in place for a long time to verify, to validate, uh, that information was accurate and true to fight against misinformation. And we talked a couple of weeks ago about, I believe it was Spencer and I that were doing the podcast that week.
And we talked about like. Will there be a domino effect here? You know, like it does, does one company decide to cut this and then others follow seems, although we don’t know if they’re actually connected to each other, that was meta, this is Google, but it does feel like another domino falling here. Um, basically there’s this, um, disinformation code.
Uh, as part of the Digital Services Act, the DSA. Um, and, uh, uh, basically Google has argued that, uh, their current moderation tools like SynthID watermarking and AI disclosures on YouTube are already effective. He pointed to last year’s elections as proof that Google can manage misinformation without fact checking.
Uh, and they confirmed their plan is to fully exit all fact checking commitments in the EU’s voluntary disinformation code before it becomes mandatory under the DSA. Now, this is interesting. I did want to get a second opinion on it from, from you, Thomas. Um, uh, you and I were at a conference together on AI, a conference on, uh, uh, how the EU was handling this sort of copyrighted information versus how the U.
S. was handling it. And so I, I know you probably have some thoughts kind of being deeply embedded in, in this type of, of copyrighted information as it relates to this action by Google. As it relates to what we talked about a couple weeks ago with META.
Thomas: Yeah, you know, I think Europe is usually the most, um, I’d say proactive or like restrictive in terms of implementing these big regulations.
It ends up impacting what happens everywhere in the world when, when this happens, when Europe puts some new thing in place. And that’s where we see GDPR, for example, is a great one. We see all those little things that come up and say, do you want cookies? You know, can we put cookies on it? You have to click that button on every website that you go to.
And so a lot of these things that happen. Elsewhere in the world, impact basically everyone. So I think that’s maybe what we’re seeing here is Google’s basically saying, well, you know, we’re not going to follow that. We’re basically going to opt out of it. And I think for our industry, you know, most of us are trying our best to make good content.
And maybe some big companies, I’m not going to name names. Uh, decide that it’s not good even when it is, or we’re doing our best, but fundamentally most of us are trying to do a good job. And so I think disinformation and misinformation was probably not directly a concern, but I know I’ve created great content on YouTube, uploaded it, And got flagged by some kind of content filter for something that wasn’t at all present in there and just gotten caught in this net that’s cast really large.
And so even if you’re doing a great job, you’re doing your best. There’s always that fear and it kind of holds you back where you even like, I’m thinking I could give an example of what happened with my video and what I figured out it was. But is that going to get this podcast flagged in some way if I even say certain things?
So I think that’s where there’s this fear and self censorship that maybe we do in our industry when. We know we’re going, we’re not going to run afoul of misinformation, but we’re worried about getting caught in the net. So anything that kind of tones that down, that, that fact checking down, that might mean fewer false positives.
And we can feel a little bit more emboldened to just create the content and, you know, say the things we want it to.
Jared: We’ll follow this as it progresses. Obviously it does have a lot of dovetails to what we do in our industry. And at the same time feels, you know, kind of higher level, kind of above us, kind of political, kind of, kind of, kind of, so, you know, it, does it affect us in some ways?
Yes. Um, but it’s information it’s news. So we want to make sure you knew about it. Probably having to do with this kind of, you know, the fallout from what happened with Metta a couple of weeks ago and other companies kind of revisiting their policies as well. So, whew, I, I, was that five stories? Was that six?
Oh my goodness. That was a lot. Did a pretty good job. I’d say we’re like a minute over, so I’ll take the, uh, I’ll take the win there. Let’s move on to side hustles.
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Jared: thought I’d focus this week on an update on my, uh, on my calculator sites. Now I, I said at the beginning of 2025, I’m like, man, we’ve been featuring these calculator websites for the past couple of years here on the niche pursuits podcast, mainly on the weird niche section, and we’re always blown away.
By how these typically old, antiquated, simple, packed with ads, calculator sites are getting so much traffic and ranking with so little work being done to them. So I wanted to try it. I wanted to try it. And so I kind of said, I’m going to do five this year. Well, A couple updates. First, let’s talk about calculator site number one.
It’s been live now at the time of recording for 14 days. Okay. And, um, uh, so I, I, I kind of blown away by how well it’s doing with perspective for the record. So, uh, Google search console shows that it’s gotten 15 organic clicks in the last seven days. Ah, refs already has it ranking for five keywords, uh, and it’s getting an estimated traffic of about three and age refs.
So again, five keywords. Great. Not much traffic. Fair enough. That’ll be the caveat. I list here a little bit it’s ranking. Between number six, seven, and eight for its target keyword. Now it’s an exact match domain. So it’s pretty easy to look at the domain and figure out what its target keyword is, but it’s ranking number six, number seven, or number eight, it’s been live for 14 days, uh, calculator site, number two.
Was launched nine days ago, so i’ve got two live now, um, google search console gsc Shows 23 impressions, but no clicks in the last seven days So it’s clearly indexed. It’s clearly getting impressions, but it has not gotten any traffic yet At least not from from organic from google now ahrefs on the other hand Remember the first site the site that is getting traffic was ranking for five keywords estimated traffic of Of 3, uh, 3, uh, basically 3, uh, people per month.
Ahrefs for this second site. Already has it ranking for nine keywords and getting an estimated traffic of 20 organic visits per month. And it’s already sitting at number nine for its target keyword. Now I would say that the second site is targeting a more difficult keyword than the first site. They’re both targeting keywords that I’m like, ah, you know, it’s around a calculator topic.
They’re different topics. And both of them are like, I think they’re beatable. Right? Like I tried to pick. Some, some, um, some topics that looked like the sites that were ranking either were not from strong domains or they were old sites that didn’t really serve the user very well, but basically I’m ranking call it number six and number nine for my target search terms.
Now that calculator said number two, that, that, um. That target keyword, it gets an estimated 600, uh, searches per month. So it’s not a terrible keyword. And we know you, you know, you’ll rank for more than just that one keyword. So I guess in summary, I’ve gotten two of the five live and I feel very happy with how quickly they’re ranking.
Not only getting indexed, indexation alone these days is hard enough. Um, they’re on fresh domains. Um, but not only how they’re being indexed, but how they’re ranking, they’re on page one. Now the downside is, they’re not getting much traffic, let’s be clear, like, no one’s gonna make Even a dollar at those levels of traffic, but we’re like one to two weeks in.
And I think if we look back at starting websites, I’ve started a lot of websites over the years in the, you know, uh, over the last decade or so, this is really quick for a website to get indexed and start getting rankings and traffic.
Thomas: Yeah, that’s lightning fast. I mean, I think of the, the kind of classic.
Google sandbox that we talk about the Google always denies it. We all know it was there. It’s been there takes probably six months to 12 months to really start to see a new domain, especially these days with a content site, start to rank, like you said, indexation. Processing so much more content with so much AI content.
So indexing is slowed down. So to get a site, not only ranked, but getting actual traffic, not just showing up any traps and getting this projected 20 that doesn’t actually exist, but actually getting clicks in two weeks, I mean, that just shows not only you obviously found a really good, uh, Area. I don’t, I don’t know what niche these sites are in, but you obviously found something good.
But also this really shows what Google’s looking for these days. Right? I mean, it’s not the content site. It’s this kind of stuff, something that does something, some tool, something that gives the user a capability that they can’t duplicate with AI overview. So that is awesome. I mean, yeah, it’s not so many clicks yet, but if I told you I launched a brand new content site and it’s ranking and it’s getting clicks, you know, but any clicks in less than two weeks.
You know, you would say, wow, you really found something incredible, uh, to, to do that with this. And that, you know, something that sounds like you built in an, in an evening, essentially, that’s amazing.
Jared: Well, and that, you know, going back a couple of weeks ago, just, you know, to, to, to what you said, like both of these were built with, um, chat GPT 01.
Um, uh, uh, uh, and I probably could have used a code builder AI tool, right? Like, cause they have those GPTs that are specifically code builders, but I just used chat GPT, uh, the 01 model to, to, to, to create the code. Um, I did customize the CSS because I was able to kind of look, uh, you know, dump the code into a bit of a sandbox and go, Oh, I don’t really like how that looks as much.
And so I was able to, but I didn’t have to like give it specific instructions. Like, you know, do this HTML, do this CSS. It was more like, Hey, I want the colors to be softer. Hey, I want the buttons to be rounder. Hey. And it was able to give me that. It only took about, I think about. An hour or less to get that information out and then, um, just drop it on the website.
These are single single page websites. They’re not fancy. They’re not even WordPress builds. They’re just HTML. Um, and so, you know, what’s the long play? Yeah. Hopefully keep getting some traffic. Um, hopefully these sites continue to rank for more and more, uh, related keywords and hopefully move up the rankings for their target keyword.
Uh, drop some ads on it. Um, and, uh, and maybe go from there. I mean, obviously. You could start to think a little bit bigger, but I’m not really thinking beyond that. But it does create a compelling use case for me to maybe do more than five this year. You know, if I can find the topic. And you can find a, a, a calculator, a calculation that you need in your daily life.
Uh, I mean, it, it’s hard to argue against spending an hour and, you know, 10 on a domain, uh, to put it up on shared hosting and just see what happens with it. It’s pretty simple.
Thomas: Yeah. And I wonder once you get these established as these sort of useful sites, helpful sites, if you will. Does that then unlock for you the ability to expand them in more of the traditional kind of content site direction?
Because I know a lot of people in the industry, myself included, have seen, even though, again, a Google feature that Google denies exists, there seems to be this site level classifier that kind of says, this is a niche content site. Don’t give them any rankings. And if it’s an e com site, for example, or, you know, a tool site like this, not only will Google rank it for the tool, but they’ll often basically treat the content like they treated content four years ago before all the craziness happened recently.
So I wonder if you kind of get yourself in good graces here by having these calculator sites and it’s a tool and people are using it as a tool with that then unlock that you could put on the same domain, kind of more your traditional. Content and drop some ads into that too, and start to rank that content.
Yeah, it really gets my, it gets my mind going. Like instead of what we’ve seen a lot of people do in the space, which is take a content site, tack on a pretend e com thing or a forum or something to try to revive it, you’re kind of going the opposite direction. You have a legit tool. Could you tack a content site on and monetize that?
Jared: It is crazy to think of some of the websites I own. That have a lot of great content or we’ll call it good content, you know, on it. Um, and they’re almost to the point where we’re going to see these tool sites rank for more keywords pretty soon than they currently rank for. It’s, it’s really, it’s really interesting to your point, like the type of site it is.
So, um, it’s exciting. It’s cool. I suppose it’s as far along as I could ever have hoped a couple weeks in. But, you know, I’m not exactly, uh, I’m not exactly going to retire, uh, next week on this, so, it’s, it’s a balance, right? Uh, okay, what have we got going on for you this weekend in the world of side hustles?
Thomas: Yeah, so quickly, because several people wrote to me and asked, um, I’ll give a very quick update on Toaster Guy, my, uh, Extremely experimental vertical video, YouTube channel. It’s up to 5, 700 views. Now, I made three more videos. One of them was how to keep your toaster very clean. Oh, spoiler alert, aluminum foil.
And that has gotten, I think, 500, 600 views in the last 24 hours. I did another one this morning. I’m making pancakes. So, um, yeah, it’s not, again, very similar. Not going to start paying the bills anytime soon, but it’s still getting traction, still getting people visiting it. And I think it shows, you know, vertical video is again, powerful, but my real one for this week, I want to give an update on another project that I shared last year, which is my food alert newsletter.
So for people who weren’t tuned in, then this is a newsletter that I started completely by accident on my main website, which is Bay area Telegraph. It’s a local news site and travel site for the Bay area. Yeah. And San Francisco Bay area. And I started publishing some kind of like food recall stories, food, uh, kind of, you know, things that happened where there was a food recall, basically.
And I figured I’m going to do this. I might as well create a newsletter segment within my main newsletter. It’s not a whole separate, uh, you know, convert kit account or anything like that. Just a segment and I’ll create a landing page. For this food alert newsletter, and I’ll drop it in at the end of the article.
Well, these articles started going viral, not on my own site, but on some of the aggregators that I, that I worked with and I’m tied into, and I, they, they’re very particular about sharing data, but I’ll say, you know, they’re things like. Uh, MSN and, uh, and you can see like smart news, that kind of stuff. So the article started to get picked up there, sent out to a national audience and people started signing up for this newsletter and, uh, it just kept growing.
It’s continued to grow. I have not really done much. I just occasionally publish these stories. I’m up to 2,241 subscribers. Wow. A hundred percent organic. No effort at all. Sometimes I’ll get a day where I’ll get like 30 or 40 new ones and I’ve no idea where they came from. I’ve can’t track it. I have no idea like where this has ended up, but some aggregator decided to surface one of these stories and it goes get a semi viral somewhere.
And I start getting these new people subscribing and, you know, you got to figure the, this, the subscription rate here, the convert rate must be very low, right? So it must be getting tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of views to be getting, you know, hundreds of subscribers, but up to 2, 241 again, 100 percent organic.
And so what I’ve. So what I’ve done so far, I hadn’t really had any strategy starting to try to develop one. I’m sending periodic emails out just as a blast to this list. Basically, when I publish a new story, that’s about food safety or some kind of food recall, I publish it on my site. And I just basically put a link into the newsletter and send it out.
And that’s been doing pretty well so far. It’s at about a 33 percent open rate, um, right. Just under about a 7 percent click rate. And when people click through, those articles are then monetized with Mediavine, just like on my main site. So it’s not a huge amount of revenue, but you know, every time I send one of these out, it’s getting some clicks and getting some more traffic.
And you can see how it could pretty, pretty readily scale. Um, what I’m doing at the moment to try to kind of build on it, I’m setting up some sequences. To try to really automate this so to do kind of like in addition to those announcements where there’s some big food recall or something happens, you know, Costco’s eggs aren’t good and check your fridge and go figure out if you’ve got on that kind of thing.
I’m also trying to write more evergreen articles. I’ve already done a lot of food. Yeah, a lot of food articles, strange foods, interesting stuff. So I started scheduling those as, um, sequence emails where every day, if you’re part of this list, you get, you know, some interesting or compelling food related article.
And it’s things like, I did a story about what’s in a Filet O Fish sandwich at McDonald’s. Uh, what the, what’s the fish, you know, what’s, uh, actually been used there. What’s the actual ingredients in a Costco hot dog. Tie into the podcast, um, and those stories have done well. And so I’ve started scheduling those out and again, they’re getting pretty solid, uh, click throughs on that.
So I’m thinking if I just schedule one per day in the sequence, every new person who gets into this, even if I’m not doing any work is going to be getting those for, you know, 30 days, 60 days, however many days I schedule it out. And the economics, I would start to get really interesting. So I kind of did like some back of the napkin calculations.
I do a daily email and maybe I can bump up the click rate on that. If I put multiple stories in, maybe make it a bit more compelling, maybe I could get 10 percent even right now, that means I’m getting maybe 225 clicks per day. I got about a 38 RPM on these stories. So that’s like, you know, eight bucks a day, something like that.
Almost 250 bucks a month. Um, so if I just keep scaling that, maybe I should, you know, buy a subscriber. Should I do Facebook ads? I’m not sure exactly how to, how to get more people in, but I’m thinking if I schedule these out, it’s totally automated. And if I can just grow that list a little bit, you know, this could actually become a viable traffic source for my site.
Jared: It’s interesting to think about as well. Like if we go back to what got you these subscribers in the first place, it was writing these articles. That got aggregated like I’m also wondering if like the best way to grow this newsletter is just to keep writing those articles And then when you write those articles, they can be sent to the newsletter, right?
So you can almost double dip by writing articles on topics that your current newsletter would appreciate And like, and also would give you, we’ll just say more irons in the fire for a site to get picked, uh, uh, story to get picked up by an aggregator, go viral and get you more subscribers in the process.
Thomas: And it’s even better because if they’re ever green, I can write the article, get new subscribers from it, and then add it to the sequence. And then every, every new subscriber from then to forever who signs up is going to get that article in the sequence at some point, as long as they stay subscribed. So you’re almost not only, yeah, getting your subscribers for free, but you’re building this little flywheel where, you know, if I write one of these a day.
And I do it for a hundred days, I could stop and all those people are going to keep getting those, or, you know, every new subscriber is going to be worth more and more to me because they have more emails they’re getting where I don’t have to lift a finger. So yeah, I think, and I’m probably just going to keep doing this organically, but I’m just going to try to automate the content as much as I can.
Jared: I think it’s great. And I think it’s proof like, um, you’re not trying to represent yourself as an expert, but you can create something. Uh, around a topic. You’re not an expert in, you know, you don’t have to necessarily be an expert in it. I will wonder. I wonder you. I’ve gotten to know you over the years.
You’re just a naturally curious guy. And I think that aspect of your personality means that you’re probably going to be able to be interested in this topic much more than the average person. I do wonder. About how interesting, you know, food safety is to you. And if that could end up being the reason why you might stop paying attention to this topic, but outside of that, like it’s proof that you really can create a community and create a newsletter and create an experience around something.
You’re not an expert in.
Thomas: Yeah. I mean, I’m starting to think, okay, this model seems to work with this specific. Really random type of content, but yeah, it’s not, it’s not so, it’s not so interesting to sit down and write, you know, 500 word piece about these are the eggs. This is the school to check. This is, you know, all that kind of stuff.
It’s not so fun, but I’m thinking, is there another topic that my site ranks weirdly well for and gets weirdly, you know, large amounts of traffic over that? Yeah, I’m actually interested in so one that stood out to me, and I’m very early stages considering this is Starbucks. I’ve mentioned this before. My site for some reason is apparently an authority on Starbucks.
I get a lot of traffic. If I write about Starbucks stuff, I love going to Starbucks seems to have a passionate community around it. I’ve seen this do well for other kind of big brands that people like I shared last week about the, you know, what’s good at Trader Joe’s website. So I’m thinking, could I do something similar where I even have a Facebook page, drive traffic there, review new Starbucks stuff, get people into a newsletter, it’s already doing well on the site, it’s already stuff I’m writing about, yeah, it gets my, it gets my wheel spinning like.
Yeah, maybe not food safety in the long run, but could I take the same model, automated content, organic newsletter growth, and apply it to something where I could see myself writing about it for another five years or whatever.
Jared: Uh, and we know that you would, you would promptly drive down to your local Starbucks to get the, uh, eye in the sky view of whatever you’re talking about.
Um, uh, referencing podcasts where you’ve actually gone and validated the, uh, McDonald’s, uh, ice cream machine and, uh, and such things. So, uh, okay, well, uh, those are great updates. I personally lost myself for a minute or two while you’re talking, looking over your toaster guy. YouTube channel here, and um, so I just, I think it’s so fascinating, so interesting.
Um, yeah, you have a video that’s gotten over a thousand views now. Um, uh, so I think it’s great. And I really want to watch the one that you have here, Is it actually bad to stick a fork in a toaster? Tell me you actually demonstrated that live.
Thomas: I did not yet, but people were very angry that it was just kind of a scientific piece.
So I’m thinking I might have to do it, but I don’t know how to do it safely. Hopefully, I mean, I could, I could double dip. It could end up being a cautionary tale to share with the Food Alert newsletter as well.
Jared: Right. I can see, I can see some crossover here, if you see what I’m getting at between these two side hustles.
Anyways. Anyways. Uh, okay. Let’s get into weird niches. Um, I just saw that from the top of yours and I’m like, Oh my goodness. I don’t know where you come up with these sometimes. Uh, mine’s a little bit of a, I don’t know, it’s, it’s, it’s a, it’s a very weird topic. Um, I thought it was fun. Uh, I’ll share the backstory on it.
Um, let me pull it up here and then I’ll share the, if you’re watching, you’ll see it, but if you’re not, I’ll give you the website. Um, I’m not going to read you the URL because it’s, it’s, it’s like a government website. So it’s not a weird niche site in the vein of, Hey, go out and start this. Although, although it does, it does beg some questions here, but it is a very interesting site and it’s a drip calculator.
So I’m on a whole calculator thing. So I felt, I kind of felt like I had to go to the calculator site here and it’s, um, it’s under this vein of water science activities and it’s through, um, the USGS. I don’t know what that is. I should’ve looked it up, but it’s water. usgs. gov. So it’s a government website.
Um, and it’s, it’s this interesting thing, how much water does a leaking faucet waste? Now, I’ve often thought about this because I’m kind of, um, like, I don’t like wasting stuff. So, every time there’s been a leaky faucet, I’ve always come at it from the standpoint of, like, we’re wasting water. Um, not from the standpo Point of like, how much are we wasting or how much is that going to cost me or how much I just want to get it fixed.
Cause I don’t like wasting stuff. I hate throwing food away if it, if it goes bad, but I thought this was really interesting because it really tackles that question, you know? So it starts by saying there’s no scientific definition of the volume of a faucet drip, but after measuring a number of kitchen and bathroom sink faucets for our calculations below, we’re going to use a quarter of a millimeter.
As the volume of a faucet drip and by these drip estimates, uh, 15, 140 drips equals one gallon. Looking at this way, it seems like that drop of water in the drain is pretty insignificant. However, use the form or calculator below to see how all those drops flowing in real time can add up to a flood. So it kind of gives us a couple of prompts.
There’s three drop downs here. First off, and so Thomas, let’s do this live. I’m going to, I’m going to put it in the ball in your court. Feel free to go big if you want, you know, for For dramatic, uh, effect here, but let’s talk number one, um, about the number of drips per minute that you think said leaky faucet is, uh, uh, uh, is, is, is dripping at.
Thomas: I’d say 30. Yeah. Drip every two seconds. So that’s like
Jared: drip,
Thomas: drip, drip, something like that. You wouldn’t fix it. You wouldn’t bother to fix it if it was doing that. Yeah.
Jared: It’s annoying. Right. But it’s like, do I really want to carve out the time to fix that? Okay. So we’ve got 30 drips per minute. Good. Now let’s talk about the number of faucets on average in each home that you think are doing this.
Now, again, you might just say, Only one leaky faucet or maybe say two leaky faucets. Uh, maybe you want to go big, they give you the option of one to five.
Thomas: Gotcha. Okay. I’m going to go with four faucets. I’m thinking Bay Area, my demographic, you know, thinking of the audience I typically target.
Jared: Okay. Let’s stick with the Bay Area.
How many homes do you want to go for that have these, um, these leaky faucets? And we’ll say maybe in the Bay Area. Your, your dropdown here gives you the choice of one all the way up to a million homes.
Thomas: Okay. So my kind of target audience is 980, 000 people. That’s the East Bay area that I cover. So let’s go with that.
Everybody in my total adjustable audience for my newsletter, uh, we’re, we’re to have a leaky faucet.
Jared: Okay. So we got one million homes with four leaky faucets each at 30 drips per minute. And if I hit the button here, that is, ah, my goodness, over 172 billion drips per day. Do I have that right? Um, I think I do, which accounts for 11 million gallons of water per day.
And 4 trillion gallons per year. Again, I think I’m reading those numbers, right?
Thomas: That’s crazy. Yeah. You know, I love like when you originally shared this, I thought this was a site that had some practical purpose for your own, like you were saying, you know, figure out how much your leaky faucet is costing you.
So, you know, you should fix it. But no, this is just showing you the theoretical leaky faucets across a large population. I don’t know what, what purpose this would serve. Like, what does this site exist to do? Okay, that’s a terrifyingly large amount of water, but what am I supposed to do? Go door to door and convince my neighbors to fix their faucet?
Jared: Yeah, I mean, if you, if you look at the sidebar here, right? Like, um, you know, the challenge questions is what this falls under. How much water falls during a storm? How much water does a dripping faucet waste? How much water does it take to grow a hamburger? I think there’s I mean, talk about weird niches, uh, we could do a segment on each of those right there.
Um, you know, it clearly is addressing like from a greater perspective, water shortage, water cycles, you know, all these sorts of things. And I think it’s just one of those things that’s meant to get you to think about it. You know, um, I just got back from being out in nature for a few days and it’s really hard to describe to someone the grandeur of some of these places until you go there and then you find it’s like, You still can’t describe it, but it means something more when you’re there and I kind of feel like to some degree A website like this is kind of meant to put in perspective, like your leaky faucet might not matter in a vacuum, but the fact is if you have a leaky faucet, you’re not addressing it.
So are so many others. And what does that mean for the larger scope of water and that sort of thing? But, um, I mean, any application people could have from this? Uh, I mean, I don’t know. I don’t, I don’t wake up in the morning. thinking I got a problem that I need an answer to in terms of calculating how much water loss I have.
But at the same time, it’s fascinating to think about if they could build that, and it’s a very simple calculator. I mean, what other, what could other people do?
Thomas: Yeah, I think of this in a school context, you know, part of a science curriculum or something like that. And I think that’s an important thing if you’re thinking of calculators.
I mean, you probably are after hearing your early results, people are probably thinking about that. What could I build? It could be something that solves a practical business related problem. But these kinds of educational calculators. I see that, I see people use that all the time, and I think if you could create something that a bunch of students are going to use, or a teacher might want to use, or many teachers might want to use in their curriculum, that could get substantial traffic too, and that might not show up in a keyword research tool, because people might not be putting it into Google, it might just be something that teachers know about, or, you know, put in their lesson plan, or whatever, so, yeah, it gets me thinking, okay, this is more of an educational thing, showing you some information about this water science topic, Are there other kind of educational calculators you could build where you might not have so much competition?
Jared: Yeah, we featured a weird niche many many months back. I think was keep the score or something It was a calculator site that was around scorekeeping, right? And I think we found a lot of teachers were using it, you know, and it was being used in a lot of school systems So good point. Okay, let’s move on to your weird.
It does not have to do with water to be clear I don’t there’s any water connection ours aren’t connected this week. I’ll pull it up on screen while you talk about it
Thomas: So this is I don’t even know how to correctly pronounce it. The domain is ozbcoz, O Z B C O Z. Um, you can see that the design of it is very, it’s like 2007 WordPress, you know, stock theme.
The title of the site is Jim’s Ukulele Songbook, because of course it is, that flows from that domain. Obviously, Oz Because would be Jim’s Ukulele Guitar Songbook. Um, but this is basically the best website for ukulele tabs, which are the chords that you’re going to play if you want to play a popular song on your ukulele.
And I play the ukulele. And I discovered this because they have the best tabs. So you go there and if you go and click into songs, again, the interface here is, um, leaves a lot to be desired. You can pull up all of these popular songs.
Jared: And
Thomas: presumably Jim, uh, has gone through and basically listed out the chords and written everything out for credible numbers.
Huge database. Of songs, basically like everything that you can imagine old folk songs and classic songs all the way up to he’ll do modern songs from kind of contemporary artists. I don’t know if he’s got help or people are submitting things here, but it’s got to be thousands of songs. You wouldn’t know it at all.
If you land that in the demand, most people are probably finding this through search. And it does get a pretty substantial amount of search traffic. So probably I looked at Ahrefs it’s getting, they say about 49, 000 organic. So I guess it’s probably a lot higher than that. Um, yeah, it’s, it looks like 47 as we’re looking at it here.
My guess is it’s probably higher. It’s a DR 39. But I looked at SimilarWeb, and they were estimating something on the order of 300, 000 visits per month. And that makes sense, because you’ve got to imagine a lot of it’s social, and a lot of direct traffic. I mean, I know if I’m going to look for a new ukulele song to play, this is the first place I’m going.
I’m going to put in that weird domain, and I’m going to land here, and find, you know, the best tabs to be able to play on my ukulele. So I think the things I take away from this, I mean, for one thing, if you’re doing something really useful, the domain doesn’t necessarily matter at all. Like I have no idea what the domain is.
And you can see, you know, it’s monetized with ads is a PayPal donation form. Traffic, I think has been, um, fairly, fairly consistent. It saw a bump, it saw a decline, but I think it’s overall been doing pretty well. Yeah. If you look at the overall graph, it was up higher in 2023. It had a bit of a fall, but it’s still in the long run, uh, pretty, pretty significantly, and I think just by doing something really well, you know, is whoever this gym is.
Don’t know how he’s creating all this content, but he’s doing great.
Jared: I mean it feels like So I just was looking here and if you hover over the drop down it looks like there’s over 4 000 songs Um, it felt higher to be honest with you, but I mean, it’s just there’s so many it’s hard to know that means he is Like you said, uh, documented the tabs for over 4, 000 songs on the ukulele.
That’s absolutely a ton of work.
Thomas: Yeah. And if you click into any of them, it’s got all the lyrics. It’s got your chords. It’s got some really nice features where if you hover over a chord, it’ll show you the, uh, you know, how to play it basically. So it’s super helpful and it’s the design is just so rudimentary, but I think it’s a good example of a situation where design and branding don’t matter at all.
If what you’re doing is genuinely, genuinely helpful, probably doesn’t have to worry about. Ranking a lot of this stuff just because it is super useful and people probably spend a ton of time on the site. I mean, I think about if I’m going to learn a new song, I’ll pull the site up. I might have it up for 45 minutes on my phone.
So I imagine that the time on page here is just astronomical.
Jared: Yeah. You know, he’s got a login up here too. I wonder what that experience is like. I wonder if maybe he’s, I don’t know. Do you get, um, is he getting, is he crowdsourcing a bit of this, maybe getting some help from people who, who volunteer and donate song chords, uh, Tabs.
I’m not a musician, as you can tell. Um, I’m curious, uh, uh, what that, what that looks like.
Thomas: Yeah. I, maybe there’s some kind of, uh, submission or he’s getting from other places and there’s, there’s all kinds of other features. There’s, you can basically start at scrolling automatically. So you can kind of play along without having to, uh, touch the phone to scroll.
It’s got YouTube videos of people playing these songs on the ukulele. A lot of the times you can go through and see example of some, somebody, uh, you know, playing really well. And a lot of the stuff that is, uh, ranking are just the names of these songs, basically. So he’s ranking for some pretty big song names, especially when you look at, um, you know, kind of, uh, like traditional or songs that people might play a ton of.
I see Jingle Bell Rock ukulele in there, for example, you know, all this kind of stuff. It’s yeah, he’s probably doing super well of just so many songs. And ranking for these big keywords that people are putting in. And it’s probably bringing in people who aren’t even ukulele players. A lot of these seem to have a guitar version.
And that seems to be doing even better.
Jared: Well, I was going to say, and I’m not a musician. I’m just, I don’t, I don’t feel like the crossover between ukulele and guitar was there. They’re both a strumming instrument of sorts. But a couple of things to note by looking at the keywords he ranks when they’re on screen here is that The vast majority of them do not have the word ukulele in them.
They’re just more generic chords. And it’s almost like he’s done such a good job making something that he ranks for the larger topic. Right. Um, uh, and they’re, they’re all song names, uh, uh, like never going to give you up chords, jingle bell rock, ukulele, but New York, New York chords. And so, uh, these are larger search queries, you know, around a thousand per search query, uh, per a thousand, uh, uh, per month kind of thing.
So. Um, it’s almost like you said, he’s, he’s done so well that he ranks for the kind of these, maybe these broader terms that his website is, is doing a good job of satisfying the user for.
Thomas: Yeah. Sadly, there’s many more guitar players than us ukulele players out there. So I can imagine that, yeah, if you do a good job and there is definitely crossover, but I think, um, it shows, yeah.
If you do a great job of one thing, it’s like, he kind of used the ukulele to get in, get his foot in the door essentially. And now he’s ranking for something that’s going to get a ton more traffic. And I also like that he has monetized, right? Like I think we see a lot of these sites that are passion project and people do a great job, but they’re not doing anything to monetize.
And this has pretty good ad monetization. And it looks like it’s pretty deliberate. The ads are placed in great positioning, but where they don’t mess, mess with the content. He’s got a donation form front and center. He’s obviously trying to make some money off of this and I bet it’s doing really well for him.
Jared: Great, great site to feature. Um, and a good way to close out, uh, lots happening today. And this week in the news, uh, we talked about tick talk and we’ll keep you posted that story. We, there’s so much in the news. We didn’t get a chance to talk about Reddit and some of the fallout from last week. We will.
I’m going to say probably address that next week. I don’t want to guarantee it. Who knows what’s going to happen in the news. It might get pushed down another week, like it did this week, but we’ll try to bring, try to bring Reddit back next week and talk about where they’re going there. Uh, uh, overall though, everybody have a great weekend and we’ll see you again.
Same time, same place next week for the news. See ya.
