Reflections on the Previous Year and Speculation on Search Engine Algorithm Update

Welcome back everybody to the first Niche Pursuits News Podcast of 2024! 

Jared and Spencer kick off the year with another great episode, offering a close-up look at all the news in the SEO, AI, and website creation world.

This week they start off discussing the Google update on New Year’s Eve, with people noting volatility in the SERPs and even upticks in traffic in a reversal of the effects of the HCU.

How difficult is it to gauge SERP changes that happened around the holiday period? What changes in traffic has Spencer noted on Niche Pursuits between December and January? Listen to find out their thoughts.

The next topic Spencer and Jared cover is The New York Times’ announcement that it’s suing OpenAI and Microsoft.

Millions of articles from the NTY were used to train the OpenAI model, and a lot of the content that was used was behind a paywall. Meanwhile, the media outlet spends millions of dollars to have professionals write and produce its content, and now OpenAI is using that information freely and making it available to everyone. 

Notably, this includes information from The Wirecutter, with the result that the NYT isn’t collecting the affiliate commissions. 

But what’s at the heart of this lawsuit? Could this set a precedent for how copyright law is interpreted? Does the media company have a strong case? Tune in to hear the discussion.

Still on the subject of OpenAI, Spencer and Jared talk briefly about its offer to pay publishers between $1 and 5 million in compensation for their content. They agree that it’s far less than what publishers should get, especially considering that the NYT could be earning over 2 billion a year.

What’s going to happen moving forward? Can AI be contained at all?  

Google seems to be moving ahead with, and making changes to, Bard, and now it’s going to implement its Google Assistant with Bard. Bard will power the Assistant to make it smarter and to make better recommendations. But how will this affect content creators?

In other Google Bard news, a paid version of the tool is coming, which hasn’t even been announced officially by Google. How was the move to a paid model discovered? And how might the payment plans work? Listen to hear Spencer and Jared’s predictions.

In the Shiny Object Shenanigans portion of the podcast, Spencer talks about his year-long experience in the Amazon Influencer Program. He made $6179 in December, and his entire revenue for the year is $17k+. Although he officially started in January, it took him a while to ramp up video production.

What is Spencer’s plan moving forward? Listen to hear what he has in store and why he’s approaching his side hustle in this way.

When it’s Jared’s turn, he shares some surprising stats from his Amazon Influencer Program side hustle. Although his December numbers were good, coming in at $4026, his November earnings were higher. Overall, for the year he earned $18k+ and although he started in May, he took a different approach to video production than Spencer.

He also talks about progress with his Weekend Growth newsletter and YouTube channel and how he has finished the year with just under 4.5k subscribers. He shares some of his monetization methods as well as his inspiration for starting this side hustle.

As for the Weird Niche Sites of the week, Spencer goes first with an Online Stopwatch, a simple website with a free stopwatch and countdown timer. It has ads everywhere and also offers a premium paid stopwatch feature. Who might this type of subscription appeal to? 

With 2.2 million organic visitors per month, according to Ahrefs, and double that according to SimilarWeb, could this site be generating around $50k per month in ad revenue?

Jared’s Weird Niche Site is National Today, which highlights the current holidays around the world. This DR81 site ranks for 1.4 million keywords and has organic traffic of 4.4 million, but what does Jared discover when he scrolls down the homepage? What type of content are they publishing? Don’t miss their thoughts on this ultra-successful site.

And that brings us to the end of another episode of the podcast. We’re hoping you feel up-to-speed on the latest happenings in the industry, excited to start your side hustle today, and inspired by some weird websites that are killing it online.

See you next week!

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