Google, Reddit, and the Controversy

Welcome back to another episode of the Niche Pursuits News podcast! You definitely don’t want to miss this one as it’s packed with interesting insights and thoughts about events over the last week in SEO.

After Spencer talks briefly about his positive experience promoting Link Whisper at FinCon, he and Jared dive headfirst into the big news of the week: Spencer’s unexpectedly controversial post on X about how Google is slowly killing blogging. 

Much to his (and everyone’s) surprise, Danny Sullivan, from Google, responded to his post and offered a few helpful tips and takeaways from the HCU. This exchange generated a lot of debate about the topic—over 130 threads on Spencer’s original post. 

Spencer and Jared talk about the general confusion among site owners and content creators over the HCU and their efforts to understand what Google wants, and although Danny references this document to help people, people remain very confused and frustrated.

They also talk about the difference between the HCU and previous updates like Panda and Penguin, and encourage everyone to check out the original post on X.

Moving on, Spencer and Jared talk about the latest news about Reddit, as the platform is threatening to block Google. This decision hinges on Reddit’s ability to reach deals with generative AI companies to pay for its data.

What might happen to Reddit if it goes through with it? What would be the ripple effect? And what about the other 500+ companies that have already blocked their content from being scraped by AI? What would Spencer and Jared do if they ran Reddit? Tune in to hear them discuss the possibilities.

The next big news is that the DALL-E 3 image generator is available in ChatGPT and it’s free. With the right prompts, you can create whatever images you want. 

Spencer shares a few images he created using the tool, Jared talks about using it to successfully create YouTube thumbnails, and they discuss the quality of the images it creates.

As for Shiny Object Shenanigans, Spencer starts by talking about his most recent results with the Amazon Influencer Program. He shares that his videos are back in the carousel and his earnings are around $2k for the month. 

Although he’s finally cash flow positive with this side hustle, with 767 videos currently, what will the coming months hold in terms of earnings? Also, who’s making more at the moment, Spencer or Jared? Listen to the podcast to find out which host is in the lead.

Jared then talks about growing his Weekender Growth email list, which is now at 3k subscribers. 

He shares his challenges growing the YouTube channel, which has about 12 videos, +1k subscribers, and 2000 watch hours. He hopes to monetize it in the coming months, so stay tuned to see how that evolves!

As for weird niche sites, Spencer’s find of the week is the very colorful Sound Buttons World, which receives 575k visitors per month from organic search and has tons of sounds that users can download or link to. 

He and Jared look at the site’s exponential growth and discuss why that may be, and they look at the types of keywords the site is ranking for.

Jared shares his weird niche site, Day of the Week, which provides a lot of information about the days of the week, everything from the zodiac, birthstones, historical events, and more. 

This DR26 site ranks for 60k keywords, and Jared and Spencer are very surprised when they take a closer look at those keywords and at the type of ads running on the site. Listen to find out why!

And that brings us to the end of the latest episode of Niche Pursuits News! Hopefully, you’re feeling informed and inspired. Tune in next week when Spencer and Jared take on more SEO, digital marketing, and niche site creation news.

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