Google Announces Changes to How-To and FAQ Schema

(275) Google Changes FAQ Schema, Word Agents Down 70%, and 2 Really Weird Niche Sites – YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERqLYpL6CAA

Transcript:
(00:01) hey everyone welcome back to the niche Pursuits podcast I’m your host Spencer Hawes with nichepursuits.com and today we’re doing an episode of this week in Niche Pursuits news so welcome and we have Jared with me here as co-host Jared how you doing today very well very well good to be here excited to record the days um today’s news episode yep it should be good we’ve got a few different news topics to cover uh Google is always changing and so we’re going to give you up-to-date news on what’s the latest there uh and then
(00:34) um as we always do we’re going to jump into a couple of shiny objects that you and I are working on it just so happens that we’re going to talk about a similar subject today as far as our shiny objects so that will be fun and then finally we’re going to bring it home with our weird Niche sites each of us have a weird Niche site that we found out in the wild and we’re going to talk about those and see if they’re making any money and yeah just glean any information that we can so that’s always
(00:59) kind of fun but hopefully educational at the same time so well last week Spencer you and I were matching in a tire this week I am now matching you in microphones yes we’ve got a new addition uh to the microphone setup so I feel like I got this thing right in my face I’ve got to work through that I don’t know how do you manage the the St the boom and anyways the mic is awesome though I think it sounds a lot better so I’m very excited to record today’s podcast and uh take it for a test spin yeah so let us know in
(01:29) the comments if you like uh Jared’s sound better than in previous weeks that’d just be good good confirmation of hey we made a good choice on the mic so hopefully it makes my voice uh sound deeper you know I have kind of a higher pitched voice I don’t I don’t know I’m sure there is but uh fix it in post that’s right we’ll fix it in post uh hey just a quick break I hope you’re enjoying the podcast so far just a quick reminder that today’s episode is sponsored by search intelligence now
(01:58) I’ve got a short clip from Fairy with search intelligence showing you how their agency built digital PR links to a client’s website what a crazy campaign how to sleep on your back this campaign got us links in Huffington Post glamor magazine mirror and lots of other great news Publications let me show you how we’ve done it it was so simple our sleep client provided us with expert commentary about how to train yourself to fall asleep on your back they also gave advice on why it’s best to sleep on
(02:27) your back once we’ve had this information we went to mccrack and searched for journalists that consistently write about sleep and well-being we’ve sent these journalistic advice provided by the client and within one day the links started flowing in glamor magazine a dr-81 website picked it up Huffington Post dr88 mirror UK Dr 90 a massive Avalanche of links blasted to our clients website with this simple yet effective campaign about how to sleep on your back I hope this inspires and I hope you’ll use this technique to
(03:01) land massive links to your or your clients website if you want similar link building PR campaigns for your website head to search Dash intelligence dot Co dot UK and get in touch with them now so let’s jump into the news uh today um Google has announced a couple of uh different things so um they mentioned that there are some changes to the how to and FAQ Rich Snippets so I will just share um this on my screen so that people can see what I’m referring to but this is on the developer Google developers blog
(03:46) essentially they say to provide a cleaner and more consistent search experience they’re changing how rich snippet results are shown and in particular they’re referring to FAQ Rich Snippets and they are going to it says they’re going to be reducing the visibility of FAQ Rich Snippets and limiting how to Rich results to desktop devices okay and the changes should be finished rolling out within the next week and then it says um where does it say that government and University entities uh let’s see going forward FAQ
(04:29) Rich results will only be shown for well-known authoritative government and health websites for all other sites this Rich result will no longer be shown regularly sites May automatically be considered for this treatment depending on their eligibility uh so it says while you can drop this structured data from your site there’s no need to proactively remove it so it doesn’t really matter if you have the structured data for FAQ or how to on your website Google’s really not going to show it it the the visibility is
(05:03) going to be limited to as it says only on um uh desktop so it’ll only so I guess mobile will not show it at all and then if I’m understanding correctly even on desktop it’s still going to only show from authoritative government and health websites yeah there’s a lot here so I I sort of wish they had announced at the same time because it’s confusing we know that how to structured data will still exist only on desktop which predominantly makes up under 50 of serps anyways you know more people are searching from mobile or
(05:42) tablet devices these days and then when it comes to FAQ schema or Rich results I thought it was going away completely no matter what mobile or desktop it’s going away unless you’re an authoritative government or Health Website right okay so there’s a little bit of a gray area about where it’s going to be shown or if any normal website will um we’ll we’ll have these results shown so does that mean that people should no longer be targeting these types of FAQ questions right to show up um in like the people also ask you know
(06:20) uh results um and I don’t know the answer to that that’s just sort of rhetorical question people to be thinking about it I well I don’t uh you know I think uh that if it still is valuable content for your reader if you think hey it makes a lot of sense to include a FAQ section um I think that is still good content to be adding to your website and that type of question and answer can still show up in the serps and so it’s probably still good to have it’s just it may not get either as much exposure or
(06:58) may not show up the way that it used to in the past yeah there’s several questions that come out of this I mean ever since they introduced FAQ like let’s center around FAQ schema Maybe for the sake of the conversation I think more people use FAQ schema than how to schema I don’t know that for a fact but ever since this was launched I think it was 2019 um it’s become something that a lot of seos will utilize and it allows you to show up with certain questions to enter into the serp so people maybe you know
(07:29) the example they give here is your ranking for the term what is robots.txt but because you marked up several questions in your article with feq schema you’re actually also showing up in the serp for does my website need a robots.txt what program should I use to create a robots.txt file so those are going away and and the reality though from my understanding managing an agency that has access to a lot of websites is that over the last year or so the traffic from Google for FAQ Snippets has dropped pretty dramatically so I don’t
(08:06) know if there’s going to be a big immediate effect for a lot a lot of websites now that being said I also saw someone we just had in the podcast Tony Hill post and say that one article of his was driving I think he said like 5 000 clicks per day from FAQ um right so that’s wow a massive loss that’s a 150 000 clicks a month that goes away if that turns out to be the case so that’s going away but I think you bring up the broader question which is should we still be doing FAQs just to bolster our content even though it’s not getting
(08:41) marked up as FAQ schema do we still want it to show up in paas does it still help an article become more topically authoritative even though you’re not going to get the the benefit from the structured data right I think if the overall idea is you want to be answering the question as in-depth as possible or giving a good answer to the query that people have and so it probably still makes sense in a lot of circumstances to do that now I also know that you found a couple of tweets from people seos that had some comments on
(09:13) the um had this particular change one of those here is uh Lily Ray right that she’s basically saying that a lot of people have arrived at the same conclusion here that um they’re angry that people believe this is clearly a move for sge to provide answers instead so this is a way for Google instead to just have ai generate those results and provide the answers so that’s one way to look at it and maybe so I don’t I don’t know I mean I’ve I’ve seen someone say they’re going to go remove all of their
(09:49) FAQ structured data so that Google is less likely to grab their answer and serve it in sge I’m not sure about that they probably already have it anyways because you marked it up but I mean there’s some credibility to it it makes sense what are we what have we’ve been testing sge on the podcast for a couple weeks on and off now and we see that they get a lot of data that mimics what I think we see FAQ schema doing so there’s a there’s there’s something to it I have no idea if it’s true but there’s definitely
(10:23) something to it right yeah uh potentially there is something to that uh and then one other tweet here from uh Marie Haynes um I don’t know if you had reviewed this one or what are your thoughts on this yeah so um this was what someone had commented on and she kind of piggybacked off of it but basically the idea that in 2019 when FAQ Rich Snippets and schema was introduced it was basically a way for us to tell Google how to identify in content what questions and then viable answers were and now through their machine learning
(11:00) they’ve been able to learn how to determine that without the need for schema anymore so thank you very much we don’t need it and we don’t need to serve your answers anymore either you you’ve done your job for US Army of content creators we have everything that we need from you and again look at it I mean uh there’s the same Theory exists with a disavow file not that we need to go wait our self into that hot water but the idea that all you’re doing by by disavowing bad links is teaching their algorithm
(11:30) how to identify bad links and then they’ve had the disavow file for a while and then you know lo and behold they kind of announced hey you don’t really need to disavow anymore because we kind of know how to identify these and you know it has some similar ideas and threads here yep that is true Google Google has it all figured out at this point thanks to all of us right um no very good so uh there’s been been some changes there um you know a little bit of a shift here and some of this news might be old for
(12:02) others but this is something that I just came across there was a LinkedIn post from the CEO of um word agents just two days ago so it’s it’s recent that this post particular post was made Aid even though there’s been some Rumblings I think for about the past month as we’ll share here but I’ll go ahead and share my um the the LinkedIn post that that I found so this was from the again the CEO um his name is David P um Peterson Peterson is that what it is oh yeah David Peterson and uh he was the CEO for um you know
(12:43) 2022 and then um a good portion here of 2023 and he was really excited a great business but AI really did some damage to the business uh there’s any there’s a sort of a 15-page little book here but basically the the Highlight that I wanted to give here that he shares is that there was a catastrophic decline to the word agents business 70 Revenue loss in the wake of AI so they experienced a huge Plunge in Revenue a staggering 70 percent loss and they had been trying to figure out how to overcome this and boy
(13:26) that is just tough to overcome and unfortunately I mean it makes sense instead of hiring authors that maybe you know cost word agents four cents a word and they charge you so seven cents a word you can get AI to create content that’s just as good but it’s significantly cheaper and so we’ve seen that major shift since chat GPT and other AI tools have come out in the last eight nine months there’s been this dramatic shift in content agencies like word agency they saw it as seventy percent drop and we’ve also talked about Niche
(14:06) website builders make lemonade they went out of business went into um not bankruptcy but Administration yes Administration for the UK company uh and so uh I don’t know exactly what the takeaway is here other than we are experiencing perhaps an unprecedented shift in the way that content is created and it’s having a major impact on content agencies you know I think there’s another Factor at play and I can say this just from some of my own projects that I have here I’m interested to get your take on it
(14:43) certainly there’s the people who’ve gone all in on AI perhaps had had been using word agents make lemonade all these companies before but what about just the trepidation that also seems to exist how many people who were gung-ho about their website are a little bit more cautious about investing in it until the dust settles maybe they’re still doing some content but not as much maybe they’re moved into more maintenance mode rather than growth mode maybe they’ve instead of investing in two or three sites have
(15:12) said you know I’m only going to work on one website right now until I see where all this goes and I wonder how much of that also is at Play Because certainly there’s a lot of people have figured out how to write edit publish incorporate Ai and not needing some of these more generalist writers but also I just wonder how many people are not investing as much in general even if they’re not using AI right I think that makes sense they’re taking a wait and see approach right and so if if enough people are
(15:39) taking that sort of wait and see approach even if it’s like only three or four months like I’m gonna hold off on investing in content for three or four months um word agents had it says a million dollar cogs cost of goods sold you know balance right so they they have this huge um expenditures every month right um this whole Army of freelance writers a million dollars right and revenue drops by 70 because people are either go using AI to produce content or taking this wait and see approach right they don’t have three or four months of the
(16:18) business when you got a million dollars you’re spending um and uh that did anyways long story short it’s done significant damage to the business uh David’s job as the CEO was to go through and find cost savings and way to operate the business more lean so that they could weather the storm and many people lost their jobs at word agents in fact David um essentially recommended it it sounded like that he stepped down yeah like he almost eliminated he basically eliminated his own job he did leave uh word agents and Jared you were kind
(16:54) enough to remember an email you got a few weeks ago from the new CEO of word agents so Vin the um founder and CEO of word agents also stepped down I mean Vin’s been in this industry for I don’t know how long I feel like as long as I have and probably longer and um I think Finn’s been on our podcast hasn’t he didn’t you interview Vin yes indeed you know good guy by all accounts I’ve had a lot of conversations with him we’ve used word agents at my Agency for different projects over the years and so
(17:27) I remember being you know surprised to see that information uh I think it was yep three four weeks ago and so they have a new CEO uh I think I believe I if I understood correctly perhaps ownership changed and stuff so a lot going on over there we wish them the best whatever that situation looks like but in terms of news it seems like we’re having a hard time running away from agencies that produce content really hurting and probably if I read into it the agencies that had um that didn’t that were kind of maybe
(17:56) in a more precarious position financially at the time this hit are kind of the first ones to to kind of cycle through right yeah absolutely so big seismic shift in how content is produced uh where will it be in eight or nine months from now I I don’t know exactly but uh there’s some of the old guard if you will um is are struggling or have gone out of business or having major changes to the business again we don’t wish this on anybody yeah Vin’s a great guy um I hope that word agents is able to
(18:29) pull out of this and that they’re able to restructure their business and move forward but this is certainly news in the industry especially because yeah word agents Vin has been on the niche Pursuits podcast I know a lot of listeners a lot of my own friends have used word agents in the past I’ve used word agents in the past um they’re still around so I can’t talk to their quality of content currently or how that’s changed other than I imagine they have a much smaller team and they’ve had to lean lean up their
(19:00) operations and they’re fighting to stay in business currently because of AI generation tools wish them all the best hope for the for them and you know more and more we’re seeing agencies adapt to AI also as a part of their service offerings and so we’ll have to see you know not only as we see AI impacting agencies in this manner but also in the way they produce content going forward and since we’re talking about Ai and Google I guess I will share this final uh brief news article um basically Google working with the
(19:34) Australian government has said that all online content should be available for AI training unless Publishers opt out so Google wants to be able to scrape your content and use it for AI training unless you ask the Google bot to not come crawling I suppose and so again I don’t know what this impact is um Australia clearly can cares deeply about this subject and so I’m sure they’ve been threatening Google hey you cannot use Australian Publishers content for free you can’t just willy-nilly come crawler
(20:16) content and train your AI on that uh and Google is arguing that hey we should be able to do that um you know as long as Publishers don’t opt out of that we should be able to crawl it and train our AI Bots to work even better well I can tell you from having studied behavioral economics in the past that if you ask Publishers to adopt and opt out rather than opt-in model the majority will not opt out and so the majority of content will be available to Ai and Google’s sge and if you adopt an opt-in then the majority of
(20:54) content will not be available and this has been studied a lot over the years through a variety of different things and so I think that’s probably why Google is coming in so heavy on this because they kind of know the directions is going to go if it becomes opt-in rather than opt out yep exactly so that’s something to keep your eye on um nothing that nothing actionable just know that there’s continued Rumblings with government agencies that are are nervous I would say about Ai and the future of content and and how AI is
(21:25) trained and so Google is in the middle of that and of course that eventually could impact us one way or another so that’s uh news as of uh this morning I think this just was announced this just came out so I hope you’re enjoying the podcast so far just want to take a short break and remind you that today’s episode is sponsored by search intelligence I’ve got a short clip from Ferry at search intelligence showing you how their agency built digital PR links to a client’s website campaign got us big links in websites
(22:03) such as Lifehacker Wells Online daily record and about 20 other news websites let me show you how we’ve done it we knew that people will be flying a lot this summer and we knew that journalists will be writing about this topic a lot so on behalf of our client we put together a nice guide about how to fall asleep on the plane then we use makroc to find journalists who write about travel then we put our advice in a nice email and send the tips to the journalists within just a few days the links started Landing securing our
(22:32) client natural placement in really big websites just like this this and this this is a great example about how you can leverage seasonal Trends to earn links to a website anticipate what journalists want to write about at all times and give them the stories that they need they will reward you with some great juicy links I hope this is helpful are you looking for similar link building PR campaigns for your website if so just go to search Dash intelligence dot Co dot UK and get in touch with them today all right very good we are going to move
(23:09) on to our next section here in the podcast where we talk about our shiny objects now before we do that uh over the last few weeks I’ve been mentioning that people can leave a review for the podcast on Apple podcasts on iTunes and we of course love to see those and we have a new one here just a couple of days old that I wanted to read on a better one this week last week’s was a little uh a little harsh you know it had some uh criticism but uh this one’s a little better I found a nice one uh so yeah that’s right uh
(23:48) and you are mentioned Jared so it will be an ego boost there you go so here five star review uh ideas spark ideas the value and knowledge I’ve gained from listening to Jared and Spencer is invaluable even when an episode doesn’t necessarily relate to my website goals I still listen because of how much creativity it speaks within my own business my website is wild and swole.
(24:19) com fitness related nothing dirty stay Wild wild and swole SW reference to the strength uh the uh what would that be a slang term I suppose maybe so yeah s-w-o-l-e.com wild and swole.com so people can check that out thank you very much um it’s kind of just a unique username not really a name but uh you know who you are thank you for leaving that review uh really appreciate that uh so another five star review Jared uh we did it you know it’s funny when we rolled this uh you’re the one who came up with the idea of doing this Weekly News
(24:57) segment and going beyond the news and kind of talking about while uh shiny objects and weird niches and all this and I mean there was a lot I was like I don’t know if anyone’s going to care about this I mean the news I get that makes sense but um I think a trending thought has always with especially with the weird niches and even the shiny objects has always just been kind of just giving people inspiration to try stuff or think differently about things and that’s been a thread that people have definitely
(25:22) echoed so that’s great to hear yeah you know if there’s one thing that I think ties Niche Pursuits together with all the episodes not just the news but the interviews and even all the blog posts I hope that they just spark ideas or give inspiration or motivation that’s really the whole reason that we do all of this is that we can share stories that Inspire we can share what we’re working on and sometimes it inspires sometimes you know maybe it just tells you what to avoid buyers are in a different
(25:51) direction exactly um and the weird Niche sites of course maybe just give you ideas that are fun to think about and dream about maybe I’ll never do but uh it’s fun to know that things like that exist uh so let’s let’s jump into our own shiny objects here um and uh you know I wrote down on on the list Jared and I before the podcast we always jot down what we’re gonna chat about so we stay organized here and uh as soon as I finished writing Jared had already written just below mine which I hadn’t read yet is uh his YouTube
(26:23) channel and so we’re gonna both talk about YouTube today uh we didn’t plan this we just we’re in the same sort of wavelength frequency uh for some reason here but so I wanted to give an update on my faceless YouTube channel I’ve talked about this I think it’s been a couple of months uh since I last chatted about it um but to give maybe a new listener um an update back in the day uh I had built a faceless YouTube channel that took off relatively quickly there was essentially one YouTube video that got
(26:57) about a million views and the channel was up to about eighteen hundred dollars in 30 days in earnings on on display ads and doing well crushing it as they like to say and uh would you say the account was swole the account was very swoll very small that’s the right hand uh and um you know I’m doing the happy dance everything’s going great but then the copyright Hammer came down uh uh YouTube found that there was some copyrighted content on the channel and I couldn’t argue with them although we tried to
(27:34) overturn that decision uh they came back a second time and said sorry no there is copyrighted content your video can stay up but it cannot be monetized and so our channel is my all the other videos are still monetized but this one particular video uh that was you know 99 of all the views and earnings cannot be monetized and try as we might over the last couple of months we have not been able to reverse that decision so that’s one update the other update is that we kind of waited a while and um before publishing a ton of videos we
(28:10) kind of wanted to see if we could um figure out this situation uh but recently we just started publishing uh more videos again just this week so that’s why it’s been top of mind is we are now finally publishing new videos to see if we can replicate the success of that old video and unfortunately we have not been able to replicate the success of that video just yet you know the videos are getting 300 400 some of them I’m getting a thousand 1500 views within the first week or 2 but it’s nowhere
(28:42) near you know a million view video within a few months right and so I just looked at the earnings over the past 28 days and it’s very depressing uh my channel is earning uh a dollar 66 in the last 28 days a dollar 66 in the last 28 days so uh that is not enough to you know pay for a gym membership to truly Get Swole or anything like that but a dollar 66 is where I’m at in the last 28 days with my faceless YouTube channel I wish I had better news but I haven’t given up we’re publishing uh new videos
(29:23) and we’re gonna see where it goes from there when you say you’re starting to publish videos again have you started have you already started that or is that the agenda going forward yeah we just started um one or maybe two earlier this week so it’s it’s too early to really know what what’s going to happen with the traction there um I actually I do have another I guess big update is that uh I have decided decided to start a second uh Channel well why not the first one’s going so well it’s it’s going great I mean a
(29:53) dollar 66 not everybody is able to do that but I’m going to try a second Channel and that’s in a different Niche that has less risk of getting a copyright uh ban if you will this this first channel I think it’s always going to be a challenge I think any video at any moment um is at risk of getting hit with a copyright claim whereas a second Channel we’re gonna try and um stay away from that of course but still have videos that can can get a lot of views go viral and still be faceless that that I can Outsource and have it
(30:29) somebody else do so so I guess that’s the big update but no earnings no big numbers to share is there any other way to monetize because it sounds like you’re still getting some views like is there any other ways to monetize that I know conversions off of YouTube are terrible um you know and often times the people who make money off you from a YouTube channel but off YouTube are like selling merch and they have ten thousand you know subscribers per day getting added and all that uh I don’t think so nothing’s coming to
(30:59) mind that would be easy to do it’s kind of just an entertainment channel that you know it’s not really building like a raving fan base or anybody that would probably buy a t-shirt or something um you know maybe there could be something there but uh probably not worth the effort unless we can get more videos to take off well I ask because this might come up again when I talk about my weird Niche later on ah okay so all right little tease stick around Spencer maybe uh you’ll you’ll get your own set of
(31:34) inspiration for your uh your thriving faceless YouTube channel when we get to the weird Niche segment all right well I’m hooked I’m I’m not gonna leave I’ll stay right here okay good I want to hear all about it so I also want to hear about your YouTube channel what’s going on so guy how do I work into this let me let me start the question have you ever started a project and um gotten you know part way into it and um I mean I don’t really know of anybody to say it just forgotten about it
(32:03) yeah yeah I’m sure I have yeah so my faceless YouTube channel that I’m talking about today is exactly that uh let me give a little bit of the backstory so yesterday morning literally I mean we’re recording this today this this came up yesterday I was sitting down having a cup of coffee in the morning and if you have an iPhone Apple will oftentimes alert you about like hey one year ago today you know blah blah blah the photo that popped up yesterday morning was of me taking a picture of us filming for a faceless YouTube channel
(32:34) one year ago nice and uh I realized that I had forgotten all about it and hadn’t checked it in probably 10 months at this point is that right so a little backstory on it coming out of the May 2022 Google update video made a big push of that update we saw across you know a lot of client websites websites of our own like Not only was more videos showing up in the serps from YouTube but even uh articles and websites that incorporated embedded video into their articles also you know seem to do pretty well as well so last summer
(33:07) in response we had a website that was growing did well during the May update but wanted to maybe future proof it a bit so we decided to start a faceless YouTube channel for it and just build out about 25 videos um around enough topics that we could embed one of the 25 videos into every post on the website and so we kind of tackled these higher level topics um most of them are like five to ten minute videos and they were all faceless like demoing stuff with voiceovers and so we got those published and we embedded them all back into the website
(33:44) and I’d kind of in my head gone like oh mission accomplished like the website got what it needed I didn’t really pay any attention to the YouTube channel itself so yesterday I discovered that I have a side project in the faceless YouTube channel and it’s this what it’s this project we did a year ago um so I popped open the results any any guesses you want me to share with you all the metrics about where this YouTube channel is at that was started it’s got 23 videos live and has not been touched in
(34:12) 12 months well is it making more than a dollar 66 in the past 30 days that’s what I want to know because it’s unmonetized because when I last left it it had three subscribers all right so I beat you on that yes you did yeah because it’s not monetized it’s not monetized no but that’s the interesting conversation here so um you know these are not great videos but they’re not like AI videos they’re helpful they’re definitely helpful but they’re you know it’s just somebody
(34:40) talking on camera holding something and demoing it so here’s here’s where it’s at 435 subscribers nice um it’s gotten 219 000 video views decent the last 30 days uh it’s gotten 11 800 views okay so immediately I was like well wait a second ever since YouTube and we talked about it on the podcast couple weeks ago a couple months ago probably they lowered the monetization requirements and as it turns out monetization now for a YouTube channel is 500 subscribers we’re 65 away and at least 3 000 watch hours I think
(35:23) in the last year or so and we are at 6 200 watch hours okay and you need to have three videos live in like the last month or two or something like that now we haven’t done that obviously but I thought hey if we can get 65 new subscribers and get a couple videos up we can monetize this we’re pretty yeah all right so here’s what we’re doing um to get subscribers thankfully we’ve built an email list for this website and so early this morning we cranked out an email asking people to subscribe we’re
(35:52) up to 461 subscribers uh a couple hours in so hopefully between that email and maybe in that second follow-up email we might be at the 500 subscribers by next week and then I thought all right we gotta get three new videos I really don’t want to create new videos for this like oh man and then I remembered we have the Amazon influencer videos and some of the products that were lying around my house that we made videos about were products we had bought to review for this website is that right okay so 37 Amazon influencer videos in
(36:26) total would work well for this um for this and they are already over and on YouTube and live and our designer was able to even crank out some custom thumbnails okay so you’ve got the requirements now for the videos you’re right there at the subscribers you’re about ready to get monetized so I mean let’s be clear at right now 12 000 monthly views this is not going to be a home run in terms of profitability but um I mean I don’t know could could make could be 100 bucks a month sure and uh you know like any great
(37:02) shiny object it’s always the Nugget of success that’s like okay if it can make a hundred dollars a month what would happen if I 10x that what would happen if I 100x that if I you know that’s where it gets exciting right is you just start to start making that first dollar yep and then how come when he exploded that’s 1.
(37:25) 66 you know um well and you bring up a good point because all the the 23 or yeah 23 videos that are live uh those are all like we’ll call them informational so the only way they’re going to make money is through ads on YouTube which RPMs are you know three five ten dollars but all the videos were we just posted from the influencer program they’re all product focused so we brought provided an affiliate Link in each of them to the product that they reviewed and so that’ll be interesting to see if maybe there’s some additional earnings that
(37:55) come in by recommending products from those videos and if those end up getting you know any substantial amount of traffic you’d imagine that some people will buy with that affiliate link yeah so is the plan to to get these uh I think you said 37 videos get those up and uh hopefully get monetized here in the next week uh and just wait and see what happens yeah yeah um okay let’s see what kind of money it makes I mean like you said I’m just so curious um are these new videos going to do well because if they are like you could make
(38:30) a case now as we’ve talked about many times like okay maybe we expand a lot of what we’re doing on the website because now we can do it for both YouTube and for the the website you know and and um you know I I don’t well I don’t know yeah I don’t know what’s on the table but we’ll have to see we’re gonna sit back and wait and wait and watch very good yeah that’s the beauty of uh side projects is a lot of them are wait and see you know try not to wait 12 months before you look at it again no no
(38:59) but um yeah give it some time see how it goes and maybe next week or the week after or in a month we can chat about again right here it’s it is very embarrassing I have no excuse first off we did the whole segment on YouTube’s new monetization why it didn’t spark my memory then you’ve been talking about a faceless YouTube channel for how many times yeah I have six seven months yeah geez I don’t know I’ve been blinded by the uh influencer program uh shiny objects so yeah anyways embarrassing as it is I’m happy to share
(39:32) here about uh successes and our failures no absolutely I think there’s there’s comfort in uh probably other people listening of like hey you know what I’ve done that before too I started something I forgot about it and uh in your case it’s it’s actually gained some traction without you looking at it so um that’s nothing to be too terribly embarrassed about could be worse I suppose you could be what I’m doing with my YouTube channel it could be way worse well maybe that’s the strategy Spencer
(40:01) walk away for 12 months and come back and see what see what it looks like I don’t know all right well I may do that whether I want to or not but yeah if this thing doesn’t start making money um so very good let’s let’s wrap it up here with our weird Niche sites so each of us have one weird Niche uh that we’re gonna share these are things uh that we found out in the wild websites that we’ve come across and um I’ll let you go ahead and go first um yeah I’m I’m still trying to think
(40:33) about how to phrase mine exactly it’s a little bit off the wall but uh yours yours looks pretty good so what do you got cool I’ve heard of this um it’s failarmy.com now if you haven’t been to the website it’s uh it’s an enjoyable watch speaking of embarrassing uh my uh for getting a YouTube channel pales in comparison to the videos that are on here they are embarrassing to the next degree it’s basically uh they say their tagline new fails the freshest fails daily and it’s just um
(41:07) uh it’s just people doing bonehead things um it’s not in the vein of like I think what was that show like jackass or something where like they were intentionally trying to do dumb things these are like you know almost like America’s Funniest Home Videos but without all the cheesy effects going on like these are people actually that’s pretty much probably a pretty good description of what it is now at this point yep and um yeah if people are watching you know I’m sharing my screen it’s going through you know
(41:36) different videos a lady on a horse falling into the river and other people falling off platforms getting wet or whatever right swimming pool accident looked uh looked painful to be quite honest with you that didn’t look like it um yeah and so you know I mean there’s a lot to this site that I thought was interesting uh first we’ll just talk about the metrics of the website and really unpack with this YouTube themed uh hour here but the website is not the primary driver as a matter of fact it almost
(42:09) feels like nothing more than a landing page for the YouTube account so the website is a dr-47 but only ranks for 500 keywords and so if you pull it up and um and the keywords it ranks for I gotta imagine they’re not even really driving that much traffic um maybe a few of them are but there a lot of them are branded Search terms and Search terms for the products that they’re selling uh presumably via their YouTube account the merchandise the YouTube account is quite different they’re posting almost every day or
(42:41) every couple days it has over 16 million subscribers and so being that they’re video driven it makes sense that their YouTube account is um is where they’re they’re monetizing but I I think to me there’s so much opportunity for the website and that’s obviously the SEO had the the content creation hat we put on but it just reminds me again about the power of being able to have a Content core to what you do to your brand and then if you really are able to do it mastering how to deploy that content
(43:15) across a variety of mediums because they’ve nailed YouTube but they have not nailed web and there’s so much opportunity given just the sheer power that they have with their YouTube channel to make their website into something so much more so what would you do what what would be your strategy to improve the website well I mean I think that they could be doing a lot more with brand plays I think that um uh they could be doing a lot more with the content they get I don’t know about the you might know more about this
(43:48) but the it the rights to the content I think when you submit your video you are basically giving them permission to do with it whatever they want so I can I could see a lot of different deployments of their content and getting sponsorships turning them into you know best dubs and then getting those sponsored you know I could see um uh that just just to get started but I think brand plays to me is the big one like there’s a lot going on here that is very Whimsical it’s very funny and brands are I can you know they’re always
(44:20) looking to align themselves with light-hearted fun entertaining content right yeah I agree do you think that there’s a written content play or you think that’s just so far out of the realm of What fail army does they should just stick with video no idea you I mean have you ever gone to Google and searched like you know funniest swimming pool accidents or something like that you know I I mean you have so many videos and couldn’t you compile top 10 lists of the the funniest Beach accidents the funniest uh you know uh
(44:53) DIY home accidents the funniest uh car crash you know or whatever it is the funniest thing of them are your videos right so you’re just getting more views on your channel but you’re embedding YouTube content that you already own and you already have it’s your channel I’ve got imagine listicles would just I I would think they would do well I would think their search content for that mm-hmm yeah I agree you know funny videos involving toilet seats I just see two of those here oh maybe that’s not a
(45:19) toilet seat that’s a just a chair um anyways but yeah I get what you’re saying there’s probably thousands of listicle you know topics that you could do yeah it started getting a long tail of search through uh written content that really is yeah a list of all these videos so that’s a good idea I like it you’re watching the videos playing I’m watching the videos and I’ve been listening to you you ‘d see the lady surfing on the machine you know she’s gonna fall right it’s just
(45:48) this is gonna be a collision I’m right oh I didn’t see that coming semi-collision that’s just not going to end well I’m sure no it does not end well there you go um so yeah no this is a good one I uh clearly they’re doing well um it’s 16 almost 17 million subscribers on YouTube 443 videos right um so it’s not as many yeah you know not as many as I would have expected the same yeah and you know one final thought on that but it gives all of us like if you started the other way and you have
(46:26) the website but I mean again like you agree this is all user generated content right oh yeah for sure yeah so like really this YouTube channel at its core could be handled by a VA and uh somehow attracting users generating and submitting this type of content like that’s really all at its base that it is I mean uh there’s a lot of ways to grow a YouTube channel and you know if your Niche uh if you’re up against it in terms of what how much time and effort you have like man interesting to think of something like this as a bolt-on
(47:01) right absolutely so a good business to think about might give you some ideas again to spark in your own business that you may might be able to apply or replicate in some way so good find uh now I’ve got a weird Niche site here that um I don’t really know exactly how to describe this so I’m going to just share it um this is called cyberspace and time.
(47:35) com now it it really if I refresh my screen maybe that would change it no it’s it’s remembers my browsing history but when you first go here it’s just got like 50 videos embedded that are all from the creator of this particular website and there’s only a couple of pages if you go to the about page this is a very um sort of retro feel type design website and if you read the about page he basically says he started as a way to practice his programming and design skills he wanted to go for a feel of a website and so we practiced all sorts of
(48:11) these things basically then created a player for YouTube videos and so if if I come over oh I guess it didn’t share my I went to the about page here’s the evaluation yes um and so it has a whole explanation and he basically admits that by far the you know what is this website this is by far the most common question to ask and I have to say that the answer to that comes with a bit of a struggle for me so he even struggles to explain what it is and then proceeds to spend you know 500 Words trying to explain what it is I
(48:47) read all this I still don’t quite know exactly what it is other than he was working on some programming skills um demonstrating you know video editors and Earth a video demonstrating the editor and the web server of which he uses anyways um and so if you I feel like I’m rambling because I kind of am because I I don’t know how to explain this uh really well but what really baffled me is that if you come over here to similar web it says right now that only 80 000 visitors a month come to the website which is a decent
(49:29) sized website but even just a couple of months ago um it shows 183 000 and then back in May almost half a million visitors uh for the month well Spencer I’ll even one-up you there I’m just perusing the about page and he goes on in one of the drop downs to say as it is now the website plays host to about 78 000 daily clicks from desktop users is that right what it says I said under the section I just stumbled upon this is it popular that was my question is it popular yeah um go up some go up there it’s right
(50:09) there I just stumbled upon it is it popular a couple more up a couple more up oh yeah oh it starts with I okay I I still can’t figure out where people are finding this I think I mean they’re either sharing it I guess Well here here’s what he says if you can believe him it’s like this most people stumble upon this place via Google image or or its web search some find it by clicking on special or Social Links I thought it’s a special links Social Links placed on Facebook Twitter and Reddit
(50:36) um some put it in their Vlogs and some with a Keen Eye for unique things bookmark it and keep coming back yeah yeah so I don’t get what this website is is is doing is it’s like Bizarro world yeah so I um so I popped in a URL and I don’t even know how to get back to that but I had it pop in this video that shows full game highlights it was just a random YouTube video that I saw right and so you can then watch this you know in this player right that’s kind of unique um I guess and um so it’s basically like a portal to
(51:14) experience the web from 20 plus years ago yeah yeah there you go so if you want to get a retro feel um you know you come to cyberspace and time.com so here here’s where you can here’s the more in-depth player uh that you can pop in a URL right I don’t think we’re seeing it in the screen oh okay let me share that sorry about that and uh what I’m gonna do here to give the full effect let’s see if I can quickly find a is there anything on this website is quick yeah um so where am I at here I gotta find the
(51:53) right tab so I found a URL for one of our interviews so here we are so now we can watch the niche Pursuits podcast on cyberspace and time.com right with this um with this unique interface again I that’s I I’m speechless right um so whether it’s getting half a million visitors a month a million visitors a month 80 000 visitors a month I’m not quite sure uh it’s interesting there are a few display ads but other than that it’s not really heavily monetized Spencer sorry I I hadn’t seen
(52:34) this before you prisoners I’m just I’m poking around he shares Google search console uh data down there does he really yeah look at that purple section the appendices okay well let’s uh I I didn’t spend that much time diving into it as you can see it’s pretty it it does not support his Google 78 000 a day I’ll tell you that much well I don’t think most of it’s coming from search but that is an interesting point you know um it’s wow 50 so if I’m reading that right he had
(53:09) 58 000 clicks from search on August 27th whatever year that was yeah um so that’s 2019 August 27 2019. okay 2019. oh yeah he had 58 000 Clicks in one day so there you go and I mean ahrefs doesn’t really show that no dangerous does not show any of that so I don’t know where it’s coming from is it all branded search um well it’s not yeah it’s not social um it’s it’s it so he did say that it does very well in Google image search so that’s probably what’s going on usually that’s a because it says search
(53:55) type web normally in Google search console that would be identified under image search not web search right although maybe back in 2019 they didn’t differentiate that way I can’t remember you had that tab there at that time but so I think this is raises more questions than answers if I’m honest I don’t know what I would do with this either in terms of my Niche but it is a fascinating website yeah you know I Was preparing for this and I ran across this site and I spent like 20 minutes just kind of looking at this site and trying
(54:24) to figure out what it did and I hadn’t come to really any conclusions but I’m like this is weird enough we just need to share it uh and so people can check it out cyberspaceontime.com if you want to try and figure out how it’s making money if it’s making money it appears to be getting a bunch of traffic people must embed this watch YouTube videos uh and kind of use this yeah this retro old time feel uh browsing experience I mean I don’t want to ask you to reveal your sources you know because a bit like
(54:59) journalists we all have our ways we find our weird niches and you know I don’t really talk about that kind of we all we keep it close the best but generally speaking where did you find this I mean this one I have to ask about well I I have come across uh a Trevor Treasure Trove of a list of like weird Niche sites okay so essentially I found somebody that has compiled a list of sites in the past and I’ve been digging deep into their list to pull out the real gems that make sense to share that’s a good that’s a
(55:35) good one so so there you go um I I guess we did it we got through everything that one might be the weirdest Niche we’ve ever done and just brass tacks in terms of like we’re only even beginning to figure out what the heck it even serves as a purpose right I can’t think of why I would ever go back still but people must uh and so yeah I’m a little bit baffled why so many people are visiting the website but uh I love it because there’s so many different ways you can look at the internet get traffic to your website
(56:10) and this is clearly one of those ways how people can Implement that uh for for themselves I don’t know exactly but maybe it will spark something and so again that’s the goal of this podcast is hopefully to just spark some ideas for people that’s great great so uh We’ve covered the news we’ve covered our our side hustles we’ve covered our weird Niche sites so thank you everybody much so much for listening to the podcast and we hope that you continue to do well in your own business if you want to follow along with
(56:43) additional podcasts or with the niche Pursuits newsletter just go to nichpursuits.com newsletter where I send out a couple of emails a week to update you on any new podcast episodes or anything new going on in my business so with that thank you so much for listening uh today and I hope everybody has a great weekend have a great weekend today’s episode is sponsored by search intelligence here’s a short clip of ferry from search intelligence showing you how their agency built digital PR links to a client’s website what a crazy
(57:17) campaign how to sleep on your back this campaign got us links in Huffington Post glamor magazine Mira and lots of other great news Publications let me show you how we’ve done it it was so simple our sleep client provided us with expert commentary about how to train yourself to fall asleep on your back they also gave advice on why it’s best to sleep on your back once we’ve had this information we went to macrock and searched for journalists that consistently write about sleep and well-being we’ve sent these journalistic
(57:46) advice provided by the client and within one day the links started flowing in glamor magazine a dr-81 website picked it up Huffington Post dr88 mirror UK Dr 90 a massive Avalanche of links blasted to our clients website with this simple yet effective campaign about how how to sleep on your back I hope this inspires and I hope you’ll use this technique to land massive links to your or your clients website thanks for joining us today on the podcast just a final reminder that it was brought to you by search
(58:24) intelligence and if you’re looking for link building PR campaigns for your website just head over to search Dash intelligence dot Co dot UK and get in touch with them today cheers