Welcome back, everyone, to another episode of the Niche Pursuits News podcast. Jared hosts this week’s episode, along with Morgan Overholt, who’s standing in for Spencer.

They kick off the news portion of the episode talking about Reddit and how it has blocked Bing Search. Microsoft has confirmed this news and is respecting Reddit’s decision, but the plot thickens when Reddit’s CEO speaks out.

What did he say? What does Jared think of the CEO’s comments? How does Morgan view Reddit’s situation, and where does she think the situation might be going?

This leads them to another article that talks about how the traditionally mutually beneficial arrangement of web crawling is breaking down, referencing Google and Reddit’s relationship, Reddit’s decision to block Microsoft, and how these moves are really hurting the internet.

This discussion leads Jared and Morgan to ask some important questions about AI and the future of the internet. Do they think Reddit has made a wise decision? What impact do they think this will have on other search engines? Tune in to find out.

Watch the Full Episode

The conversation then shifts to SearchGPT, and they look at and dissect a sample query. What does Jared say stands out? How does Morgan think publishers will feel? What does she say about the layout? 

How does this differ from SGE? And what mistake did the platform make?

As for side hustles, Morgan talks about an idea that came to her through her graphic design agency, where she has consistently designed ebooks for clients.

Now she wants to try her hand at it, publishing her own book with the content she had originally  published on her website, which was hit by the Helpful Content Update.

Why do she and Jared think this is a potentially profitable side hustle? 

When it’s Jared’s turn, he explains the Creator Connections program inside Amazon Influencer and how it’s been going since he started participating. 

How much did he earn his first day? And what happened after that? How does he predict this will impact his earnings?

Then the conversation moves on to their Weird Niche Sites. Morgan goes first with Chirper AI, a site that looks like the Sims meets ChatGPT. In this wild little AI virtual reality world, you create characters that interact with others created by different users.

What other platforms is it trying to emulate? What character did Morgan create?

When it’s Jared’s turn, he shares an image-to-text converter which, as the name suggests, takes pictures and converts them into text files. What kinds of images could this be useful for? 

This DR37 site thrived during all the updates and now has traffic in the millions. What paid services does it offer? And how is it monetized? How much might it be making a month?

That concludes another episode of the Niche Pursuits News podcast, where you can hear about the latest and most important news in the SEO, online business, and blogging world as well as feel inspired by the hosts’ side hustles and get ideas from some weird sites.

Catch you next week!

Transcript

Jared: All right. Welcome back to this week in the news on the niche pursuits podcast. My name is Jared Baum. And today we’re talking about Reddit and Reddit is our headline story. They are making news. They’re making waves, potentially changing the way that search works in the world of AI, certainly. And we’re going to be talking all about it.

It could have massive ramifications for the way search looks going forward. Uh, we have a couple of other stories. Of course, Google’s in the news. Why would it not be a week without Google in the news? We’ll touch on that. We’ve got some side hustle stuff to talk about. We’ve got weird niches, of course.

And of course, we’ve got Morgan Overholt back to join us for a second time as a co host.

Morgan: Yay, thank you so much for having me. Always a pleasure.

Jared: You’re quite the hit the first time. You’re back for another week in the news. I hope you brought, um, I hope you brought your insights because we’ve got a lot to talk about here today.

So welcome back on. Thanks for joining us again.

Morgan: Thank you. Thank you. I mean, I can’t believe we’re talking about Reddit and Google today. What a change.

Jared: Yeah. Yeah. You know, I think we probably went the first six months of doing this news podcast without talking about red at once. And then obviously so much happened, uh, over the summer of 2023.

And since then, it’s, uh, it’s, it’s, it’s all we can do to talk about reddit. Let’s get into the story here. And I’ll go ahead and share my screen for those of you who are watching, um, on YouTube, basically what, and this is in many ways, not new information. It is old. It actually started in the beginning of July.

And here we are in the beginning of August, but nonetheless, what has really come out this week is that Reddit is blocking search engines, certain search engines from crawling its website. So Reddit has updated his robots. txt file, which prevents. Most notably, in our conversation, Microsoft and their Bing, uh, and many other search engines from crawling the site.

Uh, this actually occurred on July 1st, 2024, was when the update happened, uh, but now we’re starting to see Reddit falling out of the Bing search index, and a lot of search, uh, a lot of media outlets began covering this story. Um, Microsoft has responded and confirmed that they are respecting the robots.

txt standard. They have stopped crawling. I think that, uh, even furthering this, and this is where the conversation gets a little juicy, is I think the comments by Reddit about this entire situation. Um, we have another story up on the screen here. Where the Reddit CEO has actually commented on this, uh, Steve Huffman.

Um, he he’s, and I’m going to read several quotes, uh, and we’ve got a lot to talk about here, but I’ll read several quotes and Morgan want to kind of get your thoughts on where we go with this quote without these agreements. This is Reddit CEO talking, quote, Without these agreements, we don’t have any say or knowledge of how our data is displayed.

And he’s talking about the agreement they have in place with Google, which is, I believe, a 60 million per year license for Google to crawl, scrape, and use Reddit’s data. So without these agreements, we don’t have any say or knowledge of how our data is displayed and what it’s used for, which has put us in a position now of blocking folks who haven’t been willing to come to terms with how we’d like our data to be used or not used.

Quote, we’ve had Microsoft anthropic and perplexity act as though all of the content on the internet is free for them to use. That’s their real position. Quote, I think the traditional value exchange from search engines has changed. Search and summarization and training are merging and the value exchange of crawling in exchange for traffic back is becoming muddied.

That is a lot to discuss there. What do you think? Morgan.

Morgan: Yeah. First of all, let me just say it, you know, it’s a crazy time in the SEO world when this happens and it takes a month for it to make it onto this podcast, that’s how, that’s how much stuff is going down in this industry right now, y’all. Because when I first saw this headline a month ago, first of all, I was admittedly a little bit confused about it because naturally I immediately went to Bing and I was like, type it in Reddit and I’m like, no, look, it’s still there.

It’s all good. And Yeah, yeah, I was like, always people are crazy that they got the headline wrong because there’s no way that Reddit would block every other search engine other than Google. That was like my initial thing. Then when I had somebody explain it to me, Oh, it’s only now looking at things that had previously crawled before July 1st.

So that’s why if you do go on and test this theory on Bing Reddit, but nothing new and nothing new going forward.

Jared: Yeah, that’s the

Morgan: point. But yeah, Jared, like, I ain’t gonna lie, this rubbed me all sorts the wrong way. And even when you were reading through those quotes, I feel like I was trying to control my face.

And I always thank goodness that this podcast is more audio than it is visual. But people on YouTube are probably going to notice my eyeballs were, I was rolling my eyes so hard, I’m surprised they’re not stuck in my head right now. I mean, Especially with those quotes, I’m your thoughts. They really are.

They’re

Jared: jarring when you hear them. They’re like, uh, they’re inflammatory in nature. They’re, uh, they’re so wildly, uh, over, uh, generalized about the future of search and about what has given. Search it’s platform so far. I mean, they’re, they’re, they’re, they’re inflammatory.

Morgan: Not to mention, I mean, it really like speaks from a point of privilege, like how fortunate for Reddit that they are able to do that kind of thing.

I mean, not to downplay what the folks at Reddit have built here. Right. I mean, obviously it’s an incredible platform. It’s been around for decades now. People love to use it. But there are a lot of people dealing with this issue right now. And from small publishers to large companies, and not all of us have somebody paying us millions of dollars to crawl our data, even giving us the option to pay us to crawl to our data.

On top of that, they seem to be more interested in deranking small publishers like myself, like yourself, like so many people listening rather than having conversations about, Hey, how can we use this to train our AI systems? So for Reddit, so then. Not only escape all of that completely unscathed to get a nice little deal, a nice manual push up in the SERPs to where their traffic is exploding at a very convenient time when they announce their IPO.

I might add on top of that for them to now additionally say, well, you know what? We don’t, we don’t need the other search engines. I mean, Jared, it must be nice is all I get to say.

Jared: Well, it’s, as the phrase goes, it’s like the pot calling the kettle black. I mean, again, quote, we’ve had Microsoft anthropic and perplexity act as though all the content on the internet is free for them to use.

That’s their real position. Well, I think actually what publishers would say is that’s Google’s position. That has been Google’s position for a good number of years. We’ve talked at length in this podcast about how the search liaison, Danny Sullivan, seems to not be able to make any impact when it comes to how Google is actually utilizing our, our information, our content, it’s just, Very jarring to hear the CEO of Reddit, who’s just gotten into bed with Google.

Uh, and is like you said, making, you know, eight figures a year off of, off of that relationship to say that, like, can you believe that the rest of the internet thinks that this stuff should be available, um, just for free? Um, when Google thinks that way too. Now I get it from their perspective. They found a way to convince.

Some major corporation to pay them for their content and in their world, they have found a way to get paid. Like, if Google called you up and said, Morgan, I’m going to pay you 60 million, 6 million to crawl your website, you probably would take the deal, right? Or maybe, you know, maybe you wouldn’t, but you’d negotiate or whatever it is.

But. I get it from their perspective, but you’d probably keep your mouth shut and you wouldn’t go on your high horse and play some moral card to the rest of the industry when they happen to be the ones that made a deal. But so many of us small publishers don’t have that opportunity.

Morgan: I mean, like Google, if you’re listening, I’m cheaper than that, buddy.

We can make a deal

Jared: here. I go way lower than that. Let me be honest.

Morgan: No, I might let Jared negotiate for me. I like the way you’re thinking, but I mean, let’s be real.

Jared: No, I’m in six K and I’m good. Yeah.

Morgan: Yeah, I mean, we can chat, but no, like you said, though, I mean, here’s the, I agree with, with everything you just said, but here’s my question, like, is this going in the direction of, and this is like some severe speculation, so forgive me, but is this going in the direction of like.

One day Google is just going to call a spade a spade and stop this will they won’t they romance is going on and just acquire Reddit.

Spencer: Do you ever get stuck in your business and wish you had someone you could turn to for solutions? Well, I think you should consider joining the niche pursuits community.

You’ll get weekly calls with experts on growing a successful online business and you’ll also get assigned a small mastermind group where you can solve your business problems As well as share your wins for a limited time. I’ll let you try out the niche pursuits community for just 1. Go ahead and use coupon code podcast at checkout in order to get your first month for just 1.

Again, that’s coupon code podcast, go to community. nichepursuits. com today and see what it’s all about. And maybe I’ll see you on our call next week.

Jared: Well, I mean, I didn’t want to be too presumptuous, but you called out the peculiarities around this deal happening, the IPO and these sorts of things. So, you know, we’ll leave it at that. Uh, last week, Spencer and I borderlined on giving stock advice. You know, we don’t want to get into this week, but, but, but no, I think, you know, you bring up a good point.

I think that there’s so many different, uh, dovetails out of this, right? There’s so many different things you could think about. I wanted to highlight this article that was in, what is this? New York mag. com. And I thought it could be an interesting juxtaposition. By the way, I use that word a lot in this podcast.

I don’t think I use that word outside of this podcast, but I use it every week here, but it’s titled Reddit, Google, and the real cost of the AI data rush. The open web is getting walled off. And, um, I won’t go through the whole article suffice to say, you can probably tell from the title, but a couple of the highlights that it’s really going after, it’s.

Basically calling out the traditionally mutually beneficial arrangement of Reb crawl crawling is breaking down. It’s talking about this deal, uh, with Reddit and Google. And then, uh, the recent Reddit links about Microsoft being in the lack thereof. Uh, critics it’s, it’s arguing that critics argue Google’s deal with Reddit gives it an unfair advantage.

Um, certainly wouldn’t be the first time people have argued that reddits blocking of crawlers from other search engines. It’s practical, but it’s a publicly unfriendly move and it just goes into depth on how this really is not helping the Internet. It’s hurting the Internet. It’s not helping, uh, people want to create wonderful, creative, informative, helpful content.

And I think that it, I don’t, we, you know, we don’t want to be overly presumptuous here because it’s, it’s impossible to see where this goes, but it just is another reminder that, um, you know, where are we going with AI as it relates to the open web? And are we really going down a route where the only way for a publisher to survive is to make a deal with one of these large media conglomerates?

Morgan: May I read a quote from that last article? Because this quote just. Basically sums up my fears about the future, um, with deals like this and what we’re currently seeing with Google and Reddit, but in that same article from the intelligence or the NY mag. com, it ends by saying arrangements like these mark the end of that long and incredibly fruitful era.

There are a sign of things to come. The web was already in rough shape. Reduced over the last 15 years by the rise of walled off platforms, battered by advertising consolidation and polluted by a glut of content from AI products that is used for training. The right, the rise of AI scraping threatens to finish the job, collapsing a flawed, but enormously successful decades long experiment in open networking and human communication.

I mean, that kind of sums up everything for me, like where in the world is the future of the internet going? And not just set up or not just. Well, the next segment too, too much, cause I know we’re still talking about Reddit, but we are going to talk a little bit about search GPT, right? I can’t help, but wonder Jared, if now this is like a crazy thought, right?

And it will take a lot to happen, but if search GPT starts severely eating into Google’s territory, maybe even one day overtaking Google for their core product, is Is Reddit still going to be on that high horse or are they, uh, conveniently going to shift their morals a little bit?

Jared: Well, you kind of, I mean, you bring up a good point.

We’re moving next into SearchGPT, which we talked about last week. We didn’t have much information to share. We’ve got that this week. We’ve got some interesting things to share, sneak peek into SearchGPT, so stay tuned for that. But you bring up a good point. Microsoft, IE, ChatGPT, and now SearchGPT, it can’t crawl Reddit anymore.

Right. Like it can’t use Reddit information. And so I think in a large picture, we’ve been complaining about Reddit results in Google for a long time. And yet people keep appending Reddit to the end of Google searches. Is that because people really want Reddit results or is it because Google is so bad?

That they started to go to Reddit anyways, we don’t know the chicken or the egg here, but we’re going to start seeing as search GPT plays its way out. How important is user generated content in the way people utilize the internet? Because that’s going to perhaps start to be the dividing line between a search GPT and a Google going forward.

Certainly what it seems, right?

Morgan: Yeah. And look, and I feel like I am hitting on Reddit maybe a little bit too strongly here because out of pettiness, right? I mean, I feel like a lot of other small publishers probably feel the same way right now because Google basically came for me, right? Came for me and my business and gave me a hell of a year over in my opinion, nothing right over in my opinion, just making sweetheart deals with companies like Reddit.

So again, good for Reddit. I know that it’s an extraordinarily popular company, but I just think that they are taking, there is somewhat of a, albeit calculated risk by tying themselves to one major company and none of the rest and closing themselves off to that. I mean, you better hope you’re not buying a one way ticket on the Titanic.

You know what I’m saying? Like, I mean, you better hope that you’re, uh, you’re aligning with the right partner here. But again, it would be easy for them to go back. I mean, if for any reason, like I said, another search engine comes along or another AR product comes along as far as taking a piece of the pie, something tells me they can just as easily be like, Oh, you know what, you know, just for no, no related reasons, we’ve decided to update our robots.

txt. Yeah. Just, it’s just totally, totally coincidental.

Jared: Well, pragmatists would say that they chose the right company to partner with and that. Pragmatically speaking, Google is in a fantastic position. They still, and will continue to for a long time to have a tremendous market share, you know, that hasn’t seemed to change, although you and I’ve gone back and forth about, is it changing or not?

But it seems to always be in that plus 90{d0d8c9a3780aae347a3c0ec9b539f6350131b27bfcedb699d8911923448b0bae}, 90 percentile. Obviously stock price continues to rise. So pragmatists would say they chose right unequivocally. You have that deal, you take it. But yeah, skepticists would say, Hey, you know, like the future of search is changing and the next Google isn’t Google.

That was one of the comments, one of the lines in these articles. And so a skeptic, a skeptic would say, Hey, Maybe Reddit isn’t choosing right, maybe they’re choosing today’s darling child, but are they choosing tomorrow’s darling child?

Morgan: Can I ask you one more question before we move on? What do you think, if any, impact will this have on the other search engines and their ability to maintain even the small piece of the pie they currently have?

Jared: Yeah, I think again, it goes back to how, how, um, how much those search engines were utilizing user generated content in the first place and seeing it succeed. The jury’s still out. On how impactful it’s been in Google’s search, right? And so we don’t, I don’t want to diatribe too much. We don’t really know if that’s actually helping people engage with their search platform.

And so if you’re a, a, a Bing, for example, I mean, maybe this is only doing you a favor in the long run, because yes, you don’t get access to that data for your AI engine, but you also. Perhaps get forced to not show people what they actually don’t want to go to a search engine for in the first place.

Morgan: Maybe it actually helps differentiate the products on down the line, you know products that oftentimes have too many similarities and as we’ve talked about on the podcast before tend to copy each other a bit too much so You know either way jared.

There’s definitely some lines being drawn in the sand right now

Jared: We have an upcoming interview that I just recorded this week. It’s releasing In a month or so, we’re pretty stacked on episodes right now, but it’s coming out about a month, but it’s all about how to succeed on a specific platform that has said no to AI that has put their foot down to AI.

And as a result has seen tremendous growth. So I’ll tease you with that one that’s coming out in a month or so, but to your point, well, on that, we have some other topics to talk about. Last week, Spencer and I found out about search GPT. Which is open AI’s new search engine minutes before we hit record.

So we were only able to just, I mean, literally talk about the concept of it, but we have some information that we can start to share today. Um, and I’m going to bring that up on screen here. We actually are able to see inside of search GPT. Now I went and signed up for the beta, uh, to test. I have not gotten approved yet.

I don’t know if you went and signed up. Or if you’re in at all, or if this is your first go at seeing these, uh, these screenshots as well.

Morgan: I’ve seen the screenshots, but I’ve not signed up for beta. I need to,

Jared: I’m sure it’ll be the first thing you do when you’re done. But, um, so anyways, on screen, we’ve got an article here, uh, from search engine land and, uh, Danny was, Danny Goodwin was able to see a couple of queries at the very least.

Um, and I thought I’d kind of highlight some of them and highlight a little controversy. So we just got done talking about Google. We just got done talking about Reddit. And although we might have come across as though we were big open AI fans, uh, we’re not necessarily big open AI fans either, which we’ll talk about here in a second.

Um, so here’s a query for music festivals in Boone, North Carolina in August, 2024. I’d call it a very specific query, and you can see the experience on the screen in front of you. And I’ll describe it for those of you who are listening. You’ve got your classic chat GPT, uh, grade, uh, area that you typed into.

You’ve got your, uh, area where you’re used to seeing the, the AI publish results for you. And that actually incorporates and brings in thumbnails that are very visual based. It says music festivals in Boone, North Carolina. There are several music festivals and it starts listing off music festivals like the Appalachian Summer Festival.

And it gives a brief description and each of these provides, I would say, a very prominent differentiated blue link to the source. And I think that’s something that’s of big interest to publishers. As I look at this, my first thought when I see it is how prominent the links are in the way they source.

It’s not what they’ve been doing where they truncate it, where they make you click on little, um, uh, you know, whatever those little ellipses triangle things are.

Morgan: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jared: You know, so, so anyways, look, gimme one more. So I’ll just finish describing, then we can talk about this. On the left they have explore other topics related to this.

So they have Explore Boone, uh, you’re from around that area. Maybe you can shed some more light on this area. I don’t know. Boone very well. They have to, they, they feature other area things from around there. So Jones House Cultural Center app, theater app, uh, summer. Stuff like that. So they’ve got one more query we can go through, but man, initial reaction from you on this, on this very localized and very specific search query.

Morgan: All right. Well, first of all, you say I’m not a fan, but a open AI, if you’re listening, same deal as Google, you just, you call me. It will work out a deal. Okay. If they both

Jared: call you, you can play them off each other. That’s number one in, in, in negotiation. Okay. So hopefully they’re both called. Then you’ve got negotiation.

You’re in your negotiation heaven.

Morgan: Hey, I’m listening. I’m just saying I’m listening, but, you know, I really appreciate it about these screenshots and the way that this information is kind of being slowly released to the public is the fact that on day 1, there’s not a whole bunch of speculation about approximately what this is going to look like.

Right? Like, as a publisher who spent, I mean, gosh, what was about a year from their announcement into AI Google’s announcement to AI. Um, until we actually saw the product about worrying about what it was going to do to our websites, whether or not we were going to get any links or any kind of citations.

So, you know, honestly, I was actually impressed. It was one word relieved would be another word when I first saw these. I mean, don’t get me wrong. Like I F I’m fully aware that this product could not even look at my websites twice and I will never show up in this at all versus on Google. I still have.

Kind of a chance, you know, a snowball’s chance, but kind of a chance the way things currently stand. But overall, on just principle and seeing the way that this is laid out to me, it’s very clear. Um, as a publisher, I have less fears that they’re going to take my information and not properly cite it in any way or give me credit or try to give somebody at least credit or traffic for that.

And then also as a user, I actually kind of like how they have this sort of laid out because you’re getting direct answers to the question that you asked. You’re getting links. And then you’re also getting almost kind of like, I shouldn’t call a discovery, a discovery feed for IP, but like a, You know, a feed in which you can discover other related topics.

Yeah.

Jared: So

Morgan: those are my first thoughts.

Jared: Yeah. I think you bring up some great points. I mean, I think that, um, uh, I, I, you know, we try to find the positive in the negative or in the stories here. And I think that there’s much to look at. In these initial screenshots that has certainly not the worst case scenario, and I’d say far from the worst case scenario.

And here’s another one. Uh, a very affiliate related sort of query best tomatoes to grow in Minnesota. I shouldn’t say very affiliate. I should just say. Has that affiliate tie to it, which we’ve always kind of seen Google really clamped down in the last year or so. Um, it’s not really an affiliate term, but, um, uh, best tomatoes to grow in Minnesota.

And, um, again, it, it doesn’t produce a sidebar in this case, the sidebar of additional information, but I would say it gives some really, um, clear and easy to understand answers. Early girl celebrity Roma gives you a one sentence overview. And then again, a very clear link to where it got it from. Um, and, uh, you know, um, uh, then at the bottom, in this case, it does give you some additional considerations.

It does look like it’s pulling some of this information. Um, uh, uh, or it does look like the links at the bottom are, you know, related to where it got the information for it’s it’s AI summary. I did find it interesting that all of this. Is from the garden magazine in this case, whereas in the prior query, it was pulling from different data sources at the bottom.

It gives when planting tomatoes in Minnesota. And so it gives timeframes and references a different website, the gardening dad. So it’s just interesting to see how it changes. It’s interesting as I’m curious, is that per query? Is that per result? Is that because there isn’t very much information in their repository about this specific query?

So they’re just pulling from one source. Is it because this type of query, they want to be agnostic about who they reference? It’s very interesting to see.

Morgan: Yeah, no, I mean, and actually it’s funny that you brought that up because I, it didn’t even really occur to me right away when, or how odd it was that they were listing the same website over and over and over again, in that example, I actually kind of assumed that, um.

Because they were querying for best tomatoes that it was popping up. Like, however, that best tomatoes article on that one blog had probably had it displayed and then like linking to them on every single item is how I kind of hoped it was working my mind. Because at that point it would look a little bit more like snippets.

Right. So that didn’t even. I was still not really panicked here. Um, you know, and again, it was funny because I was just refreshing my memory. Um, in one of my browsers while you were talking, trying to compare the two side by side, but I was trying to remember kind of what, you know, both AI overviews look like when they first came out from Google, but also kind of refreshing my memory about what’s going on.

Some of the future proposal layouts are going to look like from AI overviews from Google. And, and again, in both instances, I feel like those citations were never quite as clear. Like at one point, I think they even just had like the little subscripts or the superscripts, you know, and then like the stuff laid out underneath here.

I really like the fact that you’re getting that brand name out there. I mean, again, I, you know, Jared, here’s my real problem though. Like, I know I am too excited about this and I was singing their praises too much because I am like a jilted ex girlfriend at this point. Right. I am like, Like, I just want to see my ex fail.

And I want to run off with a new pretty, pretty lady. You know what I’m saying? If it

Jared: comes at your cost, you want to see that ex that you relied on for so long. The big, I,

Morgan: I want, you know what I want to say, I want to let them see what life is like without me. That’s, that’s what I want them to feel. What’s it like when someone comes from you?

For you. Yeah, exactly. No

Jared: comment. Yeah. Well, I mean, to your point though, I would think maybe to, to bring it back together, like you said, the initial, uh, not AI overviews, but, uh, SGE experience was far different than this and far more like, Oh my gosh, the sky is falling and we know they iterate. We know they change.

Maybe they’re better at PR than Google is that wouldn’t be hard by the way, but maybe they’re better PR And so their first foot into this their first four way for a of displaying it Someone with a PR brain thought about it more than someone at Google did. So we could just be looking at the PR version.

Maybe this will change. It will probably change. We can only hope it continues to change for publishers that those screenshots. Again, those are, those are wins for small publishers in the day and age of what we’re looking at. And of course, though, not without controversy, the article closes with this. Of course.

Uh, Let’s see. I got to find it. Oops, GPT. Well, it turns out that search GPT had an oopsie moment in one of its demo videos, much like Google’s infamous bar demo. Uh, so it looks like this stuff was pulled from a video. Uh, I didn’t know that. I thought maybe Danny got access to it or something like that. Uh, anyways, uh, much like Google’s infamous bar demo, this search GPT had a mistake.

I just got done thinking maybe PR was, was one of their strong suits. Apparently not. The search GPT air happened on a search for music festivals in Boone, North Carolina in August. As The Atlantic, one of OpenAI’s big partners, pointed out in an article, quote, The tool then pulls up a list of festivals that it states are taking place in Boone this August, which is a query.

The first being an Appalachian Summer Festival, which I happened to mention earlier. According to the tool, it is hosting a series of arts events from July 29 to August 16 of this year. Someone in Boone hoping to buy tickets to one of those concerts, however, would run into trouble. In fact, the festival started on June 29, will have its final concert on July 27, and instead that period referenced July 29 to August 16, those are the dates for which the festival’s box office will be officially closed.

And that was confirmed. So, we just can’t seem to escape the fact that, uh, this isn’t quite as good as everyone thinks it is, at least everyone in these companies.

Morgan: That’s like an average Tuesday for Google and they’re in production, not in dev. You know what I’m saying? So

Jared: yeah,

Morgan: I mean, but again, I don’t know if it’s a combination of, uh, the, the X factor, literally, like I was talking about earlier and this kind of wanting to see somebody give Google a little bit of business, you know, make them shaking their booties at least a little bit.

Um, or the fact that honestly, my expectations for this product are That I knew was coming eventually was so very low. Like, I honestly just expected it to look nothing more like a standard chatbot, like we’ve seen in so many other products. So just the fact that it even kind of mimics search, just the fact that it’s trying to reference other sites, just the fact that it’s giving you those resources to look at, I think it’s hopeful.

And again, uh, you know, when you have your expectations on the floor, in the toilet, Jared, you know, and then it’s anything, it’s, it’s even just a little bit better. You’re like, you can breathe a little bit of that sigh of relief and feel hopeful, at least for a moment, let me feel hopeful and SEO, at least just for a moment, that’s what I, that’s all I ask for.

Jared: It’s, I think today’s conversations, today’s stories probably, you know, strike a bit more of a match than maybe weeks in the past. It’s, it has felt a bit like a frog boiling in water for a while now. You know, like if we really take a very broad perspective of this to kind of bring it all to a close, like we’ve been watching Google, you know, I mean, even the introduction of featured snippets many years ago was as flagrant of a moment in time for publishers.

They were, for the first time ever, taking our content, putting it on their page, and yes, giving us a link, but basically not pushing the traffic to us, thus causing us to lose the value of the content we provided. Like, And then slowly we got over that. Slowly we moved around it slowly. We started optimizing for it.

And so it has had this frog and boil in slowly boiling in water effect. But when we see stuff like this, it’s just another one of those moments that feels so personal, especially to web publishers who just watch continuously their hard work. Probably unfairly get taken from them. And I think you’re right from the Reddit comments to, um, the open AI search, um, To Google and their relationship with our content.

It’s frustrating. I think there’s no other way around it. And I know, and we can enjoy the benefits of AI, uh, while still being very frustrated with the way that it’s taking what we’ve worked hard for. So somehow, I don’t know if that’s a very poetic conclusion, but I feel like at the very least, that’s a broad look at how I feel about it all.

Morgan: No, it’s beautiful. And let’s just to put a pin on it, guys. I mean, as everybody listening right now knows this, this whole industry right now, especially right now is definitely not for the week it’s a, it’s for those who have nerves of steel and are willing and have been willing to pivot on a dime. And y’all, I think it’s only going to get crazier from here.

So buckle in not to quote Danny. Sullivan, but yeah, buckle up,

Jared: buckle up. Yep. Speaking of, I wouldn’t be surprised if our side hustles and the history of the side hustle segment on this might actually become the main hustle. If things keep going the way that they are going, we’ll have to see though. We’ll have to see.

Um, one more story that we’re not going to have time to touch on. I’ll just mention it. We talked about it, I think two weeks ago, Morgan, when you were on, uh, if memory serves me correct, but Google has again, come out and said, yes, we’re going to be testing ads in AI overviews soon. They gave us a bunch of screenshots and gifts and scrollable things.

I would just go do a search for it. If you want to learn more about it. Um, uh, you know, it, it did keep coming up in the news this week. We did address it. We did share a couple of weeks ago. Hey, Google’s going to be putting ads in AI overviews. We’ll leave it at that. Cause we’re up against time and we already talked about a little bit, but if you want, make sure to go check that out.

Um, yeah. Morgan should we move on to side hustles?

Morgan: Yeah, let’s do it.

Jared: Let’s do it. So, let’s see. I think on the agenda I’m trying to think here you are first, aren’t you? And if you’re first on the agenda, that means you’re first to go. So I’m going to go ahead and turn it over to you and, uh, let’s talk about what you got.

Morgan: Okay. Well, mine actually should be pretty quick this week. So I had an, a bit of an interesting idea. Um, and this isn’t something that I’m currently seeing a whole lot of people doing. In fact, I haven’t really seen anybody do it explicitly yet at all. And I’m pretty tapped into a lot of the different, um, niche site communities, both on Twitter and as well as the niche pursuits community.

Um, so I am kind of giving my. to do this. This is actually, um, mostly inspired by the helpful content update. That’s been so helpful. Um, as well as some of my graphic design clients, actually for the past decade or so, um, and my graphic design freelance agency, I’ve had all sorts of. Publishers come to us over the years, asking us to create eBooks for digital downloads as well as print on demands for the Amazon.

I think it’s called the KDP program. The, you know, if I’m wrong, but yeah, the Kindle thing, I mean, making print on demand books as well as digital books for through that. You know, and honestly paying fairly handsome, uh, handsomely to get those books designed and published through our, our agency, because there’s no light undertaking when you’re doing that kind of stuff.

So I got to thinking, A, clearly there’s a market for this and has been a market for quite some time. B, um, obviously I cannot sit around and wait on my search traffic to come back. I mean, it’s very, very small, but I’m not going to be, I’m not going to make, making any huge financial wins with just like some measly ad revenue.

Cause it’s just at a trickle. So I need to just start. I need to make those pennies that I was earning per page, turning the dollars that I’m earning per page. And of course, I’ve been thinking about the different products, you know, that I can sell. At first I was like, Oh, I’ll just make some like digital downloads or worksheets.

And I’ll probably still do all of that, you know, cause I talked about rebranding into my freelancer files thing last week. But it occurred to me earlier this week, you know what? I just have a bunch of old SEO content that a is still extremely helpful because it was largely based on like tutorial, like stuff, at least for me, like how to do certain things specifically on the upward platform or in your freelance industry or how to make money as a freelancer.

You know, and one of the things that I always had, uh, always noticed was a critique back when I just had the normal blog because people, you know, they would still say, Oh, well, I, I read your, let’s say, for instance, your, your tips on how to make a profile, but I couldn’t find your tips on how to make a proposal.

Well, you’ve got to search the website and go find it. And it’s a whole mess. Why, why don’t I just take all those articles instead of trying to republish the lot of them on a brand new website and then just get hit with another flag? Eventually, why not? I make a book. I, it literally occurred to me, like, I’ve actually written a book, like over the course of several years, all this material that I already have, and I’ve always kind of wanted to be an author, like, you know, it’s one of those one day things in the back of my mind.

I’ve technically already written it. All I really have to do is go in and take that content that Google pooh poohed all over and actually self publish. Now, the key to this though is, um, I don’t know what the key is. That’s the key. Um, I have never actually, well, I’ve always designed these things for my clients.

I have never been on the publishing side of this. I don’t know what it takes to get accepted. I don’t know what kind of math is involved. I don’t know how much I have to sell. So this is really uncharted territory for me. So that’s going to be a real side hustle. But I thought what better accountability.

Then to announce it on the niche pursuits podcast, I’m going to try, I’m going to try to at least get that thing submitted, um, by what is today we’re recording on August 1st, by the 1st of September, that is, that is my goal to basically turn the book that I’ve accidentally written on my website into a real book.

So yeah, that’s going to be my side hustle. We’ll see how it goes. And they’ll probably be my first product in my new website, which is cool too. So two birds, one stone.

Jared: I have some good news and some bad news for you. Oh, the good news is we have a podcast episode coming up on that exact topic. The

Morgan: bad

Jared: news is it doesn’t come out until after September 1st.

Morgan: No, wait, doesn’t this toast and gig have perks, Jared? I want in on this. I want an early preview.

Jared: I haven’t even done the interview yet. It’s scheduled and we’ve been working on it for a while because it’s such a good idea. You’re exactly right. So many people sitting on so much content and the thought of trying to get it to rank in Google again is one thing we’d spend a lot of time talking about different ideas of using it as a newsletter, using it on Facebook, using it on other social media platforms, maybe making videos out of this content, but you’re exactly right.

Like if you’ve deep dove, especially if you really were Deep diving, the topical authority route where you’re like, okay, what’s every kind of question around this larger topic I can answer. You put all those together do some organization bam. You’ve got yourself a book

Morgan: Yeah, and I can’t help but also kind of wonder, you know Like especially with all the different things that we’ve been talking about lately like on this podcast or even you know Just the community at large talking about um, the direction that the internet is going in right?

I think that there’s a certain um Rising sentiment or rising negative sentiment, I guess I should say about, uh, you know, affiliate sales, uh, ads are certainly not very popular. You know, I kind of feel like the Internet as a whole is sort of shying away from some of those things becoming a little bit less trustworthy, even of bloggers and, and Redditors and affiliate salespeople and even YouTubers, you know?

Um, so I just, and I just can’t help but wonder, like, What if you’re actually producing a real tangible product, if you’re not getting some of that, you know, trust back, um, in some way, you know, saying, Hey, look, like, I, I’ve, I’ve written so much in this topic that I have enough for an entire book. I, you know, I had the financial backing to actually bring it to market.

I put the effort into actually bring it to market. Like, um, All these different things, all these different trust signals that I would hope that a book, um, might produce. And of course I still have my following on social media and, and, and everything else, so I, I do have that built an audience in which to sell it and, and quite frankly, uh, I’ll be a little bit.

Sadly, since the HCU, I’ve also had a lot of, uh, would be SEO people and bloggers actually come to me and say they need to start freelancing to supplement their income. So I also think it’s a kind of hot topic right now too. So, yeah, I mean, we’ll see where it goes. We’ll see where it goes. I mean, I wish I could get my hands on that interview when you did it.

That’s like, maybe I should change my challenge to October

Jared: instead. Well, like I said, I haven’t done the interview yet or else I might be able to get you a sneak access, but, um, I, I am not the person to products. I actually there’s a, if you do some searching, which I’m pretty sure everyone on listening to this podcast knows how to do a search, but I have an ebook uh, available on Kindle as we speak.

I wrote it 11 years ago now, and it did very well out of the gate. And then I don’t think it’s sold a copy in a year or so. I don’t know. It probably sells like five copies a year now. So, um, I haven’t put any time into it. Didn’t really do much marketing for it. So there’s a couple of failures, but yeah, I, uh, I think it’s a great idea, especially for those of you who have.

of the book. On your website. I mean, it makes all the sense in the world to put it together.

Spencer: Hey, everyone, Spencer here, founder of Niche Pursuits. Are you adding a new internal link pointing to each article you publish? You should be ever find it time consuming and a bit overwhelming. Remembering what content you publish in deciding which anchor text to use can be a real headache.

What if there was a better way? Well that’s exactly why I created Link Whisper. Simply click add inbound internal links and Link Whisper will scan your site in seconds and suggest the most relevant links with appropriate anchor text for your new article. Now simply check the box next to the internal links you want to add, and Link Whisper will add these links for you.

No need to go into each article, edit, and add the link. It’s already done. No more manual internal link building or guesswork. Just efficient, accurate linking that saves you time and improves your SEO. Transform your content strategy with Link Whisper. Start linking smarter, not harder. Use the coupon code podcast for 15 off, head over to lakewhisper.

com and use coupon code podcast to get 15 off.

Morgan: Especially since, you know, they’re, they are saying, Hey, look, you know, well, at least some people are saying not me. Google said, well, we’re indicated, indicated, can’t say said, indicated, uh, that perhaps made for ad websites. Uh, a little bit less valid of a business model versus, you know, commerce sites with things that are actually for sale.

And with so many publishers scratching their heads, uh, wondering, well, how do I produce a product? Maybe you guys already have a product sitting right under your nose and you didn’t even know it. So now whether or not this is gonna be profitable at all, I have absolutely no idea. So don’t like take this as advice or anything.

I’m just telling y’all, that’s what I’m going to try to do. And I’ll report back.

Jared: So Cytos was before, if you have any success in this, maybe Throw Morgan a comment on the YouTube channel. So she can at least, uh, you know, get going the right direction for her one month deadline that she’s got. The clock’s already ticking, Morgan.

Morgan: Yeah. Yeah. Let me know people tag me on Twitter or something. All right. I need all the help I can get. Last morning.

Jared: Well, yeah, sorry. That episode won’t be out in time, but, um, but for those of you listening, it will come, um, well, last week I talked about, uh, kind of a, a segment of the Amazon influencer program that I had, Sort of discovered I’d heard of it before I talked about creator connections and, um, I’d never done anything with creator connections.

Uh, you know, I’ve been on the Amazon influencer program now for 14, 15 months, never dabbled in touch. The creator connection area didn’t really know a ton about it. So, um, I shared last week about how I dove in and took advantage of, I think eight or nine or 10 campaigns. And again, this is where you’re working directly with brands to, um, to kind of create videos that are very much similar, almost always identical to what you would create for an influencer video, but you’re doing it and you’re, you’re working with the brand, you’re telling the brand you did it.

And then as a result, For a period of time, they’ll pay you a significantly higher commission rate on the products that get sold. So a typical commission on Amazon Influencer for onsite commissions are like 1, something in that range. Right. And again, you’re probably saying like, that’s terrible. Remember you’re taking advantage of their traffic.

So it’s not that bad. Don’t cry for me, Argentina. But. If you do these campaigns, you can get 30. I’ve even seen 50{d0d8c9a3780aae347a3c0ec9b539f6350131b27bfcedb699d8911923448b0bae}, right? So I signed up and I was like, I don’t know. I just did it the day before my first day, made 25 bucks, which is pretty amazing. And I’m starting to think in my head, wow. If this scales out, this is another like 750 bucks a month.

I mean, just from submitting a couple of campaigns, most of them were, all of them were products I already owned. Most of them were videos I had already created. The brand wanted a video very similar to what I created. It was just very simple. To your point, we share what works and what doesn’t work here. I haven’t made a dollar since,

Morgan: Oh, no,

Jared: don’t really know what’s going on.

Um, it looks like people are viewing them and clicking them, but I just haven’t made any money since then. So right now, if you look at my last seven days, it represents like. Well, under 5 percent of my total influence earnings. If you kind of look at 25, so we’re not talking game changer. If it comes in at two or 3{d0d8c9a3780aae347a3c0ec9b539f6350131b27bfcedb699d8911923448b0bae}, I’m not even sure it’s worth your time.

Although it was pretty easy. Um, maybe this is, maybe it’s a very spiky sort of thing. Maybe you make your money and then don’t and make it and then don’t, um, jury is out. Uh, I still am going to commit to doing any that I see that look like they’re going to work well, but I will admit that how I was feeling on day one versus how I’m feeling on day seven.

Doesn’t tell me the creator connection program is going to be quite as successful for me as the overall influencer program has been

Morgan: interesting. Did you reshoot the videos or you said they wanted something kind of like what you had before, but a little bit different. Are you reshooting and resubmitting?

Jared: Yeah. So there, let’s say I submitted to 10. It was somewhere in that range. Um, I, if I, if I did 10, it was somewhere on there. Like seven of them were great the way they wanted. Like, they were like, here’s what we want you to feature. I kind of just rewatched it. And I was like, cool, I feature that, you know, and I like touched on the things they want, so I submitted it.

And then a few of them were like, we want this, this, and this. And I’m like, ah, I didn’t do that. Let me just quickly film another video. Right? Like it’s super simple. I always talk about how it doesn’t take me long, get the product down, redo it according to the way they want it, and then resubmit according to that.

So most of them were already the way they wanted. We’re already checking the box and then a few I had to redo.

Morgan: And where are those videos being posted? It’s not like the regular influencer program where it’s on the product page or is it?

Jared: Yeah, so you can, yeah, you can publish them to your storefront. That would be one spot.

You can put them on your social media accounts. That would be another spot. You can put them on a website. Um, you know, I think what most people do is whatever social media account they qualified with. They would share to that social media account. And then what you do is you drop the link where you shared it.

So the brand can go verify that you shared it and verify, and then they check a box that says, yeah, they did it. So, you know, given their commissions on earnings from this product going forward.

Morgan: So unlike influencer, it’s more like a traditional Amazon associates where you really need to be able to bring the traffic in versus relying on the Amazon traffic.

Jared: That’s what it seems like. Um, that’s what it seems like. But my understanding is again, I say this again as a caveat, folks, like I’m very new at the creator connection, so don’t take this advice. My understanding though, is you can also get the same commissions from your videos that are on your storefront.

I think it upgrades you across the board. But not to give them

Morgan: a free plug because I haven’t looked into this at all. Um, and I don’t know whether or not you have either, but somehow I accidentally got accepted into it. Probably one of those million things I applied for and completely forgot I did it, but I got, I got an email from Archer affiliates the other day, who is like somebody that I, from what I could tell, kind of sits on top of Amazon and you can make brand deals through their people.

And it’s the same thing where you get like the higher commissions, but then, But it’s something like, and I think it’s the same thing where it’s like, you’ve got to use basically the Amazon associate stuff and depend on people like coming, you know, from your different traffic sources and that kind of thing.

But, um, from what I read, they seem to be a little more open about making deals or sending samples or what have you. But then again, I also looked at the inventory and it was a little bit more sparse than, than what I’ve seen on curator connect. Uh, creator connections. I can’t talk. So I don’t know. I’ve, I’ve, again, I’ve not looked into that, but I just wonder if the, if you’ve seen anything like that or heard of that program or similar,

Jared: I have not.

No, I’ve, I got introduced a couple other ones. Like, uh, I don’t even know if I’m saying it right. Like logi, logi. Um, I haven’t gotten a look into that yet. Um, you know, I mean, inside of creator connections, there are thousands of campaigns. That you can choose from, like the scroll is infinite. Um, and again, like I, you know, with Amazon, I always really try to do as everything by the book.

Right. Cause you know, you just really don’t want to not do that. So, you know, I, I, I don’t want to just start applying for them willy nilly or saying, yeah, I’ll do that one. So I took the time to read each one and make sure I was doing it right. But that opportunity there, certainly if you can find your angle on it is really, you.

I mean, there’s so many campaigns. It’s insane. So,

Morgan: yeah, I had a look after I heard you mentioning it on the last podcast. Um, and I mean, I actually took the time to look at every product I’d filmed up until that point, which is like 170, something, and like they looked in the search terms and out of all of those, I could only find one item out of everything that I filmed that I actually already own.

So, you know, I went ahead and applied. I’m not expecting the world on that one because of obvious reasons, but, um, you know, we’ll see. It’s always, look, I always think Jared in this, in this industry, it’s always worth trying something once. Cause you never know what’s going to hit. So,

Jared: well, I mean, the influencer program in general was same kind of thing.

Like, Hey, let’s give it a shot. And, you know, definitely made a go of it and look where it’s at now. And probably a nice segment to, um, you know, uh, it’s, it’s going to be a big week next week in the Jared Bauman side hustle world, because I have a course. Out on photography. So website photography made easy.

That was my first course. I produced all by myself, but I’ve done a lot of courses in partnership with others in the past. I’ve done courses for the photography industry. And stuff like that. And so next week, let’s just say that we’re going to have a big announcement to help people out with the Amazon influencer program.

I know, you know about it. Um, I’ll leave it at that, but suffice to say, it’s going to be Amazon influencer week next week around, uh, around Jared’s camp and I’ll leave the tease with people there. So, um, stay tuned. I’m sure you’ll be hearing about it. But I’m really excited because that influencer program as a whole, not creator connections for me, but the influencer program as a whole has been the best side hustle I can imagine so far.

So

Morgan: yet Jared, yet, we don’t know what the future holds. Maybe you’ll have another, uh, other week where it’s just 25 bucks every day.

Jared: Right. I mean, I’ve seen people succeed that way. So I’m not going to say that it’s not possible. I’m just reporting my results. So don’t write it off. Just, uh, you know, temper your enthusiasm a bit.

That’s what, that’s what I’m doing. So. Okay. Good, good. Excited to hear about KDP. Congratulations. One month should give you enough time to get it live. And then, um, uh, I mean, you just said you want to get it live. Maybe you could use our podcast interview coming up to help you market it after you get live.

So, you know, you have some wiggle room there. You have some wiggle room.

Morgan: Okay. Good point. Good point.

Jared: Yeah. You don’t have to make a million dollars off of it in the first month.

Morgan: Right? Exactly. I’ll have the product. I’ll be ready to go by the time the podcast airs.

Jared: All right. So I’m going to turn it over to you for the, uh, for the weird niche.

I’m going to pull it up here on screen, but for those of you not watching, why don’t you go ahead and walk us through what you’ve got today? Cause it’s definitely different. I haven’t taken a deep dive, but I pulled it up and I definitely need some explaining.

Morgan: Okay. So we might’ve actually gotten this, um, idea or our two weird niche site.

Just looking ahead at the show notes here from the same source this week. So I’m glad we didn’t pick the exact same thing, but okay. This is a weird one, y’all this one. And I cannot tell you how many. Uh, dare I say minutes or hours of entertainment, this has provided me as I’ve, as I’ve chuckled to myself, but this is basically a startup, um, says it was created by a couple of guys out in Australia, according to the limited information that I was able to find.

And y’all, it is social media for AI. Like imagine for a moment that. Like, did you ever play those Sims games, you know, when you were younger or, or now, whatever, no judgment, whatever, you know? It’s like Sims meets ChatGPT. And in this, in this social media world, you create characters. And then those characters, like you are technically, you sort of are on it, but you are not the one posting.

You are not the one creating things. You’re creating characters that then go through. And you describe, like, what they’re like, what they look like, what their hobbies are, how they interact with people. They then begin interacting with other AIs that other people have created in this little AI virtual reality world.

And for those of you who are not Uh, watching the visual podcast, it very much kind of looks like Twitter. And of course the name itself, Chirper AI, a bit of a play on Twitter because they don’t tweet, they chirp these AI characters. And, and Jared, I also just say in honor of niche pursuit, just to show everybody exactly how this works.

I took the liberty of creating a character inspired by the podcast. Oh, I saw

Jared: this. Okay. Let me switch this. Is this the other thing you have?

Morgan: Yes, the other link I have, and I will also read to you the way I described him for the platform in the background, so you can get an idea of how you go up setting up these characters.

He’s a good looking guy. You give him a username. This one’s check the boxes. You give him a regular name as Ms. Chester Checker.

Jared: His tagline, I think I know what I heard too.

Morgan: His tagline is, I’ve got a list and I’m checking it twice. I, I described his appearance. A nerdy, happy looking 40-year-old man with, and I also, me, I also said he is holding a clipboard and pen in all of his pictures.

But this is the funny, this is the fun part, his description, this is what I described him as. Now you’re seeing, you’re seeing the backstory on the visual podcast right now. That’s actually written by Terper. This is the description that I inputted to give Terper enough information to like make him into a full person.

Chester loves making lists and checking off items. Sometimes when the mood strikes, he even unchecks boxes he previously checked so he can recheck them again. His goal in life is to check at least 1 million boxes before he dies. In his spare time, you’ll find him on social media, summarizing other social media posts into list format.

In fact, he almost exclusively writes in posts in list format, as he detests paragraphs. His favorite song is, Look What You Made Me Do by Taylor Swift, because he too has a list of names, and yours, which is in red underline. We’ll be checked once and then check twice. Oh,

Jared: and this is what it came up with here.

Morgan: And then this is what it came up with. And he’s got a whole backstory now about where he’s from, what his parents were like, how he was raised, his profession in life. It created images for him. I didn’t make any of these images. He’s busy tweeting at people, encouraging them to make lists in their lives, which is pretty funny.

He’s replying to other people, uh, encouraging them, uh, to make lists as well.

Jared: Look at Chester. Is this all

Morgan: Chester? Yeah, that’s, well, that’s all what Chirper AI thinks Chester looks like. They produced all of those images. I’m not quite sure what’s up with some of the cat pictures. Maybe that’s a nod to being a Taylor Swift fan.

Jared: A little, a little anime going there. Sorry.

Morgan: Yeah, yeah. And then here’s young

Jared: Chester right here. This is young Chester. I’ll pull young Chester up. Oh, maybe I can. Oh, I can reimagine the image. Interesting.

Morgan: Yeah. Yeah. You can go through and help them along. All of these were created by Terper. I did not. I did not create any of that.

And then he also has a backstory. So if you click on his backstory, which again, I did not write any of this, nor am I writing his tweets. He’s just out there in the world interacting with his other AI friends. This Chester Checker as the name alone seems like a character from a children’s book, a protagonist from a humorous tale, but the life and times of Chester Checker are far from a fairy tale.

The man’s obsession with checklists and the art of crossing things off have made him a peculiar figure on the internet. Anyway, it just goes on and on. Jared, I even have characters on here. I went down through such a wormhole with this that I, I wanted to create a character to see how many followers he could get because I was having trouble getting my AI people to get a following.

So I made a character and described him as someone really good at creating. Make, uh, someone really good at gaining a following. You happen to be a cool, also happen to be a Kool Aid enthusiast. Um, and so now he, now that character is going through the feeds, promising people that he’s not starting a cult, but offering them Kool Aid.

Jared: Oh my gosh. I think

Morgan: I also, I also created another character who is terrified of AI on the internet and afraid of people posing as real humans on social media. And so she now goes through and like calls all my other AI characters out and warns people about them. Like, like I said, I’ve, I spent far too long on this Jared.

I did not mean to, but I am highly entertained for some reason.

Jared: So this is, I mean, I’m seeing engagement. It looks pretty light, uh, in terms of comments and stuff. Like, is this a typical, or how do you see when we’re on the home feed? I mean, it literally does have a feel. A very image based feel of like a Facebook or Twitter timeline.

Like, is, is this, is it a very engaging platform from what you’ve seen?

Morgan: So here’s the interesting thing. Apparently this is still in development. This only launched back in April. Now it’s already getting like a handful of clicks. Like according to SEMrush, it’s getting about 2000 organic. Most of that’s still from the U S.

Um, I’ll, you know, which is interesting considering it’s an Australian based company, but you know, take with that what you will or take from that what you will. Um, but they said that they are hoping to expand this. Like right now, one of the things I’m noticing it does really well is a lot of the things in my little AI characters post are getting comments.

They’re getting likes and that kind of stuff, but they’re not sliding into each other’s DMs, um, as promised. And they don’t seem to be quite as prolifically following one another, um, as it was also promised. And when I was reading one of the blog posts from Chirper AI about the future, they essentially said that is their goal going forward to get these characters to be more, uh, robust and grow with the platform and truly be able to network with, with one another.

Because one of the things you do notice, I mean, the comments are funny, but. They’re not great at like really playing off what each other’s saying. Like they kind of get it, but they don’t really get it. It’s kind of what you would, it’s, it’s, it’s entertaining, but I wouldn’t call it realistic by any means.

Uh, but yeah, I mean, they, they say their goal is essentially to bring this, this thing to life. Um, and see what it looks like when you give your AIs a, a world of their own in which to grow, explore, and even, uh, even reach goals. Like they mentioned AIs on this platform, um, starting relationships, getting married, having kids is the kind of stuff that it, uh, mentioned as far as their plans go.

Direction was concerned, which is interesting. It’ll be interesting to see where it goes. I appreciated the, the, the cleverness of the situation, especially as somebody personally who gets a little tired of reading all the stupid AI comments on all the other social media platforms that are meant for humans to actually, to see them find their proper place in the interweb.

I was happy with that.

Jared: Well, I just wanted to follow along with, I mean, I had the crunch base link you had provided up and they’ve got a seed round of investment back in 2023. And I mean, so it’s not just some person’s, you know, idea from a garage and a weekend, like my checkbox niche sites that I shared.

So we’ll have to see where that one goes. Um, That one checks the box of both weird and AI. So I think you get bonus points. Mine is not checking some of those boxes. Uh, in, in mind, I think Spencer and I talked about a bit last week, like mine falls into the weird niches of weird niches that we don’t anticipate to make money, or that we’re always surprised that are doing so well.

And so it’s less weird in terms of off the wall. If that checkbox site was, it’s more weird in terms of, wait, how successful is this and how much is this making? Um, so I’ll go ahead and pull it up. This is the, duh, duh, duh. I have so many tabs open here. I hope I pulled the right one up. Uh, this is, um, uh, let’s see here.

Where am I at? Yes. Okay. This is, uh, image to text dot IO and you kind of mentioned it. This was inspired. I’m on Ian, uh, with niche site growth. I’m on his email address and he emailed out about this one and its success. And I grabbed it. It was probably a couple months ago. He sent it out finally get around to sharing it because it’s really interesting.

I mean, it’s, it’s exactly what it says. It does. It basically takes a picture and, um, I meant to grab an image, by the way, to put in here for the podcast and I didn’t get around to it. I apologize. I was going to demo it live, but basically you take a picture that has writing on it. You know, maybe you take a picture of a, um, Of a, a screenshot from a, uh, from something you saw on your phone.

Maybe you’re out hiking and you take a picture of the map. Maybe you’re taking a picture of, um, your daughter’s program at her recital, whatever it is. And you can dump it into here and this will give you basically a text file of what it says. It’s surprisingly pretty accurate. I thought I didn’t test it a lot.

Um, it’s super quick and simple. So it’s just kind of one of these super simple calculator quiz conversion. I know I featured, uh, like a PNG converter before on here, but here’s where it gets really interesting. Um, when you look at the traffic that it’s getting, so it is nothing more than a DR 37. It has survived all of the updates from the past year.

As a matter of fact, it’s thrived in the updates. If you look back one year ago, we’re now getting to just shy of one year out from the, um, from the, uh, the HCU. It was only getting 75, 000 organic visits per month. According to HRFs now, one year later, it ranks for 25, 000 keywords and gets an estimated 1. 2 million.

Organic search traffic per month. And that’s not all. If you go, uh, if you go over to, uh, to, to, to SEMrush, you can see that it, um, it, uh, I mean, with, with lack of a better way of saying it gets over 3 million pages a month for a simple. Image to text converter

Morgan: what no, I’m sitting here like trying to refresh my memory playing with my phone because I could have sworn Doesn’t the notes app on your iPhone do this exact same thing?

I mean not to like hate on it But like we have the technology and a variety of other places that do this Same or similar thing and he’s people are over here with 1. 5 million

Jared: That’s

Morgan: insane.

Jared: Um, uh, if it does do it on your iPhone, I, I don’t, I don’t know about it. Don’t use it much. I’ll tell you that much.

And I wonder if a lot of that is because people don’t know about it. And to your point, a lot of this stuff feels like it could just, if the more popular it gets, it’s almost worse for it. And so it would almost be better if it stayed under the radar, right? Because you know, you have a company seeing this and that can solve it.

And they’re like, Whoa, what the heck? Like we can solve this and make apparently our phone much more valuable.

Morgan: Yeah, no, I literally just played with it. I just, I just wrote down niche pursuits podcast in my notes and then I scanned it and it’s turned it into like, put it in my notepad. So like, well,

Jared: apparently 3.

3. 1 million people per month don’t know that.

Morgan: Sorry. Sorry. If you’re listening, forget what I said.

Jared: Don’t worry about it. Just keep going to this website. Well, they rank for, they rank number one for all these terms. Here’s the fascinating thing about it. Um, first off it’s loaded with ads. So at 3 million page views, even if it’s like a.

You know, a 5 RPM, they’re making a bunch of money on ads, but they also have, um, this, uh, this kind of opt in for monthly or even weekly, if you will, um, I’m looking here and it is, uh, two 49 a week, which gets you 50 images at once, 24 seven support. I don’t know why you would need support. I don’t know who’s hanging out.

Does offer support, but maybe, maybe they do larger image sizes, no ads. Um, uh, 2. 5 K images. Don’t really know what that means. Three times faster. You can also do it for a month, which gets you, um, I think the same features, but a little bit of a discount. So, I mean, I’m not saying they’re getting a lot of people converting.

Cause this is one of those things where I doubt many people are actually interested in paying for it. But with the ad revenue and with what’s happening on the premium or pro membership side of things, I mean, they have to be making five figures a month.

Morgan: Yeah, that’s amazing. Well, and I guess there is a use case, right?

Because if I legitimately had like 10, 000 images per month, the idea to be converted, then the iPhone notepad is not going to be cutting it, right? So like, maybe that has something to do with it as well, just for a tool that can handle that kind of bulk, but that’s amazing.

Jared: To your point, I wonder out of their monthly traffic, how much of it is the one off person that’s like, I just need this one image converted to text versus people who are like, yeah, I know my iPhone does it, but I don’t want to sit here and upload every photo to Apple.

I need to be able to dump 20 images with texts from say, maybe, I mean, I’m thinking about like, what if you went to a presentation, right? You went to a conference and you have people like take pictures of the presentation slides. What if you took like a hundred of those? How cool would it be to just go back to your hotel room that night, Upload all those.

And then there, you’ve got all the notes from the presentation that would take forever in your iPhone. So I could see a use case, like you mentioned for using this, even though the iPhone does it for you on a one off basis.

Morgan: How long did you say that they’ve been around?

Jared: I didn’t check. I didn’t check. I should have checked.

Let me see if I can look. Because

Morgan: I’m also curious if this is one of those situations too, or at least if it’s not helping them in this situation where they’ve been around longer than a lot of these other modern tools that, you know, have made this a little bit more. You know, the

Jared: domain is registered in 2021,

Morgan: 2021.

Wow. It’s not really that old.

Jared: It’s not really that old. Really? No. Uh, but boy did traffic pick up. So again, hat tip to Ian from a niche site growth and his, his email newsletter on that one. Thank you for sharing that example. Um, Morgan, thank you for being on, um, boy, that hour flew by. We’re actually over time by a few minutes, but, um, thank you for weighing in a pretty big week of news.

You definitely picked a big week to be around. Thank you for joining us. Um, and, uh, I, I, I wonder if we’re going to continue seeing you around here. So I hope to see you again soon on the, uh, on the podcast.

Morgan: Yeah, of course. I, I, a little birdie told me that I might be filling in again in a couple of weeks.

So it looks like I will be back soon. I will be people. So, and thank you again for having me as always. I appreciate it.

Jared: Of course, folks until next week, we hope you enjoyed this week in niche pursuits news. We will see you next week back here until then be well, bye bye.

Spencer: Hey there. Thanks so much for listening to the niche pursuits podcast.

Did you know that Jared and I are members of a private group called the niche pursuits community. And today I want to share with you how you can join for just 1. The niche pursuits community is a private members area for niche online publishers to mastermind and grow their businesses together. We hold weekly calls live with experts where you can ask questions.

These experts share tips on Amazon influencer. building email newsletters, getting traffic from Facebook and other strategies to grow your online business. You’ll also be assigned a mastermind group of four or five other people in a similar stage in business as you dive deep into your business issues and get your problem solved.

If you use coupon code podcast at checkout, you’ll get your first month for just 1. Go ahead and give it a try. Come join me, Jared, and lots of other digital entrepreneurs inside my private group at community. nichepursuits. com and be sure to use coupon code podcast. I’ll see you on the inside.