Google Lied! What the Google Search Leak REALLY Tells SEOs

Welcome back, everyone, to another episode of the Niche Pursuits News Podcast, where Spencer and Jared offer their interpretation of the most recent events in the SEO, content creation, and online marketing space.

It’s been a big week with a massive leak coming out of Google, so get ready for a jam-packed episode where Spencer and Jared break it all down.

They kick things off by giving a bit of the backstory behind the leak and the scope of the leak before diving into the details of the leak.

They discuss how the API docs reveal many lies Google has been telling, from domain authority to the use of clicks for rankings to the sandbox. What do Spencer and Jared say about the lack of transparency at Google?  

Why was this a moment of redemption for long-time SEO and content guru Rand Fishkin? And does this leak ultimately change the way we approach SEO? 

Watch the Full Episode

That being said, what strategy does Spencer think could be useful for ranking going forward? And what do they think about Google’s spokespeople?

If you want to hear their thoughts on Twiddlers, small personal sites, baby panda demotion, and site radius, and also catch Spencer’s advice to Google, check out the full episode.

Moving along, Spencer talks about an experiment he’s working on: a site where the traffic comes from Facebook and Reddit. 

With 50k followers on his Facebook page and 11k visitors in a single day from Reddit, his site got 55k pageviews in the last month. He’s currently with Ezoic but his goal is to get into Mediavine or Raptive, start earning $1k per month, and build on that.

When it’s Jared’s turn, he talks about his Amazon Influencer side hustle and how he has had success creating videos about the products he uses when he stays at Airbnbs. Then he shares a fantastic hack for making those videos.

Moving onto some weird niche sites, Spencer shares Search Craigslist, a search engine for Craigslist. He shows how it works and shares a funny story about his own personal experience with this kind of site. This site gets over 100k visitors a month, a mix of direct and Search traffic. 

Are there any other sites you could create a search engine for or make other websites easier to navigate? Why does Jared call this idea brilliant?

Jared then reveals his site, Tree.fm, which lets you enjoy the sounds of random forests and stunning photography. This DR50 site doesn’t rank for a lot of content, obviously, but they do have a clever monetization strategy.

Beyond that, Jared’s feeling inspired and has a few ideas for similar sites. Listen to the episode to hear him brainstorm!

And that brings us to the end of another episode of the Niche Pursuits News Podcast. Feel free to leave comments below with your thoughts on the Google leak and anything you saw in the documents that you feel is worth discussing. Let’s keep the conversation going!

See you all next Friday for another episode!

Transcription

Spencer: Hey everyone. Welcome back to another episode of this week in niche pursuits news. And this is a huge episode because thousands of Google search documents have leaked. And a lot of these API documents, as they’re called, sort of reveal a lot about the Google search algorithm and how SEO works, I would call it unprecedented.

More information has been leaked than ever before. And so we have a lot of insight. into how search works and how Google is programmed. Although not directly, these are supporting documents with a lot of notes about the algorithm. It provides a ton of clues, like I said, more than we’ve ever had before.

And so that really is the main story that we’re going to jump into. We’ve got a response from official, you know, Google spokesperson talking about this leak. Google has confirmed that these supporting search documents are valid. This is an actual leak. Um, and so we’re going to dig into it. We’re going to dig into what does this mean for publishers?

SEO? And a big one is what does this tell us about the history of Google? And the lies, the things that they’ve said they don’t look at that they actually do look at. Okay. And so we’re gonna jump into each of those items, things that they’re using to rank websites that at least they have supporting documents.

Their their algorithm is sort of specified in a way that All of these things. And so that’s where we’re going to spend the bulk of our time here today. Uh, but toward the end, we are going to, Jared and I are going to jump in and talk about our own side projects that we have going on. We’re going to talk about a weird, a couple of weird niche sites.

Uh, keep it a little bit more fun and lighthearted towards the end, but we’re going to start with the heavy stuff. So having said that Jared. Welcome to the show. How you doing this week? 

Jared: Oh boy. The WikiLeaks, the Edward Snowden of the SEO industry. Here we go. I’m well, and I’m glad I’m back home to do this one because you’re right.

This is going to be a big podcast. I don’t know how we’re going to fit it all in our usual time. 

Spencer: Right, exactly. There’s a lot to cover, um, a ton to cover. Um, so. I will just give a shout out to Mike King of iPollRank. com and Rand Fishkin of SparkToro. com. Um, a lot of people know Rand Fishkin has been in the SEO world for a long time, but actually kind of left the day to day sort of SEO world, if you will, many years ago.

Uh, but somebody. Uh, and we have his name now. I don’t have it pulled up in front of me, uh, at the moment. Um, yeah, 

Jared: if you want, 

Spencer: yeah, he’s, he’s the one that actually leaked, um, sort of these documents and he gave it to 

Jared: me. 

Spencer: I heard a Zimi. 

Jared: Yeah. I hope I’m doing that correctly. 

Spencer: Yeah. Um, he’s somebody that’s been in the SEO industry.

And apparently there was, I won’t go into all the details, but apparently there was obviously some sort of mistake. They saved these API documentation on a public repository that anybody could access, uh, instead of privately. So Google themselves makes mistakes that run by employees. And while they were up publicly.

Um, somebody was able to copy all those and now it’s essentially all public information, even though they’ve tried to make it private, uh, since that point. Um, so, um, but what these are, again, are supporting documents to their algorithm, essentially like a big GitHub repository, right? GitHub is a place where.

You know, you put all the code to a search algorithm or any other sort of software, um, product, and then there can be a lot of supporting documents that explain. Okay, here’s what this code means. Here’s what this part of the code means. Yada, yada, yada, yada. And because Google search is so big. There’s like thousands of supporting documents.

So we’re talking about, I think it was 14, 000 supporting documents. So this is not a small leak. So to, to sort of 

Jared: technical documents, um, and I, yeah, 14, 000. What was that? No, that one was something. Yeah, these are huge. 

Spencer: Yeah. 14, 000 attributes or something like that. Yeah, exactly. Um, so, so, so this is huge.

This is more than like, you can just read over a weekend, right? Like just to read through all of it and then let alone sort of interpret what all of this means. Um, so, so Mike, he stayed up for like 48 hours over the weekend. Um, and others digging into what all of this means, because it, it’s partially like in code.

It just says, okay, there’s like a reference for. It’s call it page rank, right? And then page rank does this. And it just, it doesn’t actually like, um, give the code itself. It’s again, just notes about the code. And so there’s a lot to cover. We’re going to, it’s going to be, you know, sort of, um, Some of its surface level, but we’re going to try and draw a lot of conclusions for what this means for the SEO industry and what this means for small publishers in particular.

People that maybe have been hit by the helpful content update or other algorithm updates or people that have been listening to Google throughout the years. And, um, maybe we can shed some light on, you know, were they actually being accurate? So having said all that again, I’m just sharing the screen of, um, my king from I pulled rank, uh, dot com secrets from the algorithm.

Google search internal engineering documentation has leaked, and I would recommend that you read this entire article. It is quite lengthy. Um, but there’s a few things that I just want to pull out, uh, on top. I think it sort of just makes sense to hit, hit them hard. Right? Let’s, let’s hit Google hard. The, you know, as he says, the API docs reveal some notable Google.

And so let’s just touch on those, uh, because throughout the years, many Google spokespeople have said, no, we don’t have anything like domain authority or no, we don’t have anything, you know, about X, Y, Z, uh, these documents. Make it very clear that they do have something like domain authority and other things that we’re going to hit on a few of those.

So for many, you know, years they said, no, we don’t use anything like a domain authority. You know, Moz has a domain authority. Uh, Ahrefs has a domain rating, but internally we don’t use anything like that. The authority of your domain doesn’t matter. Well, turns out it actually does matter, right? It’s not called domain authority, uh, but in the documents it has something called site authority, right?

And so we can see that they do indeed use something called site authority, uh, that we know definitely. Plays into the search algorithm, uh, overall, um, another thing that they said is we don’t use clicks for rankings, right? But, uh, along the way, we’ve covered it in the DOJ antitrust trial. There’s been documents that have come out and indeed showed that they do use clicks, uh, for rankings and user data, uh, for rankings.

And, um, all throughout these leaked documents, it shows evidence of them using their nav boost system of using, you know, sort of, uh, click data to help rank and boost, uh, their algorithm. Right. And throughout the years, they’ve said things like dwell time, click through rate, uh, and other things. Are mostly made up crap, right?

Um, 

Jared: and more than that on this one in particular, there’s so much Duchess of lies, but in this case, documented. Evidential proof where Google and Google employees are just flat out shaming, uh, ran fish skin in particular about this one. This one has been ran baby, you know, kind of brainchild for a long time.

Well, before anybody was, I think really onto this, Rand’s been promoting that clicks have a measurable impact on rankings. Well, before we learned what we learned from the DOJ antitrust, this one’s a bit of a moot point, but this one also is more flagrant because yes, Google’s denied so many of these things, i.

e. lies. This one, they’ve gone into like public shaming, which is, which is embarrassing for them. It’s, it’s more embarrassing than just coverup. This is just a flat out, uh, immaturity. 

Spencer: And, you know, again, I’ll just reference people over to spark Toro. com and read Rand Fishkin’s, uh, response, you know, long story short, he’s, he’s kind of over it, you know, like he’s, he’s over sort of SEO and being super involved in the SEO industry for, you know, five, six, seven years, whatever it is, uh, at this point, but.

This is a big enough leak that he came back and he wrote this and sort of responded a little bit to what you just referenced that, Hey, he has been sort of making a lot of case studies and claims showing that click data and other things have been used for a long time. And so this is sort of like his moment of like redemption in a way of like, I told you guys, I’ve been telling you this for years, even though Google has been saying otherwise for years, this sort of.

Verifies what I’ve been saying a little I I agree with you that I I think it’s very relevant important that we at least point that out um Okay, uh, keep going keep going The documents themselves. Why is 

Jared: the disgust spencer? Yeah, I mean 

Spencer: So this is just a screenshot of people can see this just to give you an idea of the type of things that were leaked.

Like it’s, it’s, um, it just gives a little bit of information, right? But we know that they rely on things like bad clicks, good clicks, last longest clicks, unsquashed clicks, um, unsquashed impressions, right? We don’t. Know what all of these means, but we know a little bit, right? They give some notes, um, but we know enough to know that they definitely are using clicks and click data in their, um, search algorithm, right?

So, uh, the other one that is kind of funny is, uh, there is no sandbox, right? John Mueller has literally said in somebody’s questions, Hey, usually how long does it take to, uh, relieve? From the Google sandbox for a new website, right? We’ve all thought for years that you have a brand new website. Sometimes it takes three months, six months before you get out of like this sandbox of Google.

And it’s always been sort of Laura or legend. Google’s denied it. John Mueller, there is no sandbox. But literally within their search documentation, um, it, uh, it has something called an attribute called host age that is used specifically to quote to sandbox, fresh spam in serving time. It’s just funny that not only do they not have something kind of called sandbox, they actually refer to it as the sandbox and then they denied it.

It’s just. It’s pretty blatant in my opinion. 

Jared: Um, it’s it’s hard to add much commentary to it You know It really is like I think this might be just a good time to step in and say with all these things What’s so funny is I got asked yesterday and spencer i’m sure this has come up for you in a conversation at some point like Hey, do these leaks, we’ll get into, you know, the algorithm versus what these leaks are just a little bit to touch on it, but do these leaks change anything about the way you do SEO?

And my answer is not really, because most of this stuff we all knew. And if you’re good at, you know, this space, like you’ve learned that not always really take everything. Google says at face value, not to say everything they say is lies, but you don’t always believe it blindly. So the data from all the testing so far has proven all these things wrong.

Now we just have kind of documentation of it. So if you’re sitting there going like, well, I always knew the sandbox hat was a thing because I can’t ever get my site to get any clicks in the first three to six months. And, uh, yes, you’re, you’re, this is more of a validation for many things. You might already know that it is some groundbreaking revelation.

The groundbreaking revelation is that it’s documented and now we get to see it. 

Spencer: I generally agree with you that it’s not going to change significantly how we structure an article or, you know, what we do for purposes. Um, you know, other than, hey, we do know that quality content is important in terms of the longer people stick around the more they click to your website and don’t click back.

Like, All of that data actually matters to Google. Uh, the one sort of thing that I will say that may or may not change anything, but, uh, certainly as one area where you could try to get a little bit more aggressive, uh, is sending is, is certainly sending more traffic right to your website through, uh, other Other means, right?

Whether it’s like, if you have a Facebook page, um, and you can send a bunch of traffic to an article that might have the potential to rank in Google for something like all of that click data, and if you get a bunch of users over there, uh, and they kind of stick around, right? Like that’s all really, really great data.

So you actually driving traffic to your articles that can help, right? And now that’s something we know for sure. I mean, it’s always sort of been rumored. Um, but that, that’s maybe just one thing I would. That’s a good point. 

Jared: Consider that’s a good point. Uh, I think that perhaps that expands on, on that, what you just said kind of expands on it, that like you had, you can have more assurances about going forward with some of the ideas that you might have thought played a role, but now have more assurance that they play a role.

Spencer: Yeah, exactly. And, you know, I, I won’t name names, you know, somebody that you and I both know that we both really respect a lot, that his, his sort of use this, um, sort of strategy to drive traffic. From other places. And I just tell you what his. S very seo friendly website is one of the fastest scaling websites i’ve maybe ever seen And I know behind the scenes not only was he publishing a lot of seo content But he was driving a ton of traffic from other sources 

Jared: correct.

Spencer: Uh, and That sort of supports all of what I’m seeing here. So correct. 

Jared: Yeah, if it’s elsewhere Eventually you can almost force trigger popularity through the algorithm of google, 

Spencer: right? And that’s a lot easier said than done right like I wish I could snap my fingers It’s not a couple 

Jared: clicks from uh from reddit like you’re about to talk about later on the podcast, huh?

Spencer: That’s right. Hey Anytime you tie in Reddit with SEO, we, you know that Google loves it. So, and don’t forget to mention 

Jared: the UGC stuff that came out in this. Yes, so that is 

Spencer: right. 

Jared: So let’s go 

Spencer: through a couple of more of these, these lies. Um, Google, uh, also said we don’t use anything from Chrome for ranking.

Again, a lot of this kind of came through the, um, DOJ trial, right? Um, they actually are using chrome and I don’t remember what the attribute was. Oh, here it is. Um, chrome in total, you know, site level chrome views. So we know that their documentation, they are using chrome data. Um, I don’t know if any of this gets Google into even more legal hot water.

Heck 

Jared: yeah. 

Spencer: That’s not for me. I’m not an attorney, right? 

Jared: But. Hot water. I don’t know if it was that it was actually like, uh, could be, you know, convicted upon, but it can’t, it can’t make the water cooler for them. I guess. Let me just put it that way. It’s it’s gotta only increase the temperature around the water that they’re stuck in.

Right. Adds, adds fuel to the fire. Right. Exactly what it does. I don’t know, but it can’t make it can’t make their life easier. 

Spencer: It’s not going to get any attorneys off their back. 

Jared: Correct. The DOJ case, we’ve got to throw the whole thing out now. 

Spencer: Right. Uh, exactly. So, um, okay. Google spokespeople are well meaning, but can we trust them?

Uh, this. This is uh, just an interesting, you know, sort of, sort of side note. What’s your take on this? 

Jared: Um, you know, you, you, you kind of know Danny from history. Uh, you know, you guys, I don’t expect you guys are like text buddies or anything like that. But like, these are people that are respected for what they do.

And these are people that now have screenshots everywhere with their face in the mud. And you know, what do you think about maybe Mike’s comment, which is Google spokespeople are well meaning, but can we trust them? 

Spencer: Yeah, you know, what is the phrase? Um sort of the Manchurian candidate, right? It almost feels like I wonder If Danny Sullivan and others are put into this position that they’re the liaison, but they really don’t know the inner workings of Google, right?

They might know a little bit more and they have meetings every once in a while with some people from the SEO team, but have they ever seen any of these? Documents, probably not, is my guess. I don’t know. It’s all, it’s all conjecture. But that that’s one theory that they’re more just kind of a public face and they really don’t know the inner workings of Google.

And so they’ve done their best to be truthful. I’m giving them the benefit of the doubt here that at least somebody like Danny, I don’t know about John Mueller. Um, He seems anyway, so I won’t say what he seems like, but, uh, uh, so it’s possible that they truly just have never known, um, all the answers to SEO.

And they’ve just answered to the best of their own abilities, or there is the darker side where they truly are just lying to us and trying to cover things up. 

Jared: If you read Danny’s kind of diatribes over the last, call it six to nine months, I will echo that it feels increasingly like, increasingly like he really doesn’t know much about what’s actually happening.

He knows what he’s being told and he knows his job, which is to pass along feedback and share information that’s been given to him. That’s what it feels like, right? If you read his tweets. It does. That’s what it feels like. I’m passing this along guys. Look, here’s proof. I’m passing it along. It doesn’t feel like it’s like, Hey guys, I’m the authoritative voice here.

And so that does feel very, that’s a very fair statement. I think to make about, about Danny and the other ones, um, I wouldn’t say their commentary echoes that, but, um, you know, uh, certainly with Danny, I, I think that we can at least safely

Spencer: conjecture about that. You know, what does this do though? The relationship going forward between SEOs and. Um, Google spokespeople, like, what does this do to the relationship? Like, I don’t, I think maybe it was Barry Schwartz actually had a Twitter poll of like, will you believe anything that Google spokespeople say in the future?

And it was like 90 something percent was like, no, I, I clicked the no button. I’m not necessarily. You know not necessarily because either way if they’re lying to me bold face Or they just don’t know the information like either way. I just I Always i’m gonna take what they say with a grain of salt going forward 

Jared: and unfortunately, you’re being nice I don’t think anyone’s gonna I mean a grain of salt would be complementary at this point, you know, like you’d be Uh, if like as a, as the owner of a business, you’d be fiduciary irresponsible if you went back to your board, went back to your shareholders and said, we are doing this because Google said to do it this way.

When there’s a mountain of evidence. That would suggest you shouldn’t do that. Right. So it would actually be unwise to follow their advice after this mountain of evidence, 

Spencer: man, this is like, gotta be one of the worst situations possible for the Google search team, the, the, the liaison team, right? Because they know there’s not going to be any trust.

And so as web publishers, like who do we go to? Um, like in my brain immediately goes to the fact that, well, we need to actually Be listening to people that are out testing and doing and sharing their results. Right. I don’t want to name names and say, go follow them or listen to what they say, but you got to be really careful because there’s like great people, all, you know, Mike King and, and Rand Fishkin, right?

Like these, these are well established people. Um, Lily Ray, right? The people that are in the weeds doing tests, sharing broad data appear to be honest. Um, but then you get like blackout forum, right? On the other end where that’s like maybe spammers that are doing things. And it’s like, you always gotta be careful who you listen to.

But like, I would, after this certainly put a lot more weight into actual SEOs doing the work, getting their feet, you know, or getting their hands dirty. Instead of just somebody at Google. 

Jared: It goes full circle back to our conversation last week when we kind of dissected the interview with the Google CEO.

And one of the points that Google CEO discussed that we talked about was how they, At this point are not going to probably have AI overview information in terms of clicks and that sort of stuff in Google search console. And they kind of alluded to the fact that we don’t want to give too much information away because it could be then spammed or used adversely against us.

The, um, the algorithm, right? And we talked about that last week and kind of pickled at Google’s in, in terms of providing transparency, but then knowing that they have situations they have to deal with when they’re transparent and that’s a reality, right? We understand that, but unfortunately they are just getting caught.

Week in, week out with the negative effects of not being transparent. And, um, you know, it, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s a difficult situation to be in, but it hasn’t been stewarded well. And this is another week where they’re now caught in it where the negatives of not being transparent are probably, probably, uh, I would say, you know, worse than what would have happened on the other side, I guess.

Spencer: Yeah, no, absolutely. It’s just like negative PR week after negative PR week for Google. Um, another sort of fun term now is twiddlers. Ooh, yeah. Google has my 

Jared: favorite SEO words to use like 

Spencer: canonicalization. Oh, somebody get the domain who owns twiddlers. com. Um, hurry, go, go buy that somebody. Um, but, uh, they’ve got these.

What are called twiddlers in the documentation that are like, um, uh, tweaks, right? Like that sort of boost or demote certain things. Um, and do they have some specific examples? I mean, they’ve got NavBoost, QualityBoost, RealtimeBoost, WebImageBoost, right? Um, that sort of based on different things, right, will tweak how your site’s ranking up or down.

Um, and so there are several twiddlers that they refer to throughout the documentation. Uh, and some of those, um, like, I think, um, I think this is called a twiddler, um, is like the exact match domain was like, maybe, I don’t know if that was specifically a twiddler, uh, but like back in the day, they added something to their algorithm to demote exact match domain so that if you had that.

Um, keyword in your domain, uh, you actually would not rank as high. That was sort of like a, a twiddler, if you will. I was trying to think of an example, but 

Jared: I have a good example for, um, uh, a topic we need to address, maybe I’ll transition it now and say, Oh my goodness. As it relates to the audience that listens to the niche pursuits podcast.

One of the big things that ended up in here related to twiddlers, but separate from it is this concept of small personal site. 

Spencer: Yes. Yes. 

Jared: Did you see this in there and can we talk about this? 

Spencer: Uh, here we go. I just wanted to get down to the section. Yes. Google may be torching small sites on purpose. So, uh, within the documentation, and this is really interesting because I have never heard of this or thought of this before, but they actually have a tag here or an attribute here for small.

Um, and it just says score of small personal site promotion, go slash promoting personal blogs. We don’t know exactly what it means, but it’s clearly defined as a small personal site. Um, and he mentions, right, considering the backlash and the small businesses that have been torched by the helpful content update, it’s a wonder that they use this feature.

Um, It’s a wonder that they use this feature to do something about it. Right. And so we don’t, we don’t really know exactly how this impacts sites, but it does almost feel like there is something specifically in the algorithm that targets small personal sites, right? Sites that are maybe single author or maybe, you know, are not clearly, um, a news organization that appear to be just a personal blog, which I have a lot of thoughts about this.

Um, It maybe is getting a tweak in the algorithm and being demoted, right? Like it’s clearly being categorized as such. And, um, elsewhere in the documentation, it appeared that maybe there be, there may be different positions, right? Where if there’s a certain number of small personal sites, right. You only allow slots for two, right.

Um, or three or whatever it may be. So in that effect, you may be getting demoted, right? Because you have a. A small personal site. Um, what are your thoughts, Jared? What do you have to say about this? 

Jared: Yeah, we don’t know how it’s being used. We don’t know if it’s being used. We know it’s in there. Yeah, it is fun to break it down a bit, you know, cause like Google chose these words, small and personal, small, how do we define small, but it certainly is different than big.

We’ve talked on the podcast at length about how big sites keep winning. And it’s not just our opinions. It’s documented in almost every algorithm update for the last couple of years, how big sites keep getting bigger in terms of their traffic. So interesting, small loses. Update over update. We’ve noticed this and then here it is in this documentation personal.

Now personal isn’t a term I think we’ve ever used before, but boy, does it accurately fit the types of sites that have gotten rocked by HCU sites that. Don’t have a business platform on it. We’ve talked to a throw e comm, you had an e comm, your local business, you seem to escape. I can vouch for this, my agency and the clients that we work on.

Um, you know, if you’re, if you’re just an affiliate, if you’re just an ad revenue side, if all these things we’ve kind of looked at feel very like a personal site or what you accurately kind of said earlier as blog, so. Um, again, it’s one of those things where if it walks like a duck and it quacks like a duck, I don’t know, it feels so connected to the HCU.

And then tying this back to your comment on Twiddler, once they’ve kind of categorized sites as small personal sites, you could then in theory, from my understanding of it and correct me if I’m wrong, anyone, cause I only have a day or two on this, but you could then use a Twiddler that would either demo or boost.

Sites with these tags on them, right? And so that would be where that might come into play from our understanding through the documentation. 

Spencer: Yeah. And, um, tied closely to this is something called baby panda. Um, and it’s in the documentation, it’s called baby panda demotion. Right. Um, and there’s a V two, a new baby panda demotion anyways.

Um, so it, it, it appears. And they, this is also a twiddler, right? So it’s almost as though, and I don’t know if these work together, right? Like maybe you’re categorized as a small personal site and if yes, apply baby panda, yes or no, right? Depending on certain things. So it’s almost like, Hey, you fit into this category of small personal site.

And if you do, then you have the potential to get demoted with this baby panda. Uh, and of course, panda came out in like 2011. Um, I remember when it came out, it was devastating, um, to a lot of people. Uh, and it primarily targeted. Content quality, thin content, you know, um, you know, poor, poor quality, right?

Spun content. Yeah. Spun or copy content. Exactly. Was, was hit pretty hard. And so what that means is up for interpretation, right? But it appears that. Maybe this baby panda, this new panda demotion is tied with the helpful content update, at least, you know, Mike King is kind of making this, uh, connection here and, um, it, Could potentially make sense because of the types of sites that we’ve seen get hit.

Right. It’s like the individual bloggers, uh, the people I’ll just do my final rant here. I’ve, I’ve done this like almost every week, but it’s like, goodness, if Google wants to get over these bad PR weeks, would you just promote some small mom and pop shops? Like the people that are actual creators, the stories you can get behind and root for.

Right. It’s like, You want the, the mom blog, you want the, you know, the, the guy that travels to 50 countries on his own and documents it like the, the one man shop, like this is what America roots for, or the world for that matter, right? It’s like, you want the small guy to win, um, instead of, you know. All these big sites, the Forbes, the Reddits, the Coras, the major corporations that are doing really well in Google, and it, it feels like, I mean, Google is picking on the little guy instead of, like, actually promoting the individual voices, and now we have documentation that appears to support this rant that I keep going on, right, is that it?

All these little sites got hit in the helpful content update, right? They’ve got this baby panda demotion happening. We’ve got this small personal site tag that is a real thing. Um, it’s like, come on, Google, if you want to improve your, your image and Improve your results for that matter, get some original creators and rank their websites.

Like that’s the kind of content that we want to be reading. So Spencer, I only disagree with you 

Jared: on one thing 

Spencer: there. 

Jared: All right. You no longer can refer to them as the little guy. They shall now be referred to as a small personal guy. 

Spencer: That’s right. The small personal guy. Google’s out to get the small 

Jared: personal guy.

For real. Uh, I need a joke, actually. It’s, I mean, I guess you can’t say that for certain, but I mean, that’s what they’re calling them. Let’s put it that way. It’s 

Spencer: sad. And you know, I, you and I, we, we, you know, we try to smile, you know, we have a good time here on the podcast, but I will just say like, even this week, I’ve gotten a couple of emails from people that.

It’s heartbreaking to hear their stories, right? These are small creators that have done really well full time for years that their traffic has gone to essentially nothing. And, um, it’s because of things like we’re seeing in this documentation, um, of Google. And I mean, it hurts me to see that. Um, all right.

I, there’s a lot more that we could go through. I think there was one other thing, um, that, that you had mentioned, Jared, that you kind of found super interesting. So. 

Jared: There’s a lot of good stuff in there. There’s stuff, there’s stuff about page quality. Um, that’s worth looking at. Um, there’s, there’s, uh, a couple of other things in terms of indexing.

Uh, we talked about host stage, there’s navigational experience stuff in there. Uh, there’s spam penalties. We’re not going to get to the UGC stuff today. It was not minor, but I wouldn’t say a prominent part of it, but go look at the UGC stuff. Something I thought was really cool to see is site radius. Yeah.

In essence, a lot of what I kind of, um, uh, in many ways wrote about in my search engine land article, I didn’t write about site radius to be clear, but, um, it was those, it was some of the concepts that were, that were, that were in this is this concept of site radius is, um, this idea of how, um, Uh, how closely tied your content is as it goes across your entire website.

Uh, what I wrote down is it indicates how much of the content of individual pages deviates from the site’s primary topic. A smaller radius means the site is tightly focused while a larger radius indicates a broader range of topics. I mean, I don’t want to overstep and I don’t want to like draw too many conclusions because we don’t know how this is actually being rolled out in the algorithm, but I mean, if you want to talk about topical authority.

You want to talk about strain from your topical authority. You want to talk about what that looks like. Here’s some language that we can start to actually use now to at least phrase it in a way Google thinks about it. Right? So topical authority is a big topic. It’s a big buzzword. It’s a big phrase that gets debated a lot, and we haven’t talked about it in a little while, but Hey, that’s in there too.

So definitely, you know, do some more digging on site radius if you have your thoughts and you want to know more about what they think about that. 

Spencer: And it’s a fascinating topic because I’ve always sort of, um, talked about, you know, having very tight focused niche websites, right? Like that’s kind of been my whole theory when I started is like, okay, if I can create one website on one subject or one core subject, it should in theory do better in Google because you become this authority in Google.

And so I, You know, going all the way back to 2011 when I quit my job, that’s sort of been my thing, right? I didn’t call it site radius or whatever, but you know, when I think niche sites in my mind, that’s what I’m thinking about is like, let’s only talk about backyard games and that’s it, right? Or whatever it is.

Jared: And they have more in there. They have site radius, they have site focus score, they have site embeddings, they have page, a lot that ties together. And again, I’ll just kind of leave it this broad thing. Like it’s so weird to see documentation that would seem to support this idea of having a tight site radius, having a tight topical focus.

Then we have this personal, small personal site. Uh, uh, uh, I’m using the word tag. It’s not a tag. It’s, you know, attribute would be a better way to describe it. 

Yeah. 

Jared: Um, and it’s so weird to watch the niche site. Community get yo yoed around inside of this document. You know, it’s like, Hey, we, if you’re not going to be a big site, stay on, stay on topic.

We got stuff in here for you. Oh, but you’re not a big site. So we got stuff to, to kind of demote you. And it’s just, it is a yo yo experience to, to, to be in this space. And it feels yo yo ish when you kind of look at this, whether it’s right or wrong, we think it’s wrong, obviously, but, um, it’s, it’s certainly yo yos a lot on terms of what they want to reward when you’re in that space.

Like we talk about a lot. 

Spencer: Yeah, it’s absolutely crazy because it’s kind of like, all right, you guys have figured out that having a site around a tight focus a tight site radius is the right thing to do to do well in Google. Well, oh, because you figured that out, we’re gonna have a site demotion because you’re a personal site.

And not some major corporation. It’s just, um, it doesn’t make a lot of logical sense in my opinion. 

Jared: When you get in the world of machine learning and releasing updates that are unexplainable to some degree, like you can kind of start to see like, Oh, well, maybe that’s because there’s enough conflict in the hour.

And again, I’m not going to get into it. Cause that’s a whole podcast for itself, but 

Spencer: yeah. You start to 

Jared: see the complexities here. 

Spencer: Absolutely. So again, there is so much, um, in all we’re kind, all these documents. Ping 

Jared: ponging all over the, all over the map here today, trying to at 14,000 attributes, 2,500, uh, pages.

Lots to try to summarize in 30 minutes, but hey, I know not bad, you bad. Worked a couple ransom. 

Spencer: I, I even worked a couple of rants in maybe the last thing, right? Because, um, the Google did respond, um, to this, you know, um, one is that they did confirm that these are real, these documents are real. Um, so it’s, you know, an act accurate, you know, assessment of kind of what we’ve been talking about, but here’s the quote.

And I’ll leave it to you. A Google spokesperson sent this. That’s just funny because we literally five minutes ago, we’re talking about whether or not we should listen to Google spokespeople. Um, but we’ll read this quote anyways. It says we would caution against making inaccurate assumptions about search.

Based on out of context, outdated or incomplete information. We’ve shared extensive information about how search works and the types of factors that our systems way while also working to protect the integrity of our results from manipulation. So there you go. That is, uh, their response. Um, you know. Do it, do what you will with that quote.

Um, so. That’s all I have to say. I mean, I get it. Yeah, it doesn’t help much. Yeah, yeah, not a lot of help, so. Alright, well, we’ll probably be referencing this for, who knows, years. SEOs may be talking about this. Right. 

Jared: Yeah, uh, what do you think about the theory, Spencer, to close it out and we’ll move on, that they, that they actually purposely allowed this to go out so they could cover up all their other PR mistakes that have bigger implications for their, uh, stock price, like the disastrous AI overviews rollout?

Spencer: Hmm, 

Jared: I haven’t heard that theory, but 

Spencer: I 

Jared: find it far fetched. We’ve got to work one conspiracy theory into this, uh, podcast. Yeah, 

Spencer: why not, you know? Maybe there’s, uh. Sundar’s pulling the strings behind the scenes, leak this, and it’s all wrong. You know, leak these 14, 000 documents that are all wrong. See, 

Jared: you know, he’s got you looking at the right hand while he’s moving the left hand.

I don’t know. No, I don’t buy it. But I have heard that on multiple occasions. 

Spencer: I don’t buy it. I don’t buy it. So. That’s a big, uh, big news story, uh, for sure. Um, but we are going to kind of wrap it up with a little bit more lighthearted here in terms of, uh, you know, I’ll, I’ll just jump in and I’ll share, uh, one side project that I’ve been working on.

I’ve been talking about the last few weeks is I do have a, uh, niche site. That’s been more of an experiment site because of all the craziness in Google. I tried to build a site that. Doesn’t require any traffic from Google. I’d still love them to send me traffic, but, uh, I’m really just focusing on two things, Facebook and Reddit right now.

And, um, I’ve kind of shared what I’ve been doing, you know, over the last months and Facebook, you know, I’ve got something like 50, 000 page followers. And so we post. Three, four or five times a day on our Facebook page with a couple of those being a link to an article on our actual website. So a few of them might be just engagement things, trying to keep the Facebook page, uh, engaged and then twice a day, essentially, uh, during the weekday, we’ll actually post an article.

Hopefully that’s interesting. Gets engagement, sends a lot of traffic. I make money. With display ads, you know, that’s, that’s the business model for right now. Um, but recently just added Reddit to that and have started to see some, some nice gains. Some of my articles have been doing well on Reddit. In fact, one day, um, got like 11, 000 visitors in a single day from Reddit.

And I just released a whole video on that on the YouTube channel. So people want to watch that. It’s on the niche pursuits, uh, the main YouTube channel. But I just thought it would be interesting because I hit a little benchmark here of over 50, 000 page views for the month. There it is. So in the last 30 days, I’m sitting at 55, 000 page views.

Right. Um, and you can see these spikes, most of these, um, I don’t know if most, but three or four of them are a Reddit, right? Like this, this one here, this one here, and then this 11, 001 and this day after was, was pretty much all Reddit. And then this latest one on the 26th, um, just a couple of days ago is a combination, like I got a couple of thousand from Reddit.

I got a couple of thousand from Facebook, right? Like in the same day, they each sent two or 3000. Visitors are more fortunate. It looks like I had about 8000 visitors that day. Um, and so they’re starting to work in tandem a little bit, and it’s not always the same stories that take off on Facebook. That take off on Reddit.

Sometimes they’re different for whatever reason. The audience just responds a little bit different. Uh, they get traction in different places. And so at least looks like I I’m starting to hit on a strategy where I can at least get a few articles to hit. And if I can keep it above 50, 000 page views in a month, I should be able to get approved for Mediavine.

Um, hopefully pretty soon because right now I’m just on Ezoic. Like, honestly, I log into Ezoic maybe once a month just to see, but like the RPMs are so low there. It’s, uh, it’s almost embarrassing to, to even share. Right. Like, um, I think my big day, like I made like 50 or something, you know, this, this big spike and it’s just like, I haven’t really optimized anything.

I just kind of turned it on. I’m really have just been waiting so I can finally get on Mediavine or Raptive or some, you know, main ad network and, and, um, the RPM should, should double. Right? Maybe even more than that. Now you applied for Mediavine 

Jared: Journey. Can you I wonder if this is a strategy, if there This isn’t for the record, but I’m just, I’m joking when I say this, but I wonder if the strategy is Mediavine’s like, yeah, apply for Journey when you’re at 10, 000 and we’ll watch and see which sites actually continue growing.

And then we’ll just let you in when you hit 50 anyways. Maybe. Because you’ve hit 50 in what, a month and a half since you applied at the 10, 000 traffic mark, right? 

Spencer: Yeah, 

Jared: yeah, pretty 

Spencer: much. Yeah, it’s been, yeah, probably close to a month and a half. I mean, that’s a trajectory. That is a trajectory. Yeah. And it’s, you know, and again, it’s, it’s spiky.

Like I, I have had a 50, 000 a page view month a few months ago where I had like two articles, I think take off on just Facebook, but it does feel like now I’m getting a little bit more consistent, right? Like once or twice a week. Now I’m starting to have articles that are doing better. And so I’m really hopeful that this will be sustainable, uh, going forward and, and throughout the summer.

So that’s what I’m doing. And, you know, um, The only thing I’ll just say sort of my plans is that I think posting frequency, we could be posting a little bit more frequently, uh, in both places. And so if we, you know, call it double the frequency, uh, per day that we’re posting, like we might be able to double the traffic.

So, uh, I am going to start trying to post a little bit more frequently, get a process in place to make that happen. And of course, uh, yeah, I’ll share the results, you know, in a few weeks or whenever that is. 

Jared: Well, 50, 000, you know, views at a moderate, but totally reasonable RPM on a media vine of like 20.

That’s a thousand dollar website right there. Yeah. Thousand dollar per month. I mean, that’s a, that’s a milestone. So many people look to reach and you’ve done that in a few short months with non Google traffic. Yeah. 

Spencer: So, so there you go. And, and that would be the goal, right? Is like, if I can just get it to like a thousand or 1, 500 a month, like suddenly that becomes like enough to be self sustaining where I can be posting, I can hire out, you know, and somebody else just doing everything.

And hopefully it just becomes a growing engine and more of a flywheel at that point where it’s paying for itself and. Just growing. So, 

Jared: yeah, it’s a great point. You get it to something like that thousand dollar month mark. You can hire someone, whether it’s part time full time, depending on where you’re going to look and what skill sets you need and all that.

But you can start to actually block out money to outsource, to get help. And then it creates a flywheel effect because now you have someone who can, can do more. 

Spencer: Yeah, exactly. So, so that’s my update. Um, how about you? What’s, uh, happening with your side projects 

Jared: here? Yeah, well, hey, I’m dipping back into the Amazon Influencer Program discussion today.

Okay, nice. You might have noticed, we didn’t address it. We just kind of flew right into it. Actually A little bit of technical difficulties last week, but last week I recorded you’ll probably notice I was not if you’re on YouTube. I was not in my usual spot. Um, uh, I was waiting for someone to comment on the painting behind me.

If you really want to go back and look at that. It was a very I remember that. I didn’t bring it up. You didn’t bring it up. Probably smart. You don’t want to get those words in the video and then get the video, you know, hot water, you know, speaking of hot water. So anyway, we’ll leave that where it’s at, but I was at um, like a mastermind meetup.

Um, uh, and so I was in an Airbnb. Now I’ve talked about this before. My best selling Amazon influencer product during the Q4 sales season last year was. Something I filmed at a cabin or an Airbnb on our two Oh one creative company retreat earlier that year, Airbnbs or rentals give you an opportunity to go to someone else’s house and use someone else’s Amazon products and get access to a whole new reprop repository of stuff to make videos about now, a lot of it.

You’re not going to know how to use it. And so certainly some people might feel comfortable making a video on it, but I don’t really want to just make a video about something I don’t have any clue about, but you’d be using a lot of this stuff while you’re there. You’re there for, I think it was there for three or four days.

I mean, I used much of the stuff that’s there. Now here’s the challenge that I’ve always run into. It’s hard to find time when you’re at an Airbnb to make these videos. You’re there with family. You’re there for work. If in my case, I was there. For a work event, but I’m trying to keep up with the agency in the spare time I have while I’m doing the mastermind stuff.

It’s just a very busy time. You’re on a family vacation. You don’t really want to tell the family, Hey, hold on. I got, I gotta, I gotta get a couple hours to make an Amazon influencer videos. So what I was up against it on the last day, I just thought I’d share this, this interesting strategy. I was up against it the last day.

I was checking out that day. Um, it was last Friday and I’m like, Oh my gosh, there’s some amazing stuff I’ve been using here. It’s like a 500 coffee, a espresso machine. Um, there’s like, you know, uh, there was a 180 mirror, you know, there’s like some really cool stuff that I was using that like this would make good Amazon influencer videos, but I just was not going to have the time.

So here’s what I did. In a haste, I just recorded myself, for example, using the espresso machine in the final morning. I just recorded while I was making, I didn’t do voiceover. I didn’t do any audio. I didn’t take the time to think about it. I was just like, I’m just going to record a bunch of stuff of me using it.

And then I just left it in my phone. I went and recorded the mirror just super quick, couple minutes, different angles, all that moved on. I just ran through the Airbnb and recorded a bunch of what we would call in the industry B roll. And I got it. So it took me like 10 minutes to record, you know, whatever, five of these things.

Um, I think I probably did probably about 15 minutes worth of video. If you look at the timestamps and then I came home and now, yes, this took more time, but I recorded audio. An organized script. And I did cut three or four of those B roll videos together to make about six or seven Amazon influencer videos.

Nice. And so I uploaded, I think it was seven. I should know he’s either six or seven Amazon influencer videos. They took a lot more time, right? Each one probably took 20 minutes to make instead of my usual two to five minutes to make. It’s interesting because. I think that if I look back on it, if one of those catches, like my last one did, it’s going to totally be worth it.

And there are some really nice products in there. These aren’t just, you know, your 10 tchotchkes. There were some really nice products and I was pretty focused on. I think that’s interesting, especially for people who perhaps have a hard time making videos and talking in the moment. Um, I wouldn’t want to make a thousand videos that way, but that is a good way to get off the ground and get started on making influencer videos.

And maybe then after your first 25, your first 50, now you’re more comfortable and then you can move into just talking while you’re recording them. It gave me the chance to upload seven videos about some awesome products that I wouldn’t have had time to otherwise. 

Spencer: Yeah, I like that strategy a lot. Um, you know, for a variety of reasons, but it might be a good way for people that aren’t quite as comfortable on camera to be able to just record, sit down, type it out a script, and then do the voiceover, like you said.

And even if you’re just getting started, I mean, you figure if you do 50 videos in that way, yeah, maybe it takes a little bit longer, but at that point, hopefully you’re making, I don’t know, a couple hundred dollars a month. At least 

Jared: you get the momentum going and then, you know, the momentum creates more impetus for you to kind of get better at it.

And I mean, practice makes perfect, uh, per se. So you just get better and better and you just keep going. But, um, anyways, influencers going very well. It’s almost the end of May. I’m going to report next week on the numbers. We’ll talk about influencer numbers next week on the podcast. And then the following week I’ll circle back on my newsletter, which is doing very well, by the way.

But you know, I can only, there’s so much I can talk about this week. And we had, we burned all of our time on, uh, on Google Wiki leaks here. So, um, I’ll leave it at that cool strategy for people who are struggling maybe with making videos. People who are thinking about traveling to some Airbnbs this summer.

Cool strategy to use. We’ll talk numbers next week. And then, then we’ll get a newsletter again because it’s going very well. 

Spencer: Awesome. That’s good. So yeah, stick around for that. And you know, we’re kind of getting down here to the wire. So these might have to be a couple of short, uh, weird niche sites. We’ll try to do, you know, three, four minutes per site here.

So I’ll just jump right into it. Uh, so, uh, the weird niche site that I have is. Search craigslist. org. And it’s exactly as it sounds like it’s essentially a search engine for Craigslist, right? So, um, if we search for, I don’t even know why this popped into my head, but if we search for bowling balls, uh, is there any bowling balls, uh, it looks like an ad at the top.

I don’t think that’s. 

Jared: Yeah, I get the same thing. I think it’s an ad. There you go. 

Spencer: You, you’ve got a whole, the fold is all ads, but then here you go. You get, you could get a bunch of bowling balls. Um, you know, that, that sort of gives some results. It doesn’t even look like it lets you search by location, which is kind of the whole point of Craigslist.

But, uh, so there’s that. And then I noticed I will again, just moving quickly. I noticed that they are a friend of Craig’s cars, all Craigslist cars. So if you click on this link down here, this takes you to another website. Where it’s craigscars. net. And so clearly they probably have seen that a lot of people are searching, you know, for cars.

Right. I’m not really looking at anything. Um, but, uh, it’ll pull back again. It’s got all the ads on the top and then 

Jared: it looked good in a Chrysler 200 series. 

Spencer: I, yeah, I could see myself cruising around downtown, uh, in that, why not? Um, but just small, uh, shout out to my own history. Uh, I saw this and I was like, I’ve got to share this.

But back in the day, I mean, we are talking probably 2009, 2000, maybe 10. 

Yeah. 

Spencer: I had a niche website, Craigslist cars. Dot net maybe, uh, or something. It was Craigslist cars, something, right. And it did really well for a while. It was one of my sites that was, you know, it was like 50 bucks a day or something, all from Google AdSense.

I was ranking on the first page of Google, you know, and, uh, anyways, that’s just a fun story from, from my history. I used to have all these. Small niche websites that got hit by like the Panda update, which deservedly so, right? Um, back in the day, it was like a one page website, you know, basically tell you, Hey, if you want to buy a Craigslist car, here’s a link to Craigslist, you know, type thing.

Um, anyway, so, so that’s just fun for my own personal history. But, uh, if we look at the traffic, um, this is, uh, the search. So if I go to search craigslist. org, the total traffic is a little over a hundred thousand, uh, visitors a month. It’s 125, 000 last month, about 109, 000, uh, this month. And, uh, I don’t have the AHS pulled up.

I don’t think, but it was minimal. It’s not ranking for a lot of things in Google. It’s. A lot of it is, um, well, I guess apparently it does say at least according to similar web, that a lot of it is coming from search, but it’s a mix of direct and, um, search traffic. So there you have it. Just kind of an interesting, you know, are there any other businesses you could create like a mini search engine for, or a way to make other websites easier to navigate?

Jared: I mean, I’m not looking, I haven’t looked at it in doubt. I just seen it for the first time, but I mean, is it basically just sitting on top of Craigslist search function? Like, is it API pull? I mean, this is the simplest thing I’ve ever seen, right? Yeah, that’s kind of, I mean, that’s what it looks like. I mean, what a brilliant idea.

You just throw a ton of ads on and API out the search results and, um, you know, kind of your second website, Craig’s. What was it? Craig’s cars, Craig’s, I mean, Craig’s cars. That’s basically just taking an isolated part of Craigslist and bringing a better user experience to it. I mean, brilliant. 

Spencer: Yeah, no, kind of brilliant.

Um, yeah, they’re probably not raking in the money, but if they really are getting a hundred thousand visitors a month, right, they might be making 1500, 2000 a month off a simple little, uh, sort of search function. I don’t know what that UI who beautiful UI that they have. The, you never know. They they’re one up in Craigslist.

That’s true. That’s what they’re doing. That’s actually a fair point. They made it blue instead of red and gray or whatever. Anyways. Um, so, so that’s all, all I got. Maybe we’ll all end it there and I’ll let you take a couple minutes for yours. All right. My, 

Jared: uh, just hitting it hard because of time. My, uh. Was actually given to me last week by Tony Hill, friend of the podcast.

He was one of the people I was, um, I was working with last week and he had this one. I love it. I actually really liked this. I’ve used this niche site, this weird niche site several times this week. It is tree. fm like what the heck is tree. fm. So this is a repository, a database of. Sound bites from nature.

And so you can put this on as background music. You can listen to a random forest as they say. And so, um, it’s a bit glitchy. I found a lot of the sounds didn’t load, but basically you just, you know, click that button and listen to a random forest and you don’t have to actually press play on it, but it’ll take you to some thing that someone has uploaded from like a forest in Poland or a forest in Germany or What is this one?

Um, Estonia. There you go. 

Spencer: That’s a nice sound. 

Jared: Isn’t that pretty, right? It’s very pretty. I have put this on several times as background music because I’m a nature lover. So this is, um, I find it, many of them to be quite peaceful. You got wind blowing through the trees in some, you got birds in others, you got, You know, leaves rustling.

It’s, um, you know, it’s in the world. I know background music is incredibly popular on YouTube and this has kind of isolated it to specifically from force. 

Spencer: This is pretty cool. I mean, just click next. You don’t know where it’s going to pop up. We’re in Fiji now. 

Jared: Yeah, we’re in Fiji. Uh, and they got a beautiful photo by the way, I don’t know.

They’re pulling their photos, but all the photos are just gorgeous. They’re not these, you know, uh, knockoffs. Um, a couple, a couple of details about it. It, it is a DR 50. So, you know, plenty of people have enjoyed it. They plenty of people have linked to it. Unfortunately, It doesn’t take long to use a website to realize that there’s no way it’s going to rank for much because there’s it’s like the thinnest content known to man.

Uh, it’s only ranks about a hundred keywords. Um, now interestingly though, if you go to their about page, Spencer, Um, they do have this line that says get your brand in front of 12, 000 to 100, 000 nature loving visitors per month. Ah. See, there you go. Right there. All those stats 

Spencer: there. 

Jared: Right. 

Spencer: So 

Jared: that might tell us a bit about the traffic.

I’d say that, um, the traffic looks a lot like your chart from Reddit and Facebook. Traffic you shared earlier looks pretty up and down if it ranges from 12 to a hundred thousand a month. . 

Spencer: Yeah. Um, but, uh, I don’t know if SimilarWeb is a hundred percent accurate, but I did pull it up on SimilarWeb and it shows that, uh, up to 250 

Jared: Yeah.

Spencer: Uh, thousand visitors. So maybe it’s grown a little since they created their, about. Page. 

Jared: Yeah. Well, that would be amazing because, um, I mean, I just, so they don’t have ads on it. I checked on mobile. I checked on desktop. All they have is a donate button. A donate button is on every screen. It’s small and in the upper left.

Uh, visible desktop, visible on mobile, and all it takes you to is just buy, you know, the whole buy me a coffee thing, which is like a dollar, 3 and 5. I mean, you’ve got to imagine time on site is pretty high per visitor. You to press play and you’re going to sit there and you’re going to listen to it and you got to imagine they do okay with, with a programmatic ads.

Spencer: Yeah, 

Jared: you would think so. Um, there’s no reason why they can’t pull a YouTube. You have to listen to a five second ad before you can listen to the audio. There’s no reason why you can’t have ads on the page. Sitting over top of some of that, that those nature pictures, just to play button, I would think you could generate a decent amount of money with that sort of traffic and the fact that it makes a lot of sense that time on page is probably pretty high.

Spencer: So when you listen to this, do you just pull it up in the background while you’re working? Is that kind of. Ambient noise. That’s exactly right. Cool. That’s cool. I like it. I may actually use this. 

Jared: That’s what I mean Sometimes, you know, I like to mix up my music. I listen to classical music Some days I’ll listen to a little bit more kind of house style a bit more peppy Um, but man i’ve turned this on a couple times and I was really enjoying the different sounds of nature seriously 

Spencer: So tree dot fm, that’s a good find.

I like it Um, yeah, kind of a unique, uh, niche site. I don’t know. I, I love talking about these because it always just spurred like new ideas of like, well, create a website. I’m thinking sounds. 

Jared: I’m thinking of beach. fm. There you go. You know, it’s working here. You could do beach dot. You could do New York city.

fm, right? Like city life. You could do like, I mean, Sorry, I’m just giving away all my good ideas now there’s 50 

Spencer: different 

Jared: Yeah. Careful, you know, , all sorts of sounds. Yeah. I mean, yeah, some people like the urban setting, there’s some people like, you know, so, geez, I’m, I’m a forest guy, so this is awesome. But there you, there 

Spencer: you go.

All right. Well you start pumping out those sites and let us know how they go. Jared, awesome. Off 50 live before this podcast goes live tomorrow. That’s right. Very good. Well, um. We certainly covered the news. Um, there’s a big leak, you know, Google documents that, uh, we covered. So we are like, I’m a hundred percent sure we’re going to be referencing these, these documents in this leak, um, for months and years to come.

So. 

Jared: I have one thing I just want to say, which is of any week, uh, if you’re listening and you’re watching on YouTube, you know, this is a great week to add a comment, you know, like I’m not trying to get comments for the sake of comments. Like this is a, it kind of feels like a community week, you know, a week where we as a community can kind of respond and discuss and all that.

So we’d love to hear your comments and the things we talked about or anything you saw that we didn’t discuss, or just overall feelings about, you know, kind of what this reveals to you or changes for you. 

Spencer: Yeah, great point. We’d love to respond to your comments. And if you find anything new that we didn’t talk about, we’d love to, you know, read about that in the comments as well.

So thank you so much, everybody for listening. Uh, appreciate your time and hope you guys have a great week. Have a great weekend. We’ll see you next week.