Welcome back to another episode of the Niche Pursuits News podcast, where Spencer and Jared break down recent events in the SEO, publishing, and niche site space.
It’s been a very busy week and there’s a lot going on, so sit back, get comfortable, and get ready for a packed episode!
They get things started with a report from Glen Allsopp, which takes a closer look at who’s ranking for affiliate queries at the moment.
He goes into great detail in his article on Detailed, for which he handpicked product review terms to look at. Who’s dominating organic search for these very valuable affiliate keywords?
But it’s not as straightforward as that!
Jared reveals a twist to the plot that’s affecting search results, rendering the results from the dominant ranking website full of spam.
But what is the definition of spam, exactly? And when a spokesperson for that website denied that the results were poor quality and offered an example of quality search results, what happened?
Is this an overcorrection by Google? Are they aware of what’s happening? Check out the episode to find out all the drama!
Moving along, Spencer and Jared discuss an article that seems to have gone viral about how Google is killing independent sites.
The article was published on the website Housefresh, which reviews air purifiers and was hit hard by the HCU, and looks at how large publishers are ranking for affiliate keywords with less in-depth content and without actually putting in the work to review the items.
If this trend is glaringly obvious and offers a poor experience for users, why isn’t Google doing anything about it? How did Danny Sullivan respond?
Is there a silver lining on the horizon? Jared and Spencer have a lot of thoughts on this, so check out the episode to hear more.
Moving along, but closely related, they talk about how Housefresh’s article about Google killing independent sites is, ironically, being outranked by everyone, from Search Engine Land, Twitter, and Reddit, for its own article!
Hear what they have to say about it!
And along the same lines, they share a tweet from Glen Allsopp with the same problem: not ranking for his own article. In short, the smaller guys are getting beat by the bigger guys, for no good reason.
For their last story, Spencer and Jared talk about the big deal that went down between Google and Reddit. Google has agreed to pay Reddit $60 million a year to train its AI models.
Why is this an important moment for Reddit? By how much would this increase their revenue? But what makes this situation so incredibly ironic? Jared gives a great breakdown of recent events.
When it’s time to talk about their Shiny Object Shenanigans, Spencer goes first and reveals he’s launching a premium Niche Pursuits community.
His goal is to create a community where users can connect with each other, discuss what’s happening in the industry, and learn from and bounce ideas off one another.
The group will include weekly expert calls, mastermind groups, group challenges with monetary prizes, among other elements. It will open to the public on March 4th, so check it out!
Jared talks about his Weekend Growth newsletter side hustle, which is now1 year old. He set an initial goal of getting 1000 subscribers in the first 3 months, and 1 year in he has 4600+ subscribers.
He’s earned slightly less than $40k during that period, from newsletter ads, affiliate earnings, and the services he offers. He offers some great motivational advice for listeners and talks about what has worked for him when building up this side hustle.
Spencer then shares his weird niche site, Let Me Google That, and shares a funny story about how he found the site. He gives a demo of how the site works and recommends sharing the link when someone asks a “silly” question.
Not only does the site sell merch, but Ahrefs says they’re getting 111k organic visitors per month while SimilarWeb calculates a million per month. How much might they be earning per month?
When it’s Jared’s turn, he shares Throx, the cure for the missing sock. What started out as a pitch on Shark Tank many years ago has actually grown to become a popular brand with tweens and teens making $1 million a year.
That being said, his SEO could be improved and his website is kind of sparse. Are his products expensive? Is this a gag-gift type of product? Hear what Jared has to say.
And that brings us to the end of another great episode of the Niche Pursuits News podcast. As always, we hope you’re feeling informed and inspired by today’s jam-packed episode, and we’ll see you next week for more!
transcription
Spencer: Hey everyone. Welcome back to another episode of this week in niche pursuits news. I’m excited to bring some of the SEO news that’s happening, uh, this week, along with several other topics that we have to cover, but I’ve got Jared with me, Jared, how you doing today? I’m
Jared: bracing myself buckle up because we’re in the fast lane today.
Wow. There’s a lot of news to cover.
Spencer: There is so much news to cover that about half the things actually on our prep document, we know we’re not going to cover, uh, because these like three or four items, like it’s. Just going to take that much time. Uh,
Jared: I think there’s a bunch that’s getting cut that I’m shocked because it would be the feature story another week, you
Spencer: know, I agree.
And I just read another story. Um, anyways, we won’t go into it. There’s a lot always changing in AI and things like that, that we’re not going to really get to, uh, today because there’s such core SEO news happening that I think we need to talk about it. So of course. Stay tuned after we cover the news, which we’re going to do here.
Just a second. Stay tuned for our, uh, shiny object shenanigans, things that we’re working on the side, a couple of projects we want to update you guys on. Uh, and then we’re going to bring it home with two weird niche sites. Both of them are, I would say pretty solid today. Uh, pretty solid, uh, both, both fun ones.
Uh, mine’s weird. Mine’s weird.
Jared: If you want a weird weird
Spencer: around. It is indeed weird. Mine’s fun in nature, but does shockingly well when I pulled up the traffic stats on this thing, even organic traffic for my weird niche site. Shocking because it’s like a one page site. So I’m not
Jared: surprised. This is the first time we’ve been doing this podcast for almost a year.
Now, this is the first time where we have a site. On the weird niches that I’ve actually used before. There you
Spencer: go. So it’s been around the block a little bit, but it’s time to dust it off and show it to everybody again. So, okay, let’s, uh, jump into the news because boy, oh boy, do we have a lot of news to cover?
Um, let’s start off the bat with another. In depth study that Glenn Alsop did, he has these great studies where it always seems like he’s analyzing like 10, 000 SERPs of something, and that’s exactly what this latest one is, is, uh, the discussion forums dominating 10, 000 product review reviews. And so, uh, I’ll share that here on my screen, but it’s over at detail.
com. You know, uh, you can look at the forum SERPs, the 10, 000 product review, uh, search results. And it’s a little bit of a, kind of an update, uh, or, or in a similar vein to what he’s done, uh, in the past. And, uh, He kind of talks about what’s ranking now, right? Um, and the things that are ranking now, well, we’ve got these huge media Goliaths, as he calls him.
These conglomerates, right, that are dominating the search, uh, engine results. But Reddit is the clear winner here. When we look at, uh, handpicked product review terms, 10, 000. Product revert review terms, and he gives some examples like best electric toothbrush gifts for best friends, best pregnancy pillow, uh, best portable A.
C. Etcetera. Those types of terms. Those affiliate terms. I mean, Reddit is just dominating the SERPs, the, the number one sort of, uh, results. Uh, and so he says here, across the 10, 000 search results, the discussions and forums feature was present in 77 percent of them and linked to 766 individual forums. And you can see an example of these, I’m sure people have seen these, uh, most of the time.
Reddit is showing up as one of those, uh, results. Reddit was present 7, 500 results, um, and featured 14, 000 times, meaning they showed up a couple of times within that snippet, um, and, uh, anyways, it goes on and on that Reddit is ranking at the top or. Near the top and that discussions and forums being featured for these very, uh, valuable keywords, right?
Um, and then he also shows again, deeper down here that, uh, these big media conglomerates that he’s covered in the past, right? The, the dot dash media, the red ventures, the other big companies that own all these, uh, different websites. They. Are also dominating, uh, the search. So there’s a lot here, a lot of data that you could crunch and read and go through.
But that’s, um, I think that’s the main gist of it, but Jared, anything else you wanted to point out in this particular, uh, article,
Jared: well, when the helpful content update Came out in September. We saw the massive surge in Reddit and Quora, but Reddit specifically in terms of their visibility, right? We at one point featured a graph of visibility that went off the literal screen, you know, their growth was so big.
This is. A continuation of that by pointing out that spam is dominating reddit now. You know, we used to, as SEOs kind of have to deal with, and this was kind of maybe a year ago, a conversation we’d have where we’re writing a product review and we’re like, man, so many people append the word reddit to the end of it because they don’t want to get my website’s results because it’s ranked in Google.
They don’t trust it. So they go to reddit and they get a. A different response, a more authentic response, a non Google response. And so then Google supposedly air quotes for the, those of you listening, solve that problem by just bringing all our Reddit’s results to the top of Google back in September with helpful content update.
But what Glenn’s quick to point out, and I think he mentioned this over half of the Reddit threads in product review searches. And so the entire point of people going to Reddit causing Google to rank Reddit is being completely undone and the rug is being pulled out from underneath them. That
Spencer: is exactly right.
Um, and that’s, that’s the big finding here is that it’s gotten worse and worse. The spam that is happening, uh, on Reddit is, is getting worse. Um, and there is I guess we’ll bring up this next article here. I believe this is the one that talks about it. Um, Reddit shown excessively in Google product review, search results, a study finds, and it’s referencing Glenn all SOPs numbers, right.
So kind of highlight a lot of these, uh, things that we showed up. Again, we’ll get Glenn a link. We’ll get Glenn a link. Oh, is it, does he even have one? There we go. I think
Jared: he’s got one. There it is. Okay, good. Cause last time we didn’t, we didn’t see a link for Glenn. So I’m glad, I think you and I remember
Spencer: that.
That’s right. That’s right. Um, gotta look out for Glenn. Anyways, sorry. But yeah, so, um, so yeah, it’s a good article. Is this an overcorrection, right? Is Google, uh, pushing Reddit so heavily because it gets these real responses. But then, um, and Glenn called out all the spam that’s happening. Essentially what Glenn was saying is that.
You go to Reddit and it looks like a normal Reddit thread, but really the first response or the top comment that’s been upvoted the most is clearly just a monetized link to somebody’s website, or it goes, you know, it might go through a couple hoops. Like I’ve seen examples that go to a Twitter thread.
That’s really just monetized with an affiliate link to somebody’s website, right? So it might be one or two steps, but it’s clearly controlled by an affiliate marketer. That is putting their answer. Not because it’s the best product they personally found, but because they can make money if they put this link in and they get it, you know, upvoted.
And there’s a lot of different ways to manipulate, um, those Reddit comments to get them up at the top. And Glenn clearly called that out so much so that Reddit, a Reddit spokesperson responded after they published, uh, this article search engine land, um, The spokesperson said, the examples that are shared appear to be cherry picked.
Google is sending more product review traffic because we have good and legitimate product reviews did. What is not true is that Reddit posts are getting spammed as a result of this and that we are locking thread as a way to deal with spam. Um, so the spokesperson comes out and says, no way, man, we have great product reviews.
They’re getting upvoted by the community. This is not spam. Um. And they even say the Reddit spokesperson added that Reddit launched a new spam detection method in quarter three of 2023, which helped identify 2 million spam accounts. Uh, and then, um,
Jared: Glenn responded, but they, they, Glenn responded, but then Reddit sent over an example of They were like, here, look at this, as though, as if one example could prove that, you know, Glenn’s study of 10, 000 URLs wasn’t valid.
But they sent over an example, and as it turns out, that example was littered with the exact thing that Glenn’s talking about.
Spencer: Exactly. So the example that the spokesperson sent over Was spammed and which is really concerning, uh, because clearly the spokesperson at Reddit or whoever’s at the top of Reddit doing the PR doesn’t know what spam looks like.
They’re not detecting it. They’re not catching it, right? They didn’t accidentally send a link that was spammed because, well, I think they literally sent it over thinking this is a great example. They didn’t realize. That’s what spam looks like. They don’t,
Jared: they don’t get it. I mean, again, I was trying to think about this.
Like if I, if I told, uh, like my parents, like, Oh yeah, Reddit’s being spammed. And they said, show me an example. And I showed it to them. They’d probably look at this example and say, I, what do you mean? That’s not spam that that’s like, it’s in English and it’s legible. And it’s, you know, all these.
Caricatures of what spam looks like. I think what Glenn is talking about is that in this case, it’s purposeful with the intent of making money, not with the, you know what I mean? So I think that there might be some differences in what people understand is as spamming Reddit. And I think that spokesperson kind of falls more on that other side and not getting it like you alluded to.
Spencer: Right, exactly. Yeah. Maybe it’s, maybe it’s not spam that I guess it’s well
Jared: written. It’s. You know, well,
Spencer: yeah, it’s not, it’s not, yeah, it’s not mass, but we often think of spam is like mass, like, here’s a million article spinner
Jared: days and stuff, right? Like, right. It doesn’t actually make sense. It doesn’t actually, it’s not legible.
I don’t know. I’m trying to give the person, the spokesperson, a benefit of the doubt to some degree, like, but I just, you know, they’re, they’re missing. What do they say, read the room? Like they’re missing the memo here.
Spencer: Yeah, exactly. And um, I don’t know where the paragraph is, somewhere along here, but basically the author on search engine land says, hey, I checked out the links that the Reddit spokesperson, uh, sent and Glenn’s correct that this is like.
Exactly. The example of like a spam comment, um, that they sent over. So, um, it’s, first of all, it’s just hilarious. Yeah. Interaction. Uh, right. Um, but I think this is getting the attention of Google. Um, you know, Danny Sullivan is kind of aware of a lot of this that I’m going to show here in a second. And, uh, we’re starting to get some reactions.
Um, that, that maybe some of this could eventually get tweaked and changed, right? Because the whole idea that Google’s improving their algorithm, now we’re showing Reddit more. Well, what, what they’re getting is less authoritative people now recommending products than individual bloggers again, right?
Because you’re just getting whoever can get their comment up voted the most. They make the commission and that’s all they’re doing. They’re just trying to make money. Whereas if you own a blog, yes, you’re trying to make money, but you know that you have to do a well written review. You have to provide a lot of, um, you know, supporting data.
You have to be well thought out. You have to format the article. You have to do a lot of work than just writing a one sentence spam link that you cannot vote on Reddit, right? It’s very different.
Jared: It’s very bizarre. Google built 20 years worth of. Of success on page rank, which is backed by a highly complex algorithm of ranking the best content based on a whole number of factors.
And then all of a sudden they said, Hey, you know what, let’s just throw the baby out with the bathwater here. And we’ll just go ahead and rank something that’s user generated. And we know to some degree why there’s inklings of user generated content ranking or that it could be ranking well, but. Man, I mean, throwing the baby out with the bathwater and you know, we’re less than six months after the fact and it’s already coming back to rear.
It’s very ugly head for
Spencer: them. Yeah, it definitely feels like an overcorrection. Hopefully they’re getting the memo. Uh, but we’ve got another example of that. Um, this article went what I would call semi viral. I’d, I’d love to know how many visitors this article got because this seems like it was.
Everywhere I looked within the SEO community, uh, househousefresh. com, which they’re just a product review website. They repute, uh, review a lot of air purifiers, dehumidifiers, and, uh, they were hit by the helpful content update. They were very clear on this. They wrote an article, um. Essentially about, okay, well, the title says it all, how Google is killing independent sites like ours and why you shouldn’t trust product recommendations from big media publishers ranking at the top of Google, right?
And so you’ve got, they’ve got screenshots. They did a great job here, right? Of better homes and gardens, Forbes, uh, people real simple Rolling Stone. Um, other large. Media publishers, these large brands, they’re just absolutely dominating the SERPs and Google and they go in great detail to kind of show that, Hey, um, these websites that are ranking at the top, they’re not showing any sort of independent review of these air purifiers.
They’re not showing any of their data. They say the words, Hey, we reviewed this. We had this hands on approach, but they’re not showing any evidence. Whereas house fresh does, apparently they provide all their data, the raw data, their scientific studies, you know, they test things in a lab, which is Pretty impressive, uh, for an individual publisher to do.
Um, but they gave, they gave examples of the one they dove deep on was best air purifier for pet hair, and they highlighted how better homes and gardens, popular science, Rolling Stone, that not all of these are owned by the same company, but there was at least a couple of them and the, uh, the, the photo credit.
Was the same person. So they clearly hired like a freelancer to take these, these images. Um, and maybe even the reviewer, they had somebody, you know, sort of, uh, verify their results and the name of the person was the same across multiple websites. Um, Long story short, they did a really good job showing that, hey, uh, we understand air purifiers, but these large media publishers, they don’t really, they’re saying all the right things, but at the end of the day, they’re making really bad recommendations.
And they pointed out a couple of really bad air purifiers that are being uh, recommended even one of the companies that it is. Has gone bankrupt, um, and has like terrible, you know, better business bureau reviews appears to be not a great company, but the recommending that air purifier is their number one, even though it’s a terrible performing purifier, but it pays a really high commission.
Um, and, uh, Again, I think the title says it all that Google is ranking these. It’s killing small time publishers and these big publishers are not doing a better job. They are not showing the truly helpful content that Google says that
Jared: It’s a very well written article. It reads a bit like if they were going to court, right.
To like create an argument in front of like a jury and a judge. It’s a very well thought out, very well documented, not something I’d be able to pull off. And yeah, I mean, it’s just, I mean, what, what, what about this article have we not said yet? And when we not talked about in many different angles and many different pieces, it’s, it reminds me of a story back when I was in the photography industry and, um, uh, a conference who was put on by a specific photographer who had risen to prominence.
That conference did a photo competition. That’s very common in the photography industry. You don’t have a photo competition as part of a conference. People submit their images, you get awards when you win awards, you put that on your website, you feature that you tell your clients about it, you know, it helps bolster your credibility.
Well, Photo competition was won by the guy who put on the conference. Now he wasn’t a judge. They were all independent judges, but it created a bit of an outcry and people were saying, well, how is this determined? And all the judges were like, well, he just, he had the best photo. And it was like, well, but he’s putting on the conference.
And so it kind of feels a bit like this whole, like write content for people. That people enjoy and house fresh is saying, yeah, we’re actually testing all this and these other guys aren’t and they’re relying on other factors that you have. But you’re telling us it’s not about those factors. It’s about the things that people want and Google’s kind of washing their hands of it and saying, well.
Obviously you’re not ranking because people don’t want your content and it just, it feels like that they are reusing the same message and it’s just digging them deeper. I mean, I’m, I don’t want to be over, overbroad about it. We’ll get into some of the responses from Danny on this one specifically, but time and time again, we see that big sites when not sites that do content.
Well,
Spencer: Yeah, unfortunately, that is the case, right? You get less in depth content. Um, you get all sorts of things that don’t have the same quality signals often right of a really well written article on an independent site. You know, um, you’re getting these big publishers that are that are dominating the serfs.
Um, you know, one thing I Oh, go ahead. I was just going to say one, one thing that I think about that I need to do a study on this. Maybe Glenn can do the study for me, but, um, all of these large media publishing sites, you think, oh man, these are, they must hire the best journalists that are doing all this research.
I bet that most of the content written is being written by 20 something year old freelance writers that Forbes hired or that Rolling Stone hired to write a piece, right? I’m guessing that they’re not really experts in their field. If they’re even people.
Jared: I mean, Sports Illustrated just I screenshotted something that was this week that where it says in the byline written by Elvin Labs, you know, which is, uh, you know, an AI software.
I mean, if they’re even people, you might be We should be so lucky to have a 20 year old writing an article right now.
Spencer: Yeah. So, anyways.
Jared: I feel like, um, I’m used, I think I’m just used to like seeing like Forbes rank for the best fridge. Even though, let’s be honest, they have no business ranking for the best fridge.
They never have. They’re a business. Mm mm. publication, but again, like I was looking at some of these that are listed, like, um, I think Morty Oberstein, who’s been on the podcast before, commented, like, in what world does Rolling Stone Magazine have any business right about the best fridge for 2024? None. I mean, yeah, it’s one of those things where it’s so obvious and if everyone can see it, then why the heck is it hard for Google to get rid of it?
Spencer: Well, I don’t know. Other than to say that Danny did respond, the official Google search, uh, liaison, Danny Sullivan. Uh, and why is it so hard? I don’t know. Other than, I, I take a, a little bit of comfort in knowing that, that Danny is listening. Uh, and he’s, he’s hearing the message because he, he did respond to this specific article.
Right. He responded to, uh, uh, Giselle Navarro, who wrote the article, uh, for house fresh and said, thank you. I appreciated the thoughtfulness of the post and the concerns and the detail in it, I passed it along to our search team, along with my thoughts that I’d like to see us do more to ensure we’re showing a better diversity of results that does include both small and large publishers.
Now, just that paragraph alone, that actually. Makes me think, you know what? There might be an update on the horizon. Danny has seen it. He’s passed it onto the search team that the examples that were specified in this article. And, um, we don’t know all of Danny’s thoughts other than it must involve, Hey, we need to show more small publishers.
We’re showing large publications right now. Let’s have a better diversity. I agree. So that, that’s my like silver lining of all this is that maybe there is an update on the horizon. We don’t know how long something like that will take, but, uh, they’re listening. They’ve received the message. They’ve seen the examples.
Surely they’ll do something about it. Right. Um,
Jared: This is the second or third time Danny has gone out of his way to, in the last couple of weeks to kind of make the point, Hey, EEAT is not a ranking factor. It’s uh, he went as far as to call it more of a concept. I don’t know, what’s your opinion on that?
Spencer: Yeah, we talk about EEAT because it’s a concept that aligns with how we try to rank.
Good content I I don’t know, you know, it’s
Jared: getting more and more vague, isn’t it?
Spencer: I’ll i’ll read it because I mean it is interesting and there’s a lot of commentary on this I don’t
Jared: want to wade into the debate about you know, is it or is it not a thing? Right, but but it is interesting that the way he chose to word it this time around right?
Spencer: Well, you know, when was it a week or two weeks ago? We had their updated SEO guidelines or starter guide that said is EAT. Uh, right. His business cards and EAT is not a ranking factor, right? It was there. It was the takeaway from that. Um, it’s, it’s a concept.
Jared: Um, I mean, to me, he said it, he, here’s what he said.
This is a comment I wanted. He said. Doing things for people is what our automated systems seek to reward. And I agree, maybe that’s what they’re seek to reward, but currently your automated systems reward high DR sites, no matter what kind of content they publish.
Spencer: Yep, exactly. And, um, he says, I hope we’ll be doing better in the future for these types of issues.
So, you know, again, Somebody’s listening whether that will change how soon that will change. Um, I don’t
Jared: know It’s a good reminder, you know, like man, I would feel if I was giselle like sit down to write that article It’s like is this gonna do anything because that article took a lot of work and to your point I I think it I think it was well worth the Extrenuous amount of time that they put in to publish that article.
I agree with you I think it it made the rounds and it certainly got in front of the right people and it made such a good case For what we’ve been complaining about for five months now
Spencer: Yeah, exactly. And just the last thing, I mean, Danny kind of touched on it here is that you’re not going to rank or at least their, their systems or their concept of is not set up to rank you better just because you say on your page, I tested this or I measured this or, you know, I did this using those words.
Isn’t going to make you rank any better.
Jared: It’s like the author bio thing from a couple weeks ago, right? Like, yeah, just having an author bio doesn’t mean just saying here’s an author. It doesn’t mean that that that’s going to just solve your problem, right? Like it’s about more than that, right? So it’s a good point.
Spencer: Yeah. But if you really did have a hands on experience, definitely write that and use those words because right, that kind of Uh, allows the user to trust and know and, you know, probably, um, consume your content in a way that it feels more reliable.
Jared: You know, especially there’s a great study that was released this week on just that and many more items that we’re not going to be able to get to today.
Spencer: Mm. You know, it’s probably like a whole episode. I know exactly what you’re talking about, of course. Um, but the news must go on, you know. It, it feels like we, we have to share, it’s really one more story, but two examples. Because they apply to what we just talked about. The two articles we just talked about, it’s funny and sad.
Jared: So good. It’s so, it’s so bad. It’s
Spencer: good. Yeah, exactly. So the article we just read from house fresh, Google is killing independent sites, right? That’s the title of their article. When you Google that, um, at least at the time, this tweet shows it was ranking seventh in Google overshadowed by search engine land, Reddit.
Twitter, Meta News, Hacker News, LinkedIn. They’re all ranking above HouseRush for their very own article. It’s just like, it’s meta? You know, it’s very, uh, it’s kind of like a self fulfilling prophecy. They wrote about how independent publishers just can’t rank in Google. Even that article itself when you type in its title is getting outranked by bigger websites.
And again,
Jared: it’s not that they’re outranking other articles above, right? Like sometimes we write an article for a certain term and our article just doesn’t make it. No, no. It’s these big sites commentary or republishing or resharing of the exact
Spencer: article. Exactly. It’s like copied content. Basically, um, it’s like
Jared: duplicate content at some ventures in the past.
Would we not?
Spencer: Yeah. And like, I have no problem with, uh, Google ranking those commentary, you know, but it shouldn’t rank above the original source, the actual article. If you have a big DR, why not? Well, there you go. I guess that’s what we got to be shooting for. Um, but there’s of course, one more, we got one more story, the exact same thing.
Um, Glenn Alsop says, didn’t want to rank first for my own headline anyways, right? And he shows a screenshot of, um, of this year, the discussion forums, dominating 10, 000 product reviews, his exact title for the massive study that he put, who knows how many hours into is not ranking number one in Google.
And in fact, search engine land is ranking above, uh, his article itself. So for a title for a very, yeah, very different title indeed. So, um. Kind of, kind of funny, kind of sad, but puts an exclamation point on this whole issue of independent websites, independent media publishers. The small guys are getting beat by the big guys for no good reason, for no good
Jared: reason.
And not to the advantage of the reader and the user.
Spencer: No, no, absolutely not. Oh, man. Well, that kind of ties a bow on those stories, I think. It kind of brings us full circle. Um, so, the ball’s in Google’s court. We’ll see what happens next, uh, on that. Well, they
Jared: took a step forward when it comes to some of the Junk that’s ranking high up in the syrups, which are our next story addresses.
And again, I was telling you before we recorded, we could have made this next story, the entire news episode.
Spencer: Yeah, no, absolutely. Uh, we could have, and there have been rumors of this, uh, for a few days, but it looks like it’s official. Um, this, uh, this is just a tweet by Glenn Gabe, but, uh, you can read about it all over the place that, uh, Google has inked a deal with Reddit.
To pay Reddit 60 million a year, a year to train its AI models, to train Gemini search, to train whatever AI models. So they’re taking all the content that Reddit has, millions of pages, millions of comments. They’re putting that into their large language learning model. And they’re training, you know, Gemini or what other AI tools that they have.
Uh, and here’s just a quote, Reddit on its end is seeking innovation, revenue avenues as it faces stiff competition for advertising dollars from major social media platforms like Tik TOK and Facebook. The timing is crucial as Reddit is on the verge of a public offering. Intending to sell approximately 10 percent of its shares.
This move could significantly impact its valuation. Previously pegged at about 10 billion during a 2021 funding round. Um, so a lot that you could say, say about this, of course, Hey, why not? Good move on Reddit’s part, please pay me 60 million a year.
Jared: Why not? It’s, it’s just like gravy, right? I mean, I looked up and I mean, they don’t have to do anything for us.
Don’t have to. I don’t know, just do anything, right? Again, I’m not, this isn’t my space, so I don’t want to start saying things I’m not sure, but I’m pretty confident they don’t have to do much. They just get to cash check 60 million. Uh, let’s see last year, 2023 Reddit had revenue at 804 million. So this would represent 7.
5 percent revenue increase. That’s that, that, that is substantial. When I first saw the 60 million number, I was like, ah, that is probably not that much, but you know, darn near 10 percent increase in revenue is, and probably mostly profit is, is substantial, especially when you’re going out for an IPO. So um,
Spencer: That’s significant.
So
Jared: they lost this, this might put it in perspective. They had losses last year of 90. 8 million. Wow. So this would, again, assuming mostly profit would reduce that by two thirds overnight, am I doing my back of the napkin math all right there? Mm
Spencer: hmm. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Uh, huge for an IPO. Huge for an IPO.
Absolutely. I mean, that’s, that’s a huge chunk of change. Um, 60 million a year, right? So, but, but, you know, why would Google do this? Well, it’s this huge data source, right? That huge, um, that Google can train, uh, their, AI models on, but maybe, maybe I’ll let you give the punchline here. Jared, you, you sort of said it well, right before we started the call, it, it just sort of the irony of all this, right?
The
Jared: irony is Google doing it, doing the deal with the devil. I mean, you know, it’s like, uh, Reddit. To your YouTube videos point, Google has a reddit problem. Google was losing traffic on a daily, monthly, and yearly basis to reddit. They, oddly, and again we can debate this, we have debated it in previous podcasts, they oddly then, uh, remember there was a whole, last summer there was, there was a debate about reddit, uh, de indexing, uh, their, their platform from Google.
That’s right. That’s right. Like this should not get lost in all this discussion. Here we are, six, seven months later, Google turned around, said, well, if you can’t beat them, join them. Welcome back to the SERPs. We’ll throw you everywhere because people love you instead of us.
Spencer: And we’ll pay you 60, 000, 000 a year to stay there,
Jared: right?
We’ll just pay you 60, 000, 000 and we’ll just get access to all of it.
Spencer: And what’s, uh, what’s funny about this is, of course, what we just talked about, is that more and more of the comments are, uh, being spammed. That it’s just filled with, you know, content that
Jared: They’re buying the junk that they used to have that caused them to go there in the first place.
Spencer: Exactly. More and more of Reddit is being spammed. The comments are not legit. It’s just people trying to make a buck so they make one or two comments and then pay all their buddies overseas or freelancers overseas to up to upvote all those comments. Uh, and perhaps a lot of those comments are generated by artificial intelligence, right?
And so perhaps we’ve got all this AI generated content on Reddit. That is now being used to train Google’s new AI model. What happens when you make a copy of a copy? Isn’t there some movie about that? You make a copy of a copy of a copy. It just gets worse and worse. Well, we can, we can talk
Jared: about it just from the photography standpoint.
Every time you make a copy of a JPEG, it reduces the quality. That’s why we’re always looking as photographers for the raw file. They call it the raw. File and we work off of the same original file because exactly what you talk about the image degrades to the point of being unusable pretty quickly.
Spencer: I have to believe that there’s some truth to that statement as it applies to AI models as well, right?
If you just continually copy what an AI spits out, like eventually it’s going to probably get pretty far off the beaten path. So it’s a game of telephone,
Jared: right? Like if you say something in someone’s ear and then you see what comes out 12 rounds later. Which is odd, because you’re saying one sentence to someone, one statement to someone, and then you go around the room, right, and what comes out 12 people later is vastly different.
Imagine this. With large language
Spencer: models, you know, I think I need to do another video and simply call it google still has a major reddit problem And just cover all of this And even bigger reddit problem um so Oh, man, so we’ll keep our eye on this but uh reddit and google boy making life a lot of fun for the independent publisher here um But that’s the news.
I mean, there, there is like three or four other really good stories that we could cover this week. Um, so there’s a lot going on, but we’re going to have to cut it off there because we’re already halfway done. More than halfway done. We still got to get our side hustles. We still got to get our weird niche sites in and, uh, I know people are sticking around for the weird niche sites.
We got to get to them.
Jared: Some levity after quite a dramatic, uh, week of the news. We’ve got to get a little levity going for us.
Spencer: Yeah, I agree. So, uh, first, let’s do our shiny object shenanigans, kind of give an update on some of the side projects that we have working on, uh, here. I’ll go ahead and go first. Uh, so this one is, um, a little bit different, I guess, because, uh, I, I often talk about, you know, my side projects, whether it’s my Facebook page or my faceless YouTube channel or my Amazon influencer, things that are really totally unrelated to niche pursuits dot com.
So this one is different that it does have to do with niche pursuits dot com. Um, I am excited and happy to announce that I am going to be launching a premium niche pursuits Uh, and we’ll live over at community dot niche pursuits dot com. It’s not live there yet. Uh, but I am starting to privately invite a few members, including Jared and a number of other people.
Yep. Jared made the cut. Um, and basically what we’re doing there is, uh, I’m starting a community that I hope is not only the. Best of the best kind of people that I can bring into the community. And I’ll explain that here in a second, but hopefully it’s just a place that people truly can feel. That they’re part of a community and can discuss on an ongoing basis.
A lot of these issues, um, that are happening in, in the blogging, SEO, affiliate marketing, side hustle, online business world, right? And, um, so what, what is basically happening is yes, there is going to be a community aspect there, a real time chat aspect. If you ever have any questions, you can interact with me or Jared or other people, but really the ideas.
The community as a whole kind of supports each other. Um, and part of that is that there will be small mastermind calls happening. I, I’m going to kind of sync you up with three, four, five people that are in a similar situation to you working on the same business model, or maybe have similar revenues, um, that you can get on a call and really dive into the business issues that you might have.
I found this to be. Hugely valuable in my business. I’ve, I’ve have been a part of a couple of different masterminds to help me really figure out what I need to tweak in my business to get to the next level. All right. Uh, and then another big thing is every week we are going to be doing weekly expert calls.
We’re going to be bringing in people that are an expert at Google discover. Traffic or getting Pinterest traffic or growing a Facebook page or growing a faceless YouTube channel, right? All of these sort of individual sort of strategies or business models every week. We’re going to bring somebody on, uh, and you’ll have the opportunity as a community member to do live Q and a as a community.
You can ask questions while the person’s on the call there. Um, and then there’s going to be a number of other things that are involved. Uh, one that I’m excited about will be. Ongoing challenges. Uh, so we might say, Hey, let’s all focus on getting more traffic from Pinterest, for example, and over the next two months, whoever can generate the most traffic or get the most new traffic from Pinterest.
Um, I am not only going to sort of say, Hey, you’re the winner, but I’m actually going to give a monetary prize just to keep people motivated. I feel like this is going to be a good way to, um, keep people accountable. So if you say, Hey, for the next two months, I’m going to focus on Pinterest. You put your name on that spreadsheet and you know, you got to report every month, even if you don’t win, the idea is that, Hey, I focused on something and I actually got something done because the community was motivating me, keeping me accountable, that sort of thing.
So. I could go on and on, but I’ll maybe stop it there and simply say, I’m excited about the community. It’s coming very soon. The planned launch date is March 4th. Uh, so people can be on the lookout for that. So another, what is that? 10 days? Something like that. Um, and so. People will hear more about that, but I’m going to be putting more of my time, spending more time in that community and making sure that it’s going well, because, like I said, I’ve been a part of other communities that have really helped me in my business.
Um, and growing an online business can often feel, um, lonely or you can feel secluded and. I feel like I’ve been in this industry long enough now that I can bring together a community of people that really can help each other and hopefully, uh, everybody benefits. So,
Jared: well, I know you’ve been talking about this, you know, off and on for, for a while now.
So I’m excited to see it come to fruition. It’s gonna be great. Um, although you’re, uh, you’re kind of undermining my favorite part podcast here and. Well, I would like to know before like, you know, what, what, what’s your favorite part about hosting the podcast? I’m like, well, you do listen to the podcast.
Well, yeah, yeah, I do. And I said, you know, when you’re listening to that guest and there you have that question that you want to ask them, you’re like, oh my gosh, this is amazing. If I could just ask this one question, it would help so much. I always tell them, well, I’m the host. I get to ask that. Well, now people get access to that every doggone week.
Spencer: That’s right. That’s right. And that’s, that’s the beauty of it, right? Because a podcast, you get a lot of great information, but there’s just that 10 percent more, or just that couple of questions more. It’s not personalized, right? Uh, and so that’s the idea is that you can say, hey, So and so here’s my business.
What would you do? And often, hopefully they’ll be able to look at something for a couple of minutes. Say, Oh yeah, well, I would, I would change that. Yeah. And that’s just one of the features. Exactly. It’s exciting. So March 4th, March 4th is a big launch date. Um, so people will hear about that. Check their emails, follow the podcast, wherever Monday they follow niche pursuits, uh, Monday, March 4th.
Jared: Got it. All right. Exciting. Well, I’m already in the uh, discord and uh, I, I did my introduction, my introductory post. I hope it won’t be buried by the time everybody signs up on March 4th, but uh, it’s there. They can look for
Spencer: that. I am there. Yep. We will be there. So good. Very good. All right, Jared, what do you
Jared: work out?
Um, a bit of a milestone week, I’ll tell you, uh, weekend growth, the newsletter is one year old, one year old this week, I feel like we have some congrats or, you know, when you text someone like your phone, it gives all the confetti and stuff like, yeah, you know, the fireworks line, we don’t have that here, but you know, you can imagine them.
But yeah, so we can, we can growth is, is one year old. I feel like we just got done talking about how Niche pursuits has so much experience that you’re bringing a community together. And I’m like, Hey, hey, we can grow with it’s one year. That’s a dichotomy, but still worthy of celebrating. Um, so just a quick recap.
People have heard this for a year ago for this podcast, which by the way, the news podcast, Spencer is coming up on its one year anniversary in a couple of weeks. We’re going to have to, I don’t know, do something with that. It was in early March. Yeah. Or we don’t have to do anything, but, um, basically really what made a go of it.
Be on the back of knowing that we were gonna be doing this side hustle or shiny object Segment of the podcast goal was a thousand subscribers in the first three months. Um, one year in, we are at, uh, 4,685 subscribers. Um, so it’s hard. One way of looking at it says. You know, but again, keeping it in the category of side hustle, keep it in the category of one email a week.
That’s all I have time for, et cetera. You could also really celebrate that. Didn’t do any advertising to grow that, um, you know, experimented with like a partnership or two, but mostly just organic growth. Um, and here’s the interesting thing. I went back and we do separate the, the revenue, um, that is directly attributed to the, to the newsletter.
And in last year, it’s earned just shy of 40,
Spencer: 000. That is huge. That’s impressive.
Jared: So that comes from a variety of things, a very wide variety of things, um, newsletter ads, um, affiliate earnings from the, anything that, you know, might be promoted in, uh, in a newsletter, um, and then weekend growth services. So consulting, we have website reviews.
We do, those have gotten really popular. Um, and then obviously kind of the initial push for weekend growth, which was the, the, the website photography made easy course. So those are the. Five, I think main channel, I think there’s like 95 percent of the revenue are from those five channels there.
Spencer: Yeah, it’s interesting to see, um, kind of as a, I guess a close bystander, right?
I’ve, I’m on your list, right? And I can, so I can see what you’re emailing out and we chat about it from time to time. And it has been interesting to see that you’ve tried five or six or seven different. to try and kind of monetize this list, right? You’ve, you’ve tried it all. You did sponsored ads, of course, affiliate links.
Uh, you’ve had a couple of different products. You had the helpful content update spreadsheet. That’s right. And uh, you had your, your photography course, um, and now the consultation website reviews. Uh, and so it’s, it seems like maybe you’ve, you’ve started to land on one or two that you’re going to probably.
Yeah, you know, I mean, and
Jared: that’s the thing. It’s a good reminder to like, take chances, you know, throw stuff out there. Did a big schema series last month. Um, launched as a little schema product, uh, that did well in the email, but hasn’t gotten any buzz subsequently afterwards. Um, uh, we did a whole email newsletter, um, uh, service, uh, probably nine months ago that did all right.
And the initial launch hasn’t really gotten ordered much since then gets ordered like, you know, once every couple of months, right? So. Um, but the website reviews like one a week without even talking about it. Uh, what, two a week, three weeks, sometimes do a promotion, five, 10 a week, you know, so you kind of land on what does well, but you have to throw 10 things up against the wall to see which two or three things stick unless you’re just smarter than me, you know.
Spencer: You know, I think that’s kind of been the theme of this segment, this shiny object shenanigans is that we’re just throwing a bunch of like side projects up against the wall and it may be revenue sources in your case of like, let’s just, I’ve got an audience now, like, let’s, let’s throw a bunch of things at the wall and see which one or two stick.
That’s what’s worked really well for me in my career, right? I’ve kind of meandered all over the place until I landed on kind of here where I’m at. And um, I think that’s important for people to realize as well that are out there building is that not only will it potentially take a year to get your first 5, 000 email subscribers, but even when you have those subscribers, it may take a little bit of time to figure out what’s the best way to monetize that list as well.
Jared: And it, it really, it dovetails nicely, especially if you can find a way to, this is why I always tell people like, Hey, if you can start a newsletter around your website that you own, right? Like around your, your affiliate website or wherever, like it just doubles up because I’m sure I could. I haven’t bothered.
I’ll say there isn’t any way to quantify there is, but I, I didn’t do all the detailed work for it, but the amount of impact that the weekend growth newsletter and subsequently the brand has had on two Oh one creative has been amazing. Right. And so this didn’t even that 40, 000, all the numbers I’m sharing that doesn’t take into consideration.
All the people who are on the weekend growth newsletter who end up, and we’ve seen the connection to them kind of hiring tool and creative for either. You know, a content plan and a site audit or ongoing monthly, um, uh, services in the world of digital marketing and specifically SEO. And so the crossover, when you get outside of weekend growth and look at some of the secondary benefits have also been, you know,
Spencer: really big.
Well, good. That means, uh, you probably won’t be shutting down the Weekend Growth, uh, newsletter anytime soon, so. Not anytime soon,
Jared: so, yeah, and so, and I, I know that last week I said, but I didn’t realize I was having this, this anniversary, so I prioritized the anniversary, but next week we will talk about YouTube monetization, and I’ll give you some data on how that weekend growth YouTube account is doing, because that’s one of the benefactors of this original newsletter.
Spencer: Perfect. Very good. So stay tuned for that. The little teasers, little teas. Yeah. I got to come back next week. Can’t share it all.
Jared: I’m happy though, you know, but we’re up against it with a clock here today. Anyway. So
Spencer: I was just going to say, you know, we got. 10 ish minutes. Uh, we gotta, we gotta get our two weird niche sites in.
So maybe five minutes each here. Uh, so, so we’ll, we’ll hit it right away here. So my weird niche site, um, you know, I think maybe I’d heard of this a while ago, but this came up because I was. Lamenting, complaining, whatever, having one of my, you know, rants, uh, on, uh, the comment section of one of my recent YouTube videos.
It was about the Amazon Influencer Program. Oh, I was going to poke
Jared: fun of you about that.
Spencer: So many people.
Jared: Why is it that nobody watched it?
Spencer: So many people that there was a lot of comments, like maybe a couple hundred comments. I don’t know. And it seemed like a lot of them, not most of them, but there was several comments that it was literally I had answered that specific question in the video.
Jared: No, there were people making, not just, I’ll even go further, just to your credit, there were people asking, there were a lot of people asking questions you answered in the video, but there were a lot of people just making dumb statements. That clearly hadn’t watched the video
Spencer: Right exactly. It’s like that was the first thing they did is they read the title and they wrote something dumb.
That’s so funny It’s just and so like there was an example of like in the comments. I basically said hey, I did a quick google search for you And I pasted the link to the google search You know because it was like such a simple like question like just take 10 seconds and Google that. Would you? Well, somebody responded and said, Hey, there happens to be a really great niche website for that.
And it’s let me Google that. com. Uh, so let me share it. And it’s about what it sounds like. It’s, uh, it’s. It’s great. I mean, it’s comedy gold here, right? You come here, it looks like you’re at Google. It says, let me Google that for you. Oh, but it gets better. You don’t just send somebody this link to let me Google that.
So, Jared, what’s, what’s a query? What’s something we can type into Google? What’s, it could be anything, um, that somebody might search. Why does it range
Jared: so much in Washington?
Spencer: Because it rains so much in Washington, right? So then type a question, click a button. So we’re going to click that, right? So here’s where it gets great.
So if somebody on like, on somewhere, you know, ask that question, you say, you know what? Let me, uh, you, you go here. You know, here’s this link. Oh, okay. What did I do? Let me copy that link again. Copy URL. Okay. And then if I copy this in here, it goes over to the URL. It types it out for them. You know, as you can see, animated on the screen, slowly hovers over the button and hits Google search.
It’s like, here, let me Google that for you. Um, and then I don’t know what’s going on here. If it always just doesn’t show the results, but I think we’ll get the point. You go to, let me Google that for you. And when people ask silly questions, easy to answer questions. You send them here. Um, and there’s, uh, there’s, um, let me do that.
Oh, yeah. Because when you do an actual search, it pulls up their query, their, um, their shop, right? So they’re selling hats, pens, mugs, um, all these things. And I think they’re probably doing pretty well because when I go over to Ahrefs, Uh, they’re getting quite a bit of traffic. They’re getting 111, 000 organic visitors a month, right?
Uh, coming from Google and, um, top pages. I don’t want top pages. They got like one page. What I want is organic keywords. So their number one keyword is. Let me Google that for you. Um, and a whole bunch of varieties of that, right? Um, how to Google, um, so anyways, a lot of queries related to that, you know, how, how did Google something or how to do a Google search or et cetera.
So there’s quite a bit of traffic.
Jared: If you’re the passive aggressive type, this is the site for you.
Spencer: Oh, a hundred percent. And then, um, I’ll just share similar web. They’re getting a lot more traffic than just that. You can see that monthly they’re getting nearly a million visitors a month. 960, of course I got this pop up there.
Oh, uh, 968, 000 visitors a month. So a lot of direct visitors, right? People are sending each other links. And, uh, so, um. How much money it’s making, I don’t know. They sell their merch, you know. Why don’t they have an ad
Jared: in the
Spencer: homepage? That’s what I was just thinking. If they’re getting a million views,
Jared: that ad would be served above the fold.
It would be seen by virtually everyone. Man, that’s
Spencer: a lot. At least a few thousand bucks a month right there. Maybe more. I mean,
Jared: I would have to assume. Five figures,
Spencer: right? You would think, yeah, yeah. 10 RPM, 10, 000 a month. Yeah. Something like that. So, uh, anyways, this is kind of a fun, weird niche site. Try it out.
Uh, send it to your, you know, frenemies that you have out there.
Jared: I see at the bottom that they’re keeping with the times. And so if, if you are, uh, if you’ve moved on from Google and you just hang out with chat GPT all day, and so do your friends, you can send them this. It looks like the same, I haven’t tested it, but it looks like the same thing with chat GPT.
Spencer: Yep, it is. Uh, here, here’s the site. Let me GPT for you, or let me GPT. com. So, uh, good, good stuff.
Jared: I have used this like a long time ago, like 10 years ago. I remember it and I had fun with it for a little while and then I lost the URL and I haven’t seen it since.
Spencer: Here you go. We’re going to bring it back.
Jared: All right, Jared, bring it home for us. Mine’s not quite as fun, but it certainly checks the quirky box, or the weird box. Um, mine is throx. com, which sounds weird, and uh, careful there, it’s not, uh, it’s a weird looking site, too. Mm hmm. Yeah, you’re probably a little nervous. I see
Spencer: a lot of legs and socks. A lot of
Jared: legs.
A lot of leg going on here. This is the cure. Throx is the cure for the missing sock. All right. And um, I, I, I’m a little hard pressed to call it a cure. What this person has devised is that when you buy socks from throx. com, you get three instead of two. So that when you lose one, you now have two.
Spencer: That, brilliant!
Jared: Um, brilliant, yeah, brilliance aside, we’ll get into the brilliance here in a little bit. I actually dug a little deep into this because I was so, uh, not blown away. This is not the right word, but whatever you want to say. It was, it was very perplexing to me. Now, uh, this The site was originally, not the site, the brand was originally pitched on season one of Shark Tank.
Spencer: I saw you listed there. And um, I almost wonder if I remember this. Here’s, here it is on Shark Tank. I do remember this guy. I remember that guy’s face. I think he was a character
Jared: man. They have on crocs. com on the about page. They have his, they have his segment. So I watched it. Man, he’s a character. He looks like a, like a circus guy.
Like someone you find at the fair, you know. Pitching uh, you know, pitching some weird knife to you.
Spencer: Little snake oil,
Jared: you know, um, who do you think do you think it may funded his deal?
Spencer: Uh, I think uh, mr Wonderful funded his deal.
Jared: Mr. Wonderful laughed at him said it was a a niche. Uh, what’d he say? It was uh, A gimmick, you know, like a little a tchotchke. Um, no one funded his deal He wanted he wanted fifty thousand dollars for twenty five percent of throx. He was only making thirty eight thousand dollars at the time.
So um Now, fast forward a decade later, the guy has collaborated with various artists, um, he’s launched an eco friendly line, and he’s become pretty popular with the teen and pre teen category. The, the folks who like to mix and match their fashion and their socks, right? Oh.
Spencer: Swap with a friend.
Jared: Right?
Exactly. Swap with a friend. So you get a bunch of socks, you can start swapping. So, supposedly, I read on SharkTankBlog. com that he is making a million dollars a year now. Really? Really.
Spencer: Really. Yes. Wow.
Jared: That’s what that, uh, link that you had pulled up there said at the bottom is that he is now doing a million dollars a year.
No deal from shark
Spencer: tank.
Still going strong at a million dollars a year.
Jared: Now, I, if he’s doing a million dollars, he should carve a little bit out to invest in his SEO because he is a dr 34. Probably just from the links that he’s gotten from shark tank and subsequently affiliated, um, you know, mentions, but he ranks for 49 keywords and he’s only getting about 400 monthly visits from organic traffic.
And they’re almost all his brand name. So it’s not exactly doing well when it comes to SEO, but he must be getting business elsewhere. Uh, many would say the teen or preteen market isn’t really using Google these days anyways. So maybe he’s hitting it big on TikTok or
Spencer: something. Yeah, it’s interesting because it doesn’t even seem like there’s that many socks on his site.
I agree. I mean, it’s like a 10, 12, uh, that’s all I’m seeing.
Jared: I read some of the comments somewhere. I think on that blog post I had surfaced and a couple of people were like, well, interesting idea. I went to order a pair of, Oh, I mean a three, a three of socks and they’re more expensive than just buying two packs of my favorite pair of socks.
Yeah. So I went and bought. Two pairs of my favorite pair of socks. And now I have four socks for less than I would have spent on this gimmicky three pack.
Spencer: Yeah. 23 bucks a pair, at least the pair, you know, that I’m looking at. Yeah.
Jared: So that’s a lot. It’s definitely feels like more of the gimmick gift than it does the practical gift or the practical purchase.
I should
Spencer: say. I’ve bought some pretty nice socks. I mean like, cause I’ve run marathons. So if you, you want to. Buy really good running socks, uh, so you don’t get blisters and stuff. I spent nowhere near 23 on a pair of, you know, really nice running socks. So
Jared: he’s doing a million dollars a year. Spencer. Can you believe that?
Yeah. I mean,
Spencer: well, I could, it’s, it’s got that gag gift feel of just like, Hey, I bought this. You laughed at Christmas. We’re all happy. Right. So
Jared: Barbara had the same thing. She’s like, I’d like to buy a few pairs for Christmas to give out as gifts. And they were like, do you want to invest? And she’s like, no,
Spencer: Yeah, I know I just want to make somebody laugh and then don’t ever expect him to wear the socks, you know type thing So good find good good find So yeah, that’s a good one.
It’s weird. Definitely weird checks the weird box. I’ll say that much X the weird box. So Well, very good Thank you everybody for sticking around We’re up against the time here. So we’ll wrap it up. Uh, like I said, there is so much more news that we could have covered, uh, and we will cover more news next week.
So be sure to stick around for our next episode. Um, I’m sure there’ll be new news by that week, by next week as well. So we’ll, we’ll touch on that. Uh, thank you everybody so much for listening. Really appreciate your time.
Jared: Have a great weekend, everyone.