Sports Illustrated Caught Publishing AI Content, Amazon Influencer Update, and 2 Weird Niche Sites

Welcome back everyone! It’s Friday, which means it’s time for another episode of the Niche Pursuits Podcast. 

A lot happened this week so there’s a lot to talk about. Join Spencer and Jared as they discuss and analyze the latest happenings in the SEO, AI, and content creation space.

The first news item they cover is the Google Core Update and the fact that it has finally finished rolling out. 

How long did it last in the end? What kind of movement did Jared and Spencer see? Was there a reversal from the HCU? Are there any updates currently underway or coming in the future? Tune in and find out!

Then Spencer and Jared shift the conversation to a slightly more controversial topic: Sports Illustrated allegedly published a ton of content written by AI-generated writers. 

When the articles were deemed as potentially AI-generated, the team at Futurism pressed Sports Illustrated, which then deleted all of the content and issued a response.

What did they say? What do Spencer and Jared think about the situation? And how does EEAT play into all of it?

The next topic is how the Canadian government has reached an agreement with Google on the Online News Act. Google has agreed to pay online Canadian publishers around $100 million a year to publish their news content on Google. 

This is clearly a win for news publishers, who are going to get paid, but it raises some interesting questions. Why did Google agree to pay? Will other countries follow suit? Will it go beyond news publishers at some point?

In more Google news, the number of companies who have blocked Google from crawling their sites and using their data for Bard has increased by 180%. Jared and Spencer have talked about this situation previously, but in that case it was the GPT OpenAI bot; now it’s the case with Google-Extended.

What about this article really riles up the hosts?

Spencer gets especially riled up sharing that Google Bard is now summarizing YouTube videos. Not only can you get a summary, but you can also get a transcript. Spencer gave it a test drive with one of his videos.

What was the result? Was the summary accurate? The result is pretty funny, so check out the episode to see why. 

Moving along, the next topic is X (formerly Twitter), and how some brands have paused their advertising campaigns while others have stopped altogether. As a result, the platform may lose up to $75 million in ad revenue by the end of the year. 

This is attributable to the fact that Elon Musk is a bit of a loose cannon, he's making offensive statements, and there are also lots of changes to the platform. 

What does this mean for other advertisers? Could this be part of Musk’s overall strategy?

Last but not least is news from Amazon, which has launched a new AI chatbot for companies. This chatbot is not a competitor for consumer-facing chatbots but, rather, for companies to use for their businesses. Think financial projections, policies, and procedures.

What is AWS and how is it involved? And what might the name of the chatbot be a reference to? Listen to the podcast to hear what Spencer and Jared think about it.

Moving into the Shiny Object Shenanigans portion of the podcast, Spencer talks first about his progress with the Amazon Influencer Program. With 954 videos currently published, how did he do during Black Friday and Cyber Monday?

Jared then shares his progress with the program. Currently, he has 982 videos live, but how did he do during the big shopping days? After talking with other members of the program, Jared also has an interesting theory about how to increase earnings during this period next year. 

He also talks briefly about Weekend Growth, progress, and new developments. 

As for their Weird Niche Sites, Spencer goes first with Katie Goes Platinum—a site that’s more unique than it is weird. Katie documents the process of letting her hair gray gracefully and seeks to inspire others. 

She’s got ads and digital products, not to mention a YouTube channel and a section featuring her web stories. A little research shows that back in 2020, she was earning $6k per month from her site—a figure that has most likely increased since then.

Jared’s Weird Niche Site is Hood Maps, which creates funny maps for different cities. He and Spencer take a closer look at a few of them and share some of the entertaining descriptions.

This DR41 website doesn’t have any display ads but it does rank for 50k keywords. But how does it collect the descriptions for so many maps? And is it making any money?

And that brings us to the end of a jam-packed episode. See you next week when Spencer and Jared tackle the latest headlines and serve up more information and inspiration.   

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