Google Changes FAQ Schema, Word Agents Down 70%, and 2 Really Weird Niche Sites
Welcome back to another episode of Niche Pursuits News, with Spencer Haws and Jared Bauman of 201 Creative. This week, like every week, the hosts serve up the latest SEO news as well as inspiration for listeners.
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They started by addressing the changes Google announced to the how-to and FAQ rich snippets.
(https://developers.google.com/search/...) Specifically, Google will be limiting how-to rich snippets to desktop results and reducing FAQ rich snippets, and the roll-out should be completed by next week.
Then Spencer shares a post on LinkedIn from the COO of Word Agents, David Peterson, where he talks about how AI put them out of business, causing them to lose 70% of their revenue. He talks about how Make Lemonade suffered a similar fate, as discussed in a previous episode.
The last news item they tackle is that Google is in talks with the Australian government as it wants to be able to scrape publishers’ content (https://searchengineland.com/google-c...) and use it for AI training unless publishers specifically opt out. Spencer and Jared share their opinions on how they think they may affect content creators.
In the Shiny Object Syndrome portion of the podcast, Spencer begins by giving an update on his faceless YouTube channel. His channel was doing very well initially, earning about $1800 in display ads in the first month, in particular thanks to a video that went viral.
When Google found that video to contain copyrighted material, it had to be demonetized. Although Spencer appealed the decision, he could not reverse it.
He talks about how he recently started adding more content to the channel, and earnings over the last month were $1.66. Spencer’s not throwing in the towel, though. He’s going to keep working on the channel though and is even starting a second faceless channel on YouTube.
During Jared’s turn, he talks about his faceless YouTube channel that he started and completely forgot about. He shares the strategy he used when he first created the channel. It currently has 23 videos and hasn’t been touched in almost a year, yet it’s got 400+ subscribers and 219k video views. He’s very close to fulfilling the monetization requirements and he shares his strategy to move forward with this channel.
Jared and Spencer then talk about their weird niche sites, and Jared goes first with Fail Army (https://www.failarmy.com/). This entertaining website shares people’s “fails,” like falling down and running into things. This DR47 website only ranks for 500 keywords and is more like a landing page. The action is over on their YouTube account, which has +16 million subscribers, and Jared talks about the potential they have to grow their website and drive traffic.
When it’s Spencer’s turn, he shares his very weird niche site: Cyberspace and Time (https://cyberspaceandtime.com/). He struggles to explain what this retro-looking website is all about, mainly because the creator also has trouble explaining what it is. What’s really interesting are the stats: 500k visitors per month just a few months ago and 78k clicks from desktop users. All in all, the website is very weird!
And that brings us to the end of another episode of Niche Pursuits News, with a lot of food for thought and no shortage of ideas for listeners!
Timestamps:
00:00 - Intro
3:42 - Google Announces Changes to How-To and FAQ Scheme
11:58 - Word Agents’ COO’s LinkedIn Post
19:27 - Google Wants Australia to Change Copyright Laws
26:36 - Spencer’s Faceless YouTube Channel
31:50 - Jared’s Faceless YouTube Channel
40:40 - FailArmy.com
47:17- CyberspaceAndTime.com
This Episode is Sponsored by Search Intelligence - https://search-intelligence.co.uk/
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