AI vs Google, Future of Twitter, Fall of FTX – This Week in Marketing Ep. 1

Links mentioned:
Weekly newsletter: https://www.getrevue.co/profile/indexsy
Tech Layoffs tracker: https://layoffs.fyi

Chapters:
(0:00) Intro
(2:48) Is AI Content a threat to SEO?
(7:15) Performance plateau what is it?
(10:13) Tech layoffs
(11:25) Reason for layoffs in Layman’s
(14:03) State of Twitter with Daddy Musk
(16:15) Thoughts of the Zuck
(19:49) Reddit NFTs (?)
(21:50) The clappening of FTX
(28:35) Outro

Hosts: Jacky Chou and James De Lacey
Video Editor: Jacky Chou
James’ Twitter: https://twitter.com/jdelacey01

Indexsy Links:
https://twitter.com/indexsy
https://www.youtube.com/@indexsy
https://indexsy.com/
https://indexsy.spp.io/order/niche-edits

Jacky Chou: All right. Welcome to the first episode of this week in Digital Marketing. I’m your host, Jacky Chou and co-hosting today is fellow marketer and my online friend, James d Lacey. I wanted to start this podcast. I wanted to start this podcast because we’ve had some pretty solid feedback from readers of the marketing newsletter that I’ve been sending out every week, which I’m guessing, yeah, the link will be in the description.

I just thought it’d be fun to talk about it live with someone and . James and I had a podcast, or he interviewed me on a podcast in the past and thought, it was fun. So James, why don’t you give a quick introduction about yourself where you’re from, where you based now and what are you working on?

Yeah, for sure. You know what? 

James de Lacey: I actually just signed up to your newsletter yesterday 

Jacky Chou: as well, so yeah, Now, 

James de Lacey: now I’ve got a, an insight into what it is, but I’m James del Lacey now co-hosting this with. From New Zealand now living in Austin, Texas and working on my own things online in the area of, [00:01:00] I guess you could say health, fitness, strength, conditioning geared towards combat sports.

And then another one geared towards more strength sports, general fitness, and that’s like my bread and butter right now, merging the career degree, all that kind of stuff into online. 

Jacky Chou: Yeah. Cool. And I’m Jack Chow. I am, I guess I was born in Taiwan, grew up in Canada. I am back in Taiwan now visiting family trying to do that remote work stuff.

And I’m working on various things such as the agency Indexy. Also using it as a holding company for various niche sites currently in several verticals such as architecture home decor, and several tech sites. And did, you’re fucking killing it too. I been slapped pretty hard this past past year.

So let’s see how it goes. Should we jump [00:02:00] right into the topics? I think we wanted cover today. We wanted to cover AI content with seo. What marketing Performance Plateau means current tech, Tech layoffs, some more Twitter news with Elon the NFT space with Reddit. And maybe if we have time, we can talk about the fall of FTX right now in the us.

What do you think of AI content right now? Do you use it yourself? What do you think would look like in the future? Yeah, I play around with it. 

James de Lacey: I don’t use it. I write all my content from scratch. I just feel like it can be difficult to have to go through and fucking edit everything.

Anything is such a, it’s a ballbuster to end a lot of stuff, so I don’t use it. But in saying that, there’s a lot of people that do use it. Success. And obviously people often saying, Google’s going after AI content. Google’s going after spam, Google’s going after this and that. But I get along with my information from, especially guys at SEO Fight Club and the testing and stuff and analysis they do, and [00:03:00] just from what they’ve seen.

It doesn’t look like Google’s identifying any of that stuff well at all. And obviously people who post the screenshots from HF and stuff onto Twitter all the time can show you ai, ai, AI sites or spa sites killing it right now. 

Jacky Chou: Yeah, exactly. And I it’s actually funny, I think the AI sites that are identified on Twitter are immediately destroyed.

But if. If you’re doing on the down low, if you’re not doing huge numbers yet, you probably won’t be found. And I guess you’ll be fine. I personally have used ai, I use it for content creation as well as I have a couple pure AI automated sites right now that do like people also ask content.

Yeah. And that’s killing it right now. It’s pretty surprising. . And it’s astounding because I think we’re in a space where creating content, hiring writers gets very pricey at scale. Yeah. [00:04:00] So AI enables us to be able to test certain keywords at a crazy scale that we didn’t know it was possible.

So right now I have I’m using a service. A custom built service that does people also ask content, it automatically posts for onto WordPress as well, and I’m able to post out like thousands of blog posts a day and just try to index them through indexing services and seeing some crazy success. I think I have one site that’s at, I think it was 1500 views a day right now.

Damn. Can I guess what the service 

James de Lacey: you’re using. Yeah, go ahead. Is that, is it Centrify? Is that how you say it? Is that 

Jacky Chou: one? No, it’s not. It’s not. It’s yeah, I think it’s a lesser well known one. I think I’m gonna gate keep this cuz I don’t wanna want everyone to find out. Unless this person decides to sponsor us, then we can talk about it, 

James de Lacey: for sure.

Are you doing any buyer and tech content with the AI. [00:05:00] 

Jacky Chou: Buyer intent content? No, it’s not great right now. So our current process with AI content is post bulk if rank. Then you rewrite with rewrite it with a human writer and then optimize it. Gotcha. And so one thing I’ve noticed with AI content, what you can do is build a topical authority very quickly.

I dunno if, have you dove into the topic at all, like of topical authority? Yeah, was in the podcast for sure. Yeah, So I think it’s super easy to do. So let me give an example. It would be if you write a thousand blog posts on how to cut xyz, like a thousand of them, and then you try to write, then you try to rank best chef’s knives for cutting or something like that.

Yeah, it would be much easier to rank than when. , just start from scratch. If we have a full affiliate site full of best XYZ knives that wouldn’t work anymore, but, yeah. , I think this is [00:06:00] a interesting topic that our, it’s widely discussed on Twitter, but not really covered.

I believe on other marketing outlets, they just say, Yeah, Google’s gonna catch up. We hope, but it’s so far it’s not. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Performance Plateau. I actually saw this article. I’m not sure this is so much an issue for niche site builders. Is this related to ppc?

Similar. Similar. So it’s more like, it would be more applicable to D to C, really large d TOC brands or really large consumer brands. , for example. I think in the article, Airbnb talk mentioned that they’re having a performance plateau because if you run paid ads direct response ads for too long, eventually people will stop converting.

Yeah. And what you need to do is they talk. Needing to run branding campaigns, so that’s why. An example would be Coca-Cola. Why do they keep [00:07:00] doing these like super expensive product placements and movies in on Netflix? It’s so you can get the reach out, you can get the brand reach out there because at a certain point you reach saturation, you’ll reach everyone who’s on Facebook and Instagram, but you want to reach those people who aren’t on there as often.

Have you ever tried running branding? In the past with your niche businesses. 

James de Lacey: I haven’t run branding campaigns, but I am getting further and further into branding now that I’ve got my own physical products partnered with another company . So essentially I take, I have hands off everything and I see the traffic sales or that they handle everything there is to do with shipping artists or my logo.

or my branding on that gear. That’s like now starting to work that branding side as well and partner with that company. So slowly, 

Jacky Chou: but sure. Okay. Yeah. Cool. I think another popular topic right now is it was like the [00:08:00] creator led companies. So for example, it would be, a huge example would be Mr.

Be Burgers. So it would be, the playbook would be grow your audience and eventually you can launch products at ease because your audience is so big. It’s, this is an interesting topic right now because if. Build a brand around your own identity. People tend to be a lot more loyal with like your customers.

Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. I think this is something we’re struggling 

James de Lacey: with too, something with affiliates too. If you rank your best pages and you can partner with someone or create whatever that product is and have that as number one, which is currently what I’m about to do, then that’s just an easy way 

Jacky Chou: to improve your brand presence.

Just there. Yeah, for sure. I think we’ll see a pretty seismic shift in the next couple years in this space, but excited to see what happens. For sure. I’m not sure if you saw, but Facebook just announced that they’re laying off 11,000 people [00:09:00] at or MEA is laying off 11,000 people.

I think it was Twitter with 50% strip. At a thousand layoffs and Stripe is one of those, the Silicon Valley like Angel one of the most highly valued startups, private companies in the world right now. And it’s pretty interesting to periodically check Layoff Star, fyi, I’m not sure if you’ve ever been on that site.

No, I just 

James de Lacey: went on it just before. When you show. 

Jacky Chou: Yeah, it’s crazy, right? Damn, man. 

James de Lacey: But I can’t believe like Stripe has to lay off employees. I Think about every single online business uses Stripe and Yeah, they take that 2% every time. Say, Man, that must 

Jacky Chou: be billions. Yeah, for sure. I think. But their valuation is still at something insane.

It was like 40 or 50 x. Annual revenue, which is absurd, but this is a software business. It makes sense. But also I have to explain [00:10:00] this to my girlfriend yesterday. Why does Facebook need to lay off so many people? And how I explained it to her was, if, so during Covid, you see a huge uptick in online shopping, social media use, everyone’s.

During Covid, but so they run projections based off of those usages and consumerism. And after Covid, you see a huge drop. It is not something they were anticipating. So Amazon, Facebook, Stripe, they all have to run their projections again, and I’m sure it looks like shit. So they’re like, Okay.

So it’s either we lay them off. Or we’re gonna go broke in. Yeah. Based off of projections in two years, it’s it’s pretty, pretty scary times actually. You really feel it in the consumer markets right now. I’m not sure if you you’re on media vine, right? I don’t even use display.

Oh yeah. Just a [00:11:00] flavor. Digital products. Yeah. So it’s a pretty big indicator because I. Last year display ads, RPMs are much higher than it is now. So what does that mean? It probably pretty much means that advertisers, so companies are seeing less money coming in, so they have less money to spend on advertising.

So the your display ads, pay payments are going down. It’s a huge. Huge better order effect and I’m not sure if you’re seeing in Austin, but if there’s like a huge slow down in consumerism, it’s pretty alarming. Yeah, just it goes to show, like 

James de Lacey: people often say, having contractor or W2 job, that’s the safest thing to do.

But then you realize, man, like layoffs that can happen any time and being self-employed. To me it’s safer. But then again, if you’re just relying on one thing, like display ads, then it becomes another risk, a risk factor. So diversify 

Jacky Chou: everyone. [00:12:00] Yeah, exactly. I think especially in the niche community, diversification is nonexistent.

yeah, 

James de Lacey: for sure. Amazon 

Jacky Chou: And. Yeah, Shout Soic. Their Twitter team is in definitely hounding people, . So what do you think of Twitter right now? What are your thoughts? You use it quite a bit. Yeah. You, I’m sure you browse quite a bit. You’re seeing what Elon’s changing. Everyone’s verified now.

Yeah. So a bunch of people get verified today. Yeah. I guess most people can agree that the previous state of Twitter, it was not in a good place, let’s be honest, because if you check the stock price, I think it’s traded sideways for about five to 10 years. How do you feel about Twitter now that Elon’s taking over?

Would you, if there’s still a public company, would you invest in them and what do you think of their new verification system? 

James de Lacey: New verification system’s interesting that anyone can pay to get out. I wonder if that’s [00:13:00] gonna increase spam at all. Cause anyone can get a check mark now. So you probably have a lot of impersonators and stuff like that, but I don’t know.

I don’t know if much I don’t know if much will change anyway, like with these massive companies you knows. To me, I don’t think the change in leadership at least, will make any drastic changes in the next however long will be something gradual that will roll out. Would I invest in Twitter? I don’t know.

I not a hardcore Tesa Elon Maxi. I do enjoy his. Random takes on Twitter though. Just every now and then is trolling of everyone on there. But yeah, I dunno, I wouldn’t say, I don’t even have any other investments outside of this, outside of the businesses right now anyway, so 

Jacky Chou: yeah, I’m not too sure.

You’re, What about you? You’re not invested in the stock market? No, 

James de Lacey: not at the moment. Eventually I will diversify a bit, but right now it’s just all growth. 

Jacky Chou: That’s definitely very risky as well. I still have to [00:14:00] diversify a bit more, but I’m pretty happy with where I’m at in terms of diversification.

Yeah. Have you on Twitter? Would I? Yes. Right now. As of now, yes. 100%. I think Elon, So we talked about meta laying off 11,000 people. I would. And, everyone hates the Zuck. Everyone makes fun of Mark Zuckerberg. Everyone makes fun of Elon. But I think Elon is probably the number one executor and like operator in the world right now.

Yeah. For a tech company. And not far under him is Mark Zuckerberg. It’s, I think it’s not really talked about, but for him to keep meta relevant for all these years with so many social networks coming. Popping up every day. And being able to defend by copy his way into relevancy is uh, something like not many people give him enough credit for.

It’s savage that he could just straight up copies, Snapchat destroyed them, but , you don’t, it’s just how it is. And 

James de Lacey: you don’t [00:15:00] think Zack’s with meta is gonna almost transition from a social media platform into. Pick in with the stuff and 

Jacky Chou: bit of his shit. Yeah. I think that’s his huge Hail Mary.

I’ve never used Oculus, so I don’t know, but I think I wouldn’t bet against Zuck right now, but I’m not betting for him. Yeah. Cause it’s, I’d rather be I think at this point in my life, I’d rather be late than wrong. Cause if I place a bet on Facebook and. For some reason, VR is not the future then, Okay, fucking clap Chuck.

Money like in the toilet, yeah. Yeah. But it’s interesting to see how this plays out. They’re losing 100%. They’re losing relevancy. I think kids are not even using Instagram. There was a pull I saw. Yeah. Adults now. Boomers are on Facebook, bro. Who’s posting on Facebook? I think my mom posts on Facebook

Instagram is I guess people my age. So it would be like the [00:16:00] millennials, and then we got the Gen Z, I think it was 35% of Gen Z kids have TikTok. And then shortly after it’s Snapchat and then it’s Instagram, so if anything, I’m more bullish on Snapchat. TikTok, we’re still trying to figure it out.

It’s tough. So I actually started the challenge, I’m not sure if you saw on Twitter that I did posting two short form videos a day and just using it an hour a day just to try to understand what works and what doesn’t. It’s very interesting. I’m not sure if you’re on it, but you should probably, I 

James de Lacey: actively avoid it.

I started posting short clips for my own podcast on. And I was like, Fuck, I hate this platform so much. I hate opening it. I hate seeing the people on it. I literally, I can’t stand it. But I tried posting stuff on it. We got a little bit of traction, but I’d have to be way more consistent to make use of it.

But man, I can’t stand that app. I can’t 

Jacky Chou: like the people. I think you just have to you have to use it for an hour. Then the outro understands what you want. Cause it’s by showing you like dancing, kids like torture. 

James de Lacey: Yeah. It shows. I’m in [00:17:00] USA and it shows me shit from like China and Japan and stuff.

I don’t know why. Maybe it’s cause I went on it on my computer, but that still doesn’t make 

Jacky Chou: any. Yeah. That’s wild. That’s odd. Maybe I tracked, maybe they maybe they track your like facial recognition and you’ve got know you’re like half east Asian, right? Or something like that. Yeah, exactly.

That. This guy’s half Chinese, he’s showing this. Yep. . Yeah, exactly. I have on the list of topics, Reddit, NFTs but it’s clear that no, none of us know where the fuck that is. And yeah do you use. Are you on? Do you have the Reddit app? Yep. I and 

James de Lacey: yeah, I saw something on Reddits the other day, but I was, I read something that Reddit NFTs were doing well.

Yeah, 

Jacky Chou: exactly. I don’t, that was very vague, but I guess it is for, I guess it’s for, I think right now what my understanding is like they have this adorable avatar things for in your profile, and that’s supposed to be you. Yeah. Your. Profile and you’re able to buy skins [00:18:00] on it or upgrades to make you look cool.

Yeah, like fire or like swords and shit. But maybe that’s for more for, I don’t know, kids or people like heavy Reddit users would use it, I’m not Reddit. I put in our notes here that is 

James de Lacey: for Reddit Virgins, the ones that just like channels or so and stuff like that, but it’s almost like a rendition of the NFT profile pictures, yeah. On Twitter right now, it’s Yeah. Now it’s of moved over to 

Jacky Chou: Reddit. Yeah. Probably for the, yeah. Reddit neck beards and yeah, exactly. Yeah. But it’s interesting cuz now there’s a marketplace. Let’s see how they do it. I think the article I read about NFTs is they just implemented it, added a marketplace, but never mentioned the words NFTs or Web three.

So they’re not using hype names. It’s it’s good. So let’s see what blockchain 

James de Lacey: Is it built on? Is it all ethere? 

Jacky Chou: Fuck, I have no idea. I should know. I’m like into crypto, [00:19:00] but yeah, not enough to fucking play with these ugly ass avatars. , 

James de Lacey: that’s a good segue into the the last topic too.

Jacky Chou: Yeah, exactly. I’m not sure if you’re following this the fall of ftx. Yeah. I’m sure it’s everywhere in the news, but I can just give the audience the general gist of it. It’s pretty much. There was a rumor that was started. Started because with a crypto taking a nose dive recently that FTX is insolvent, and what that means is they don’t have the liquidity to cover.

Shit on their balance. So for example, if everyone pulled out their money today, they would be in the negatives and they’d be fucked. Cuz they have, they would have to sell certain assets they were holding in their treasury. And around the same time, the CEO of Binance, cz, or CED, as we call in Canada, Announced that they, so they initially had a stake in FTX and it’s now worth the market price of, I think it was like two to 3 billion, and it was held in both B U S D, which is [00:20:00] the USD equivalent on crypto or in crypto for Binance.

And Ft. X’s own token ft. And they were like, Okay, so fuck that. We’re gonna sell it on the open market. And what that does is it drives the price down, like largely because it’s done on the open market, it’s not done otc, which is, which means over the counter. And just like behind the scenes, So that has a huge selling pressure, which drives the price down.

And this pretty much. Had a huge domino effect. So even if FTX was in, wasn’t insolvent before, now they are because like Binance sold all the, all these FTT tokens and they pretty much halted withdrawals. I have several friends who actually lost millions on this. Pretty scary, Yeah, pretty fucking scary man.

And I think CZ offered to buy FTX pending due diligence, but obviously the due diligence falls [00:21:00] through and now FTT is in the gutter. It’s pretty fun three times. 

James de Lacey: Sorry not to, but so what, so explain to me the audience who are, and to myself, ftx us from what I’ve seen and read, is still thriving. How are they two separate companies?

Jacky Chou: Yeah, it is so ftx us and Binance us is completely separate entities and companies. So I think it was a law for us exchanges. To be able to trade directly to US dollars. Yeah, so I think there’s something to do with the regulations within the us. That’s why Binance, Stockholm is not available. In the US because they have yeah, way too many regulations.

For example, binance.com has futures, which is like leverage trading and that is definitely not available in the us. They probably see us gambling, which it is. But yeah, so this is completely okay. I’ve had, I’ve seen reports [00:22:00] that people using FTX US are fine. They’re able to withdraw everything.

That’s good. But I think so many people right now have been destroyed by ftx because they’re one of the, I don’t know if you’ve seen the podcast on Sam Bankman freed the CEO of ftx. He’s like the wonder child of crypto for the last like year. He’s considered a genius. He was a quant trader in the past.

He was like, he was on the Fortune cover and everyone was saying he’s like the next Elon Musk. But it seems yeah, this guy just took a 95% haircut in his net worth from like 16 billion to 1 billion. Still rich, but. Yeah he’s not in a good place right now. It’s reminds me of the story of IOUs.

I don’t know if you know about it. It’s , the guy who flew too close to the sun, and Yeah. Yeah. It’s a sad thing to see. I think it’s bad for the crypto market in general. Have you ever dabbled in crypto.

Yep, 

James de Lacey: I’ve got some [00:23:00] NFTs. I’ve got what else? I’ve got my, obviously the other stuff Theas set up and all that kind of stuff there. I had to delete a bunch of Discord groups cause I had way too many Nft Discords, , you know when you’re, at the time when Ts were big two, yeah, I’ve got a few different things on there, but it’s interesting.

I guess the question becomes in what’s the lesson for everyone with these exchanges? Because obviously people lost, as you mentioned, people lost millions on ftx, saw screenshots of like affiliates losing money. Like all sorts. 

Jacky Chou: Yeah, I think it’s it’s the normal US saying in crypto. It’s not your keys, not your crypto, right?

 Or. Yeah, something like that. So you pretty much trade on the exchanges and move it off. But yeah, I say all the time, but I still have a significant amount of money in Binance. Just hope they never clap. Do you trust Binance? I do trust Binance. Yeah. Easy’s my daddy, man. , it’s yeah, [00:24:00] have like arine of them every morning.

Cause like you, you’ve seen my affiliate payouts on Binance. Love them man. Number Binance. Number one, Binance affiliate coded right underneath. Get on that guys . They’re never going go . 

James de Lacey: That’s good timing. Up, up to FTX flowing. They, you can show, but you know how many people were also showing FTX at the time as well?

Like 

Jacky Chou: I guess maybe , they have a reallys cause they had Meir program, but. Yeah, they have a really generous affiliate program. But yeah, I’m just, I just hope people didn’t put like, too significant of their money in and hopefully everything’s okay. Yeah, definitely. But yeah. Should we close it out?

Yep. All right. Yeah. Thanks everyone for watching. If you liked this episode or you like seeing more of James and I Like share, review this podcast. Yeah, all of it. Comment and just let us know.

I dunno. Is there anything else I need to add there? [00:25:00] Cool. All right. Just.