🗞 What's New: Mass media trust hits a new low...good news for creators?

Here's what you'll find in this issue:

• Americans don't trust mass media, especially those in the younger crowd. But founders can turn that distrust into dollars.
• We know that AI makes it easier to create content, but turns out that AI-assisted posts also get better engagement.
• $20K MRR with an SEO agency. Ilias Ism had an early viral hit, then over 20 failed startups, before launching his successful ecosystem.

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Only 31% of Americans say they have a great deal, or a fair amount, of trust in mass media, including newspapers, TV, and radio.

This record low isn't just a blip; trust has been trending downwards for years. Although trust has fallen among all age groups, a sizable gap has grown between the proportion of older and younger people who trust mass media.

Here's the data, and what it means for creators.

Here are the top products that launched on Indie Hackers yesterday:

1. 🥇 ApplyAll: Apply to hundreds of tech jobs in 30 seconds.

2. 🥈 Flowbite: An open source ecosystem of UI component libraries.

3. 🥉 Midi Notion Studio: Notion template studio.

You may think that AI content doesn’t perform very well. We used to think that, too.

But then, Buffer, a social media marketing tool, analyzed 1.2M AI posts.

The results? AI-assisted posts scored better on every single platform.

Here's why.

🛍️ TikTok wants to turn millions of Americans into paid shopping influencers.

🔗 The 50 best bootstrapped backlink builders.

🎁 Here's how holiday marketing campaigns are evolving.

👎 The worst sales promotion in history.

📸 Where did our photos from 2004 go?

Ilias Ism already had two startups (and 20+ failures) under his belt when he cofounded MagicSpace SEO, a successful SEO agency.

His philosophy? Payments first, solutions later! He builds complementary, connected products, but only after people have started paying for them.

Next, he has his sights set on hitting $10M ARR with backlink automation.

Makes me wonder: What's today's hot new technique that everyone will roll their eyes about in 10 years? —@channingallen

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Special thanks to Jay Avery for editing this issue, to Gabriella Federico for the illustrations, and to Katie Hignett, Darko Gjorgjievski, and Stephen Flanders for contributing posts. —Channing