Marketing Letter - 🕯️Google’s Creator “Funeral”

Happy Halloween nerds,

Welcome back to the newsletter that’s ditching the jack-o-lantern and lighting a candle every time you get clapped instead:

The true horror… SMH.

Here’s what’s good this week:

→ Google’s Creator “Funeral” 🕯️

→ Meta’s New Search Engine 👀

→ Why Your Site Will Never Be Recovered 📉

→ more, obviously 💬

But first…

​This Week's Video 🗣️🎙️​

The state of niche sites has shifted dramatically over the past year, especially after Google’s recent updates. Many creators feel hopeless even after receiving little reassurance from Google about their future. In this week’s video, I share some of the reasons why I believe niche sites are struggling to recover. So tune in for more!

​YouTube​​

What’s Going Down @ Google 📊

→ How’s this for a headline: I Attended Google’s Creator Conversation Event, And It Turned Into A Funeral.

With section headers like “Google Sucks Us Dry And Throws Away The Husk,” the TLDR is that Google invited a bunch of "the most vocal independent site owners who’ve been shadowbanned by their brutal updates" and it became an extremely awkward event for all involved that confirmed basically the worst of what small publishers have predicted about where Google’s at and the direction it’s going.

As so perfectly put in the article: "Google has never done anything like it before. After this account, they likely never will again." lol.

→ Here’s another scathing one from the same event: I Drank the Kool-Aid at the 2024 Google Web Creator Summit. The most infuriating part?

“According to Danny Sullivan, my content was not the issue… so don't let the HCU update make you automatically question your content.”

WHAT.

→ And here’s my take on the whole thing.

→ Finally, one major takeaway from the summit (also the least surprising news imaginable): another algorithm update is coming soon and you shouldn’t expect to see any recoveries

→ A Google ad rep got caught making unauthorized changes to a Google ad account. The changes include “writing new ad copy, adjusting headline pinning, and changing a bidding strategy” and yet they “don’t even show in the account change history.” Oof. Keep an eye out.

→ Life comes at you fast. ICYMI: more than a quarter of new code at Google is generated by AI. Hot take— Google’s growing dependence on generative AI might explain why it can’t get a handle on controlling its own algorithms. Just saying.

That’s just one gem from Google’s Q3 earnings call. If you want more on that, here’s a solid breakdown of the most interesting takeaways, including updates on AIOs, "Project Astra," the impact of AI on YouTube video recommendations, and more.

AI Insight 🤖

→ ChatGPT has officially passed Bing in monthly traffic. May not sound like much (because like, seriously, who uses Bing), but, at 2 years old, OpenAI’s steady climb up the ranks has it behind only YouTube and Google.

→ Looks like Meta’s AI chatbot will soon be equipped with a search index, allowing it to provide conversational answers about current events and news search queries. The goal here would be to gain some independence from Google.

→ A new AI-powered search tool called “Search Bidding Exploration” is being tested by Google. Apparently, it’ll “find new pockets of valuable traffic… by identifying lower-traffic queries within search that actually drive conversions.”

→ Oh yeah— AIO’s are rolling out in 100+ countries to 1 billion + users.

Social Media Round-up 📲

→ Something to keep an eye out for— Instagram is lowering the quality of unpopular videos. IDK about you, but wouldn’t be me.

→ The YouTube Studio app’s Content tab just got a facelift, simplifying the process of understanding the impacts of “all formats, including videos, Shorts, Live, and Playlists, organized by their own respective shelf.”

→ One of the X rivals to actually show some growth, Bluesky, has now reached 13M+ users. Meanwhile, Threads is closing in on 275M monthly active users.

→ Reddit revenue is up 68% YOY. lol.

→ I know some of you are out there trying to step up your LinkedIn game. If so, the platform's new "post boosting for Lead Generation" function is worth checking out.

SEO Pro-Tip

→ Here’s an interesting piece on “how to scrape customer reviews for actionable insights.”

The piece basically explains how to use Python to scrape customer review data that can then be used to create overviews of the most used terms, "use OpenAI or any other LLMs to help you identify common topics," and more.

Jacky Chou​
Founder of Indexsy
hello@indexsy.com
Let's Connect on Twitter👇

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