Niche Twins - A week Google will never forget 🚨

TGIF. This is the Niche Nugget. A monthly roundup where we bring you SEO and creator news and insights from across the industry.

What happened? What's it all mean? We've got you covered.

Here’s the crispy nuggets we've cooked up for you in October 👨‍🍳:

• 20 content creators attend Google's funeral?
• ChatGPT search is finally here
• Wordpress drama intensifies

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Google's Funeral

Lowdown

On October 29th Google hosted what they are calling the "Google Web Creator Conversation Event" at their headquarters in Mountain View, California.

In total, 20 independent site owners were in attendance.

The common thread? All of their sites have been absolutely decimated by Google updates over the past couple years.

The stated goal of the event was not shared with the creators upfront, other than making it clear they were looking for their feedback and that their attendance would not lead to any preferential treatment.

Takeaway

You may recall back in July when Retro Dodo's Brandon Saltalamacchia published a breakdown of his face-to-face meeting with Google Search Liaison, Danny Sullivan.

Following the meeting Danny mentioned that this was the second "creator" type meeting for him this year and that he was working on a third.

Well, we have our third meeting in the books and the feedback remains pretty much unchanged.

Two highly informative and transparent summaries of the event were recently posted by creators Joshua Tyler of Giant Freakin Robot and Kylie of Between England & Everywhere.

TLDR - Danny is a genuinely good guy that has zero power or ability to change things, Google search engineers refuse to acknowledge that any site wide classifiers exist, and it's clear that Google cannot algorithmically assess the difference between original content and spam (as they acknowledge none of these sites should have been hit in the first place).

So yeah, more of them same. Google search is broken and they don't know how to fix it.

Not exactly encouraging.

To top it all off, in what can only be described as kismet poetry, just two days after Reddit became profitable for the first time in its 19 year history, Google started ranking a Reddit post ahead of Joshua Tyler's original Creator Conversation Event article!

You can't make this sh*t up.

To borrow a quote from Joshua...

ChatGPT Search

Lowdown

The moment we've all been waiting for is finally here.

Yesterday, on October 31st, OpenAI released ChatGPT search.

Waitlist and PRO users will have access immediately, with Free users gaining access over the coming months.

Takeaway

ChatGPT search blends the benefits of a natural language interface with the real-time web.

And unlike Google's AI Overview, ChatGPT search includes easily accessible source links - a huge step in the right direction for niche content creators.

This feels like a genuine inflection point in search and potentially the first meaningful Google competitor to surface in 20+ years.

Just a quick recap for those of you asleep at the wheel...

In this past week alone Reddit became profitable for the first time ever (I wonder if the Google deal had anything to do with that 🤔), Google hosts a disastrous event that leaves creators feeling like they just attended Google's funeral, and OpenAI launches ChatGPT search, the first viable Google competitor in decades.

But Google has all the money in the world...and they still have time to turn this all around...right?

Wordpress Drama Intensifies

Lowdown

Things have gone from bad to disastrous in Matt Mullenweg's war against WP Engine in October.

Here's the latest...

• Oct 3rd: WP Engine sue Matt Mullenweg and Automattic over abuse of power and for blocking their access to WordPress, which claims to be an open source project. That same day, 159 Automattic employees who didn’t agree with Mullenweg’s actions quit the company.
• October 9th: Mullenweg adds a new checkbox to the WordPress.org contributor login, asking people to verify that they are not associated with WP Engine in any way.
• Oct 12th: WordPress.org takes control of ACF (Advanced Custom Fields), a plug-in with 4.5 millions users maintained by WP Engine. Mullenweg claims he has every right to do so under the WordPress.org guidelines.
• Oct 13th: David Heinemeier Hansson (37signals and creator of Ruby on Rails) offers his thoughts in a post titled "Open source royalty and mad kings". Mullenweg quickly responded, attacking DHH directly, but later in a moment of rational thought (which seems hard to come by for him these days), decided to delete the post.
• Oct 23rd: A California judge announces that the first hearing for primary injunction will take place on November 26.
• Oct 28th: WordPress allegedly asked organizers of WordCamp Sydney, a community event, to remove posts talking about WP Engine.

Takeaway

What a mess.

There was a small window there for Mullenweg to walk things back, but he's beyond the point of no return.

It's with the courts now.

I wholeheartedly believe that in many years from now Mullenweg will look back at all of this and realize that his sole desire to win this battle with WP Engine caused him to lose the war of open source principals.

Memes of the Month 🤣

That's a wrap on October. See you in November!

-Keith