The title of this email is clickbaity for a reason. Keep reading, you’ll see.

I looked at my Google Discover feed the other day and saw an interesting looking article, titled: “Farmer Explains Why Walmart’s Great Value Milk Is Cheaper Than Other Brands.”

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Here’s the article (this is from the site…I didn’t get a screenshot of it in my Discover feed):

I read the article. It basically re-stated what the farmer said in the original video. No added “value” beyond that.

I looked at a few other articles. Most of them are summaries of interesting TikTok videos and Reddit posts.

They include lots of screenshots of the original TikTok or Reddit posts and comments, and add their own comments.

With short sentences like this.

Easy to read.

Lots of space for ads in between images and paragraphs.

Example from one of today’s articles (they publish multiple per day):

Then, I checked the traffic numbers for the site, as one does.

And what I saw shocked me.

7.6 MILLION monthly visitors.

And almost twice that, according to Semrush. 14.1 million!

I dug in a little more.

Very little of that traffic is from Google organic.

And that’s because this site is publishing viral-style content. They’re not targeting keywords. They’re writing about interesting things, and getting traffic from platforms that reward that type of content.

It appears that most of their traffic is direct and social. I’d guess Google Discover and Facebook are among the top sources. I also noticed they have a large following on MSN.

Another interesting thing I found was that TwistedSifter is one of many brands owned by the publishing company Everhance.

And what’s even more interesting is that the other brands all have massive Facebook pages, but 90% of the content is link posts pointing to articles on TwistedSifter.

Such as the Humans of Tumblr page, which has 5 MILLION followers:

And the Did You Know page, with 4.8 million followers:

According to Everhance, TwistedSifter gets 10+ million pageviews per month.

Let’s do some rough math to estimate revenue…

With a $10 RPM (revenue per thousand visitors), that’s $100K/mo.

A $30 RPM = $300K/mo.

Due to the nature of the content, I’m guessing their RPM is no more than $30. Probably closer to $10. But who knows! I could be waaaayyyy underestimating here. Publishers of this scale usually have pretty sweet ad deals compared to us little guys.

I guess the “viral” content model isn’t dead

I thought the viral clickbait content model kinda died out a few years ago.

Maybe it did, and TwistedSifter is just a vestige of its former self.

Nah, probably not.

10+ million monthly visitors proves there’s still a hungry market for this content.

Which is good news if you’re looking for a simple publishing strategy. Just find interesting content (super easy if you’re on social media much), and then write about it with lots of screenshots and short explanations. You could whip together these types of articles in less than 30 minutes, EASY.

Getting traffic is the hard part. You’d have to get on a bunch of social platforms and hopefully break into Google Discover. It’s not hard actually, it just might take a bit of time.

I love finding interesting business ideas like this and sharing them with y’all. I have too much on my plate already, so I don’t plan to try this. But I’d be curious to know if any of my readers take this info and run with it.

Are you gonna be the next BuzzFeed? Or, um… TwistedSifter? If anyone actually does try this, remember me when you’re successful. 😄 

Thanks for reading. Hope this was inspiring!

Ian

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