The Gemini Debacle, Google Pays for AI Content, the Future of the HCU, and 2 Weird Sites

Welcome back to another episode of the Niche Pursuits Podcast! This week Spencer and Jared turn things up a notch and cover many, many news items in the SEO and content creation space. After that they share their latest side hustles, and finish everything off with a weird niche site analysis.  You won't want to miss this one!  They kick things off by talking about Google Gemini and issues with its image-generating capacities. It turns out that the platform is not very accurate, which has led its stock price to drop recently.  The core of the problem is that users found that the race of the people it was depicting in its images was not historically accurate and people are asking if the programmers behind the program have anything to do with it. Does Google have an agenda behind its search results? This has led to a lot of debate and controversy and, as a result, Google shut it down temporarily. One person who has been extremely vocal about the Google Gemini debacle is Elon Musk. Spencer and Jared talk briefly about how Musk is leveraging this opportunity to talk about his AI chatbot, Grock, and how he's going very hard against Google on Twitter. The next news item up for discussion is the fact that Google is paying publishers to test out a new, unreleased Gen AI platform. As part of the Google News Initiative, there's a tool that beta testers are using during the next year to publish their stories, and Google is paying them five figures over the course of the year to publish 3 articles a day. What does this reveal about Google's feelings about AI content? Do the articles need to be labeled as AI-assisted? And does this fly in the face of its antitrust lawsuit? Moving along, Spencer and Jared report that Vice has announced lay-offs and its plans to stop publishing on Vice.com in search of new traffic sources. Its authors and journalists are scrambling to back up all of their articles in the event that the website disappears.  Is it letting writers go to replace them with AI? What does their new studio model entail? Why are they giving up on their own website? Tune in to hear Spencer and Jared's thoughts. Moving on, it looks like Google is finally rolling out some new Generative AI features for Chrome. Now you can customize Chrome with themes, organize your tabs, and get help writing. What do Spencer and Jared think of these new features? They talk very briefly about how the NYT filed a lawsuit against OpenAI for revealing the content behind their paywall, and now OpenAI is claiming the NYT hacked the system. In the next news item, they highlight an article by Glenn Gabe talking about what could happen with the Helpful Content Update. They highlight another article that did a big study of Google sites and the effect of updates, including the HCU. Spencer reads some of the website attributes that are considered very positive for websites, but check out the article for a more in-depth look. Lastly, developers are looking into the possibility of adding micropayments to the Chrome browser so users can pay websites or publishers when they browse their content.  Although this is just an idea and there are no plans for implementation, it does raise a lot of questions. What do Spencer and Jared think? Tune in to hear what they say. As for Shiny Object Shenanigans, Spencer talks about his new project, the Niche Pursuits Community, which will be live and open to the public as of March 4th.  He talks about some of the features, including calls with experts, small mastermind groups, a private Discord channel, and ongoing challenges with monetary prizes. When it's Jared's turn, he talks about how he recently monetized his weekend growth YouTube channel. He reveals the earnings from the channel: $11.14.  Although that's clearly not very much, Jared shares a few caveats as well as a positive outlook, since his YouTube channel is generating client work for his agency.  When it's time to talk about some Weird Niche Sites, Spencer goes first with Next Episode, which lets you keep track of the TV shows and movies you watch and see when the next episodes are.  This site was going really well, almost reaching 1 million organic visitors per month, but it got hit hard by the HCU and is now averaging less than 200k, according to Ahrefs.  However, Similarweb shows the site is getting about 3 million visitors per month, in January for example, and the traffic is mainly direct. When Jared's up, he shares Jedi Temple Archives, a comprehensive resource dedicated to not just the movies, but also to toys and collectibles. This DR43 site is ranking for over 13k keywords and just 3k in organic traffic, according to Ahrefs. It's monetized with ads and affiliate links and a lot of the traffic is direct, and they talk about how much it might be making and what strategies appear to be working. And that brings us to the end of a jam-packed episode of the Niche Pursuits Podcast. Tune in next week for another thorough run-down of all the latest news, and more.