This week’s podcast has covered a story on a large scale in the past, but now it is hitting the mainstream press. Bloomberg published just one piece titled ,Google AI search shift website manufacturers feel betrayal, – And it keeps the spotlight square at the Google’s web creator summit held back at the end of 2024.
If you are following our podcast, you already know GIST. Google invited about 20 small publishers to its premises – those who used to toughly compete with the updates updated and subsequent updates. This idea was to listen to them, understand their pain points, and change (possibly) so that high quality, independent material manufacturers can rank in search once again.
Since then? Crickets.
Now Bloomberg is telling the same story, with a national lens. This is not just to talk about the SEO and the material community-this is a broad world that is starting to see how far these algorithms shifts have reached.
Watch the full episode
Google promised to help small publishers. Nothing happened again
Decline from Google’s promises:
- Creators like Morgan McBrid (We interviewed earlier) And Jake Boli is prominently depicted in Bloomberg’s coverage.
- Morgan lost 70% of his traffic and 65% of his income. Jake put it clearly: “If you remove all enthusiastic and small publishers, we are going to overnon spam and some players who can pay to play.”
- A similar analysis showed traffic drops in 67 small publishers in verticals such as travel, DIY, and food – confirming what we have seen.
Despite following Google’s eeat guidelines, these sites are not looking at recovery. In fact, traffic continues to decline. This is where the real feeling of betrayal comes. The publishers were told that they were doing everything right – yet nothing has changed.
And at a time when Google is in dire need of good PR, this story is becoming another stain on its reputation.
Tiktok’s reverse count: 75 more days to find a buyer
Let’s pive on another platform that is in the headlines for all wrong reasons: Tickk.
Back in January, Tikokok suffered a possible shutdown in the US, and after a few hours after the actual downtime, the government gave the original company 75 days to sell the stage. He The deadline has increased -Now they have till June 2025.
Now what is happening with Tiktok?
- Many buyers are rumored to be in the mixture, including Oracle, Amazon and Private Equity Group.
- Uncertainty has left advertisersCPM is quite down, and eight of Tiktok’s top ten advertising categories cut their budget in Q1 2025.
- Despite anarchy, Tikokkok is still estimated to produce around $ 15 billion in US advertising revenue this year – even more than YouTube.
Both Thomas and I agreed: while Tiktok’s long -term viability is not clear, there is a real short -term opportunity for creators and advertisers.
- Less manufacturers are publishing due to uncertainty.
- CPM is low, which means cheap risk.
- Brands ready to stomach up the stomach can find that this is the best time to enter the ticket advertisement.
If the ticket is sticking around – and we think it will probably be – manufacturers and advertisers who are trapped with it through unrest can find themselves in a great position.
Latest in AI image equipment: Midjourney V7 and more
We also covered the weapons running in the AI image generation. Midjourney released version 7Openai’s GPT-4.0 image tools and closeness behind Ideogram V3.
How is Midjourney 7 piled?
- Midjorney V7 is a significant upgradation in realism and visual nuances.
- It still struggles with lessons than GPT-4.0.
- You need to “train” your style by selecting favorite images in the setup – about 200 of them.
Where it really shines, it is in creating images that do not look like AI-well. Even using a file name such as “img_4147.heic” is a prompt hack to trick the model to generate images that appear as they came out of a phone camera.
So what is TL for content creators?
- Best All-Around Tool: GPT-4.0 image generation. There are good and advanced editing features with lessons.
- The best for design layout and aPI work: Ideogram V3.
- Best for artistic or photorialistic work: Midjorni V7.
Side hustle update
Starting a rank of one of the calculator sites of Jered
On the side hustle front, I shared an update on one of my five calculator websites. After some early yo-ying in the ranking, a site is indicated to take off.
- The homepage calculator jumped from just 72 to 13 positions for its main keyword – with 60,000 monthly discovery.
- The engagement is strong: over 130 users in the last week and an average engagement time of 51 seconds.
- The keyword is driving most traffic, and if it cracks into the top 10, it can turn into a stable earning.
This is actually the first of the five calculator sites to show traction. And while it is still the early day, it is encouraging to see such speed from a very lean construction that depends a lot on the AI devices.
Thomas’ Newsletter Revenue: First month on Behiva
Thomas shared his first full month of revenue numbers for his “AI in Real Life” newsletter, which he recently moved to Bihaive.
- 14 emails sent to the list of about 3,000 customers in March
- Total Revenue from Burate Advertising Program of Bihaive: $ 257
- The highest earned email was bound by specific high-value AI advertisers
This is not a full-time income, but it is the early day-and the list with the list size revenue scales. In addition, it fits well in a comprehensive content and mudification strategy that includes YouTube and affiliated offers.
Weekly strange niche sites
This week’s “strange niche” pics had two very different but equally interesting examples: Tiresize.com And PerishaBlenews.com,
Tiresize.com
It is a powerhouse calculator site in automotive space.
- 315,000 organic seizures/month
- Tire size, comparison, gear ratio, and more than 20,000 indexing pages covering more
- Display for tires such as Amazon and Discount Tires was mosified through both advertisements and affiliated links
What stood with how tightly calculator results are accompanied by affiliated purchase travel. This is not only a great example of solving a problem, but also to guide the user to purchase.
PerishaBlenews.com
Thomas brought a hyper-specific top news site to the table this week.
- The parishbals covers the industry: production, meat, flowers, etc.
- High DR (71) but less reported organic traffic
- Possible short -term traffic from braking news does not capture equipment like Ahrefs
- Industry-specific demonstration advertisement and conference promoted through promotion
This is a great example of how top news sites – especially a business or B2B angle – may not appear in traditional SEO devices.
final thoughts
This week’s stories actually gave the house a central theme: Landscape is shifting rapidly. Whether it is algorithm change, AI tool, or platform is the only stable change.
But the opportunity comes with change. If you are ready to experiment, be agile, and keep your audience first, still can be found very upside down – even in front of failures.
