MrBeast's SaaS Decision - A Mistake?, Pay per Crawl Launches for AI, Listicles Are Back, Why You Need Them for LLMs, How LLMs Will Rank You in the Future, AI Content Farms Are the New Arbitrage?

In this episode #3003, Eric Siu and Neil Patel discuss MrBeast's ViewStats and the AI thumbnail backlash, Cloudflare's pay-to-play model, and how LLMs are shaping the future of SEO. They also cover the challenges of monetizing AI content and the potential of hiring AI automation interns to boost workflow efficiency. TIME-STAMPED SHOW NOTES (00:00) MrBeast's ViewStats and AI Thumbnail Controversy (02:43) Cloudflare's Pay-to-Play Model (05:23) The Future of LLMs and SEO (09:53) AI Content and Monetization Challenges (12:31) AI Automation Interns and Workflow Efficiency To suggest a topic, go to https://www.marketingschool.io. For more content from Eric and Neil, check out Eric’s Leveling Up with Eric Siu YouTube channel and Neil’s Neil Patel YouTube channel. Connect with Us: Single Grain << Eric's ad agency NP Digital << Neil’s ad agency X @neilpatel, @ericosiu Instagram @neilpatel, @ericosiu Drop Us a Review If You Enjoyed the Episode!

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:35Speaker 00

  How about this Mr. Beast sash decision? Do you see what? Do you know what happened here?

• 0:38Speaker 01

  No, I didn't even know Mr. Beast is going to sash, other than he has a competitor of a...

• 0:43Speaker 00

  Social Blade.

• 0:44Speaker 01

  Social Blade, there you go.

• 0:45Speaker 00

  So, okay, Social Blade is like a YouTube or like a social... It shows your social stats, basically, right?

• 0:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, it does it for multiple social profiles, but people mainly use it for YouTube first and then Instagram second.

• 0:56Speaker 00

  So, View Stats is a product that Mr. Beast came up with. Interestingly enough, I met someone that was supposed to be his partner on this. But apparently, it's a, you know, he... So apparently, I think Mr. Beast will partner up with you, but like you'll get a very small chunk of equity, like 1% or something like that. But, so Mr. Beast, he posted this to Twitter.

• 1:17Speaker 01

  Really quickly, View Stats gets 2.1 million visitors, according to SimilarBlade.

• 1:23Speaker 00

  Similar web?

• 1:23Speaker 01

  I mean, SimilarWeb, sorry. SimilarBlade, uh, SocialBlade.

• 1:27Speaker 00

  Okay, so View Stats, it's actually a great tool. I pay for it. And it shows you like, it'll come up with like thumbnail ideas for you. You'll see outliers and things like that. It's a great YouTube tool. You want to say something?

• 1:39Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:39Speaker 00

  Okay, so he tweets this out. This is on June 26th, right? So not that long ago. So, "Hey guys, hey guys, thanks for your feedback on View Stats AI Thumbnail Tool. We pulled it and added a funnel for creators to find real thumbnail artists to commission." What happened was, he launched an AI thumbnail creator in the product, right? Which I don't think is a bad idea. But a bunch of YouTubers pushed back, or creators pushed back, saying, "Oh, this is, uh, this is not good for us. This is gonna take jobs, whatever." And so he's like, "Oh..." So he removed it, and they created a funnel for creators to find real thumbnail artists to commission. I think this is an impulsive decision.

• 2:13Speaker 01

  I think that's a bad decision.

• 2:14Speaker 00

  Right after that, a bunch of people just started creating a giveaway for free.

• 2:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm like, I'll go back to that.

• 2:20Speaker 00

  This is reactionary, right? And so I think Mr. Beast is fantastic. I think this is a situation where it's like, hey, when you're when you're in SaaS, you typically want to validate it by how people are engaging with that specific feature. And you could look at the qualitative numbers and you could also look at the, which is the feedback from people, but you also have to look at the quantitative numbers.

• 2:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:40Speaker 00

  So.

• 2:42Speaker 01

  He should just do what's best for the software. If he does what's best for the software and what's best for the end users who are paying.

• 2:48Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:49Speaker 01

  He will make more money and create a better software. And if he doesn't do this to please people, someone else will and start eating his lunch.

• 2:55Speaker 00

  Yeah. And I think that is the thing. Like, I think it's sometimes you might apply the lens of, oh, if he, if a video is loved by many people and has a lot of views, like, it is important. That part's important, but you can't apply that to SaaS. Because usually, like, it's like the Henry Ford thing. It's like, okay, if you ask people, they wouldn't want a faster horse. Like, people don't know what they need sometimes.

• 3:13Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 3:13Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 3:15Speaker 01

  Yeah. All right. What's the next topic?

• 3:17Speaker 00

  What do you think about that CloudFlare paid to play, paper crawl launching? What do you think about that?

• 3:24Speaker 01

  Ah, I saw it. I don't know how well it's gonna work.

• 3:30Speaker 00

  I think it's a terrible idea.

• 3:31Speaker 01

  Yeah. I, I don't know. I, I'm, I'm not a fan of it. I'm not saying it won't work. I'm just not a fan of it.

• 3:40Speaker 00

  So my take on this is if you're a big publisher, getting millions and millions of visitors per month, maybe this might make sense. But if you're someone, like, they power 20% of the internet. It's a lot of people, right? But most people don't have big websites and the website traffic's going down over time. You might as well get crawled by everything.

• 3:56Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 3:57Speaker 00

  And, and, and like have a chance, a fighting chance. Because otherwise, you turn paper crawl on, you're not gonna get crawled and you're gonna make what? Pennies?

• 4:05Speaker 01

  Not just that. You're then not gonna get recommended by all these AI platforms, so then someone else is gonna take your business?

• 4:12Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 4:13Speaker 01

  The, the crawling should be free. This, this shouldn't be a gatekeeper. I get why CloudFlare is doing it. Because they control so much of the web's traffic that they can be like, oh, this is another easy way for us to monetize. And, you know, make another way for publishers to monetize as well. But.

• 4:33Speaker 01

  If I'm a publisher, I'm like, so I'd be, I'm happy with this model rolling out. I know that sounds bad because this means that a portion of the people aren't going to be getting crawled because they're not going to get paid. So they're not going to be happy and they'll be like, no, you're not allowed to crawl. And that makes me happy as a marketer because it just means I have less competition.

• 4:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, I, I don't think many people are going to turn this on. I think they'll make some revenue from it. I don't think it's going to change CloudFlare's business. And by the way, I think you and I both use CloudFlare. I think, I think it's a great company. But you actually had, um, this, their stock is still doing well.

• 5:08Speaker 01

  I think you had a piece.

• 5:09Speaker 00

  All time, uh, not all time high, then 2021 they were higher, but you know, for the last few years, they're all time highs. I thought you had a post in here or a topic in here where it talks about what you actually need to rank in L L M's.

• 5:24Speaker 00

  Right?

• 5:24Speaker 01

  I posted it on Twitter.

• 5:26Speaker 00

  Oh, you did? Maybe it's worth talking about here.

• 5:30Speaker 01

  So when you think about L L M's, I, I kind of had one topic in here.

• 5:35Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 5:36Speaker 01

  And it's about listicles.

• 5:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, just go for that.

• 5:38Speaker 01

  When you think about listicles, you know, we're seeing with a lot of these L L M platforms, they're not as sophisticated as Google. I don't mean that in a bad way. When you look at Google and someone's typing in or there's a, you get a link from someone. They know a New York Times link in theory is more valuable than a link from neilpatel.com. Just the reality in New York Times has much more authority. If your website, your company is around marketing, sure. And a link from Neil Patel can be very valuable because it's a similar audience. But other, outside of that, a link usually from New York Times is always going to be neilpatel.com.

• 6:16Speaker 01

  Now, when you look at Google, they also know an article from New York Times is better than, and more trustworthy than abcxyz.com, I'm making up a domain name, right? Because New York Times has more authority. But what we're seeing with the L L M's is if I just bombard the internet with listicles of like the best A B M software. And I keep, yeah, and I keep mentioning your product.

• 6:45Speaker 01

  And it's on websites that have links, you don't need a lot, but enough where they're getting indexed. And I bombard it and there's like, I'm creating like 20 articles a month consistently. And there are other competitors, but you're always number one and you're praised the best. The LLMs are just pulling and you're getting placed way higher. From everything we're seeing, it is the easiest way to get the LLMs to recommend you. It's called guest posting, which is old school SEO tactic, but instead of a link, you're just having them talk about your company or technically your guest posting. So you're just mentioning your company and you're mentioning it at the top and why it's the best. And then you're mentioning other competitors and you just bombard the internet with it.

• 7:29Speaker 01

  And the LLMs are just pulling from it and they're saying you are the best.

• 7:32Speaker 00

  Dude, I have a thesis on this, right? So, okay, here's how I think LLMs will rank you in the future. So I, when I use GenSpark or Manners or any of these super agents like Perplexity Labs or Deep Research or whatever, I, they're so powerful at quickly crawling videos and crawling anything, crawling your social profile. Where I'm like, they will just look at a brand instead of looking at links all the time. It's very easy to tell if this, this brand is legit, right? So if what you're saying is true, that listicles are back and you just need to bombard the internet with them. And then maybe have your, your company at number one or whatever. But if you're also a strong brand yourself, like a personal brand like yourself, for example, or like use your name as the author for these, I think you get a double whammy there. You get a double plus. So I'm like, man, we should test this for like 30 days or something.

• 8:17Speaker 00

  Where it's just like every article that we put out on our blogs.

• 8:19Speaker 01

  I've already tested this out.

• 8:20Speaker 00

  Okay, how's it going? It works.

• 8:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:23Speaker 00

  There you go. So I do think LLMs are not going to rank so much on links. I think links will still be important, but I think your brand is going to continually rise. And it's so easy for these things to just quickly figure out who the heck you are. Instead of relying on link signals.

• 8:36Speaker 01

  Yes. And if you can just end up, like if you bombard the internet with a thousand articles, talking about different variations, thinking about prompts people would use. And you're always rated highly and talked about the best. And it's thorough. It can't just be a crappy guest.

• 8:49Speaker 00

  Make sure it's quality, guys.

• 8:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, it has to be quality. And it's authentic and real and they can look at other places and see similar stuff. Like, you know, I, I say the last part because you want to be ethical. Of course, you don't want to just bad mouth the competitor. You want to be honest. It just helps you get mentioned in all the LMS and do well. I do think eventually they will adjust and they'll put different weight on different types of websites.

• 9:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, dude.

• 9:14Speaker 01

  Um, and they could say they're doing that right now, but we're not saying that. Just being honest.

• 9:18Speaker 00

  But it's seeing what?

• 9:19Speaker 01

  We're not seeing them put a lot more weight on different publications. We're just seeing that you just blast the web with listicles and you rank for like best ABM software and variations of that, like

• 9:32Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 9:33Speaker 01

  What software is, what's the best software for uh B two B SaaS companies to use?

• 9:38Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 9:38Speaker 01

  You know, and you just always list you in different variations of your ideal customer profile.

• 9:43Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 9:44Speaker 01

  And then you just get customers.

• 9:45Speaker 00

  This is how it's been early days of SEO guy. So, but we would just say you want to shield yourself by, by making sure it's quality and having a human in the loop ideally.

• 9:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:54Speaker 00

  Don't just spam the, the, the, the.

• 9:56Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 9:56Speaker 00

  The short way is usually not the way, but this is still a shorter way. If you're in B two B, here's the deal. LinkedIn account based marketing sucks, but it doesn't have to. With Carrot, it allows you to create personalized ads towards your customers and also personalized landing pages that align with the ads. You're going to have higher conversions and influence pipeline reporting to prove that your ABM works. So if you want to learn more, just go to carrot.ai and you can join the waitlist. Again, it's carrot, K A R R O T dot AI. And we'll see you on the other side. By the way, did you see this post? Um, you probably didn't, but this was from uh Greg Eisenberg. So um he talks about how it's insane how many AI reply bots and AI faceless channels now roam on TikTok, X and IG.

• 10:38Speaker 00

  And it's becoming a new normal, right? And he's saying that, look, there's one account that got 2.3 million followers pumping up motivational content and it pulls like 500K views a video and that's pretty significant.

• 10:49Speaker 01

  That's a lot.

• 10:50Speaker 00

  And so he's saying, look, we've processed weird territory where AI accounts can outrank most humans and followers. People form real emotions with bots. Engagement is higher on synthetic content than on authentic posts. Nobody notices or cared that it's fake. I think that works for like, if you're doing like travel content or like wide tem content, like

• 11:07Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 11:07Speaker 00

  Um, health content, motivational content, maybe that works well.

• 11:10Speaker 01

  I don't know about health. Depend on the health.

• 11:12Speaker 00

  Yeah. Like you want to get it from like a legit doc. Yeah.

• 11:15Speaker 01

  Andrew Huberman.

• 11:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, maybe not.

• 11:16Speaker 01

  It depends unless it's like helped like

• 11:18Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 11:18Speaker 01

  why you should exercise more.

• 11:20Speaker 00

  But travel or like even like even generic relationship advice is what he's saying here. Um, and so he says, look, it reminds me of the demand media era, and I don't know if he's calling it demand media, but that reminds me of eHow.

• 11:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:31Speaker 00

  And so my whole thing is, look, if everyone starts making these faceless channels and things like that. So he's like, your competition now is the agent farm that never sleeps and never misses trending audio. I don't know about that yet. I don't know how I feel about it. I don't know about yet, but this is where I kind of disagreed with it. And he's like builders who move fast might be the biggest attention arbitrage ever. But then I was just like, we tested this with pure AI content. It just doesn't do as well. And I was looking at some of these channels. It's like, most of it doesn't do that well right now. I'm all I'm all for it if it does well, but even listening to Brett Melonowski and that that CEO of Cluedly talk about it. They're like, it's just not there right now. So I think it's a little overhyped in the moment. Not saying it won't work, but um, this is where I think sometimes people go a little too far. What do you think? Frictionless growth marketing hosted by Sonya Thompson is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network,

• 12:16Speaker 00

  the audio destination for business professionals. Frictionless growth marketing hosted by Sonya Thompson shows how modern brands grow by removing the friction in their marketing and customer experience that pushes customers away every single day, often without leaders even realizing it. Each episode delivers practical insights, real brand examples and conversations with marketing leaders, showing brands how to win with the new rules of growth, identity-driven marketing, cultural relevance and frictionless customer experiences. Listen to frictionless growth marketing wherever you get your podcasts.

• 12:47Speaker 01

  I I I agree with that.

• 12:50Speaker 00

  I don't think it's a new arbitrage yet.

• 12:51Speaker 01

  I don't think it's a new arbitrage yet, and then go find out how easy it is to monetize this content.

• 12:56Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 12:56Speaker 01

  It is not easy to monetize it. The way I've seen people monetize it the most, and I'm not recommending this, is people creating, and I'm not saying there's anything right or wrong with this. I'm not judging. There's people creating AI content and monetizing it through OnlyFans. I've seen that.

• 13:12Speaker 00

  Does it work?

• 13:13Speaker 01

  Uh, from the data that some of the articles I've read, some of these people are making eight figures a year from that.

• 13:19Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 13:20Speaker 01

  We, because remember we did dinner in Germany with the guy with a marketer.

• 13:25Speaker 00

  He managed real OnlyFans people.

• 13:26Speaker 01

  Real OnlyFans people.

• 13:27Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 13:28Speaker 01

  And what was his number one issue?

• 13:29Speaker 00

  They were too much of a pain to work with.

• 13:31Speaker 01

  Because when he started making a money, they would go off and spend the money.

• 13:35Speaker 00

  They're unreliable.

• 13:36Speaker 01

  They were unreliable and they wouldn't keep working. So then he couldn't make consistent income on his end because he was taking a percentage of the revenues. So then with AI, you don't have to deal with the person just taking a vacation.

• 13:48Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 13:48Speaker 01

  You can get them to continually produce.

• 13:49Speaker 00

  You get the cut.

• 13:50Speaker 01

  And then imagine someone paying you a lot of money. I don't know how only fans work, but let's say there's a premium feature. I don't know if you can like, someone can get personalized content or FaceTime or I don't know, whatever it is. And you can now have AI personalize it for that individual because your cost isn't really there and you can scale.

• 14:08Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 14:08Speaker 01

  To not just 10 people or 50 people, you can scale to millions of people.

• 14:13Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 14:13Speaker 01

  And you can make even more money.

• 14:15Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 14:15Speaker 01

  But I read an interesting article. I believe FaceTime is is blocking nudity. Was it FaceTime?

• 14:21Speaker 00

  FaceTime?

• 14:22Speaker 01

  Is it FaceTime?

• 14:24Speaker 00

  Wait, Fa- wait, they block nudity?

• 14:27Speaker 01

  They block nudity?

• 14:28Speaker 00

  Wait, how do you block nudity on FaceTime?

• 14:32Speaker 02

  Of course, it usually. It's not necessarily in.

• 14:35Speaker 01

  And so it's not the app. And when people are doing nudity, is it, are they sharing like, you're single? Or you know, people, i- is it like they're FaceTiming someone else and they're like sex talking or whatever it's called? Is it called sex talking?

• 14:50Speaker 00

  I don't know. Sex talking?

• 14:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, so monitoring a lot of this live.

• 14:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:56Speaker 00

  See, no one knows his stuff here. Yeah, no one knows his stuff. Yeah. Anyway, well, okay, but look, I think this will proliferate in certain areas and I think it'll, it's just not there in a lot of other areas. So we won't call it an arbitrage on this podcast until we feel like it's an arbitrage and we've seen it.

• 15:11Speaker 01

  Where I also think AI, not to say content farms, but AI content will help is when the quality is there. Be it content, uh, having someone who's the AI face of a corporation will be really useful.

• 15:23Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 15:23Speaker 01

  Because what the we face right now, when we talk to a lot of companies is they don't have a person who could be the face and you struggle, they struggle to find someone and they don't want to like, oh, well, they could leave and there could be issues. And then when you have an AI person, it just eliminates a lot of that.

• 15:40Speaker 00

  I think the model right now is you hire in-house. Influencers and you pay them and try to incentivize them to stay. Or you do, I, I do like the Clouly model. I kinda wanna test this where they have fifty content interns and they hired these people. They pay them twenty to forty dollars per video, okay? And they, they get bonus if they make a video that has over a million views. You get a thousand dollars for that. That's a good deal. And his whole argument is if you're like eighteen to twenty-one, if you're a broke college kid or whatever, you know how these algorithms work and you wanna hire the people who are up and comers. And so you just look at your for you page or whatever and you hire these people and you get fifty of these content creators, right? And then eventually I think what's gonna happen is you're gonna have like an AI spokesperson and, but I think right now the, especially if you're creating, if you have like a consumer app, I think you can do this fifty interns thing and just see how it goes.

• 16:25Speaker 00

  I don't know if it'd work for us.

• 16:26Speaker 01

  I don't think it works as well on B two B.

• 16:28Speaker 00

  I think B two B, the, the best thing we can drive it to is probably our newsletter. But like not our software or not our services.

• 16:35Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 16:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, but okay, one more thing before we go is cuz we're on this topic right now. I don't know if you started doing this, I feel like this is something you're doing too, but this guy talked about this whole concept of GTM engineer. It's basically like, you know, you have like a person who will, you know, help with reporting on the sales side, more doing. They'll, they'll work with tools like Zapier or Clay or N A N or whatever to build these workflows. And I'm just like, we should hire AI automation interns. And so we've been, the, all these people, we put this job post up, just a job post. And it's all developers that are applying for it and we just hired someone, I think we might hire two more. But they're all in on building these workflows, all of them making things more efficient. I'm just like, oh, this is great. And they're like, they're like, dude, we just wanna learn, we just wanna work harder right now.

• 17:20Speaker 00

  And the things that they're building are already sophisticated. And I'm just like, how do I get more? Cuz one of our mutual friends, he's like, he hired these two kids out of college and they're all in on AI. They sleep in the office and I'm just like, oh, this, this is, this is great.

• 17:35Speaker 01

  We don't have it to that extent where they sleep in the office. But um, yes, we have a team of people that just do that.

• 17:42Speaker 00

  But are we talking AI automation interns where they're like super young?

• 17:46Speaker 01

  They're not interns.

• 17:47Speaker 00

  Okay, these are full timers.

• 17:48Speaker 01

  They're full timers and their goal is to automate workflows and systems and processes and stuff that people are doing. That's we start with mundane, boring stuff that's easy, replicatable. That has very little like ambiguity. It's more black and white. There's not really much gray.

• 18:06Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 18:06Speaker 01

  That's the stuff that we have them focus on first because then it's more likely to succeed.

• 18:11Speaker 00

  I think we're for this team. It's going to be, we're probably going to have AI content operators join to, which can help like chop up content or you know, even like do a content farm if possible. But um, I think this is a nice way. If you don't have a team like how Neil's established right now, you can have these people that are AI native and then probably have them report to someone technical. And then they're just fixing things throughout your organization and maybe you're bonusing them on, on, on things fixed. How are you bonusing them right now if at all?

• 18:35Speaker 01

  I don't even know how they get paid.

• 18:37Speaker 00

  All right.

• 18:37Speaker 01

  At a higher level.

• 18:38Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 18:38Speaker 01

  I just know we've been doing this for more than a year.

• 18:40Speaker 00

  Yeah. So I think this is great. I think it doesn't have to be N and N. It doesn't have to be like Zapier. You can figure out what you want to use. You can even use Clay for this. But I think my vision of this is this team is AI native to start with. And then eventually in the next six to nine months, we want the entire team to be AI native. So anyway, anything else from your side?

• 19:00Speaker 01

  I think that's it. It was a fun session today.

• 19:02Speaker 00

  All right, that's it for today, guys. We will see you tomorrow.