The Fall of CNN

In episode #2907, Eric Siu and Neil Patel discuss the decline of CNN and legacy media, the challenges faced by HubSpot regarding SEO traffic, and the impact of AI on content creation and customer support. Don’t forget to help us grow by subscribing and liking on YouTube! Check out more of Eric’s content (Leveling UP YT) and Neil’s videos (Neil Patel YT) TIME-STAMPED SHOW NOTES: (00:00) The Decline of CNN and Legacy Media (02:46) HubSpot's SEO Traffic Challenges (05:57) The Impact of AI on Content Creation (10:14) AI in Customer Support and Product Development (15:13) The Future of AI and Creativity (17:18) That’s it for today! Don’t forget to rate, review, and subscribe! Go to https://www.marketingschool.io to learn more! Leave Some Feedback: What should we talk about next? Did you enjoy this episode? If so, please leave a short review. Connect with Us: Single Grain << Eric’s ad agency NP Digital << Neil’s ad agency X @neilpatel X @ericosiu

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Finding customer information shouldn't mean digging through emails, call notes, and spreadsheets. HubSpot's starter plan brings all of those details together, so it's easier to track what's happening with every deal and what to do next. It pulls information from calls and emails. Then it gets to work, logging and summarizing them. Right after your call ends, HubSpot pulls next steps from your call notes and drafts suggested follow-ups. And it stays up to date for you, so you can build demand, win more deals, and spend less time on repetitive work. Your records, insights, and next steps are ready for you to act on. And you don't have to miss a beat searching for any of it. Try the starter plan for $10 a month. Learn more at hubspot.com. How about the fall of CNN? That's a brand.

• 0:37Speaker 01

  That is a brand.

• 0:38Speaker 00

  But this is a negative feeling when you think about CNN nowadays. CNN, by the way, I used to read that stuff all the time in high school. When we were like, the US was invading Iraq. I'd just read CNN all the time. But they're cutting 200 people. You see that?

• 0:51Speaker 01

  I don't believe him, but I'm not a CNN fan for a different reason.

• 0:54Speaker 00

  Okay, so here's Mario Nafal tweeted this. CNN to lay off hundreds as it struggles to compete with new media. So they're trying to move over to 3.99 a month subscriptions. And they're cutting a lot of the TV staff. NBC is also looking to cut about 50 people or so. And the other day, someone was interviewing, I think it was like a Speaker of the House. And the CNN anchor was like, you're on the news, sir. He's like, dude, nobody watches CNN. Like, people go to Cartoon Network and watch reruns instead. And I just think this is an example of a brand that's going, that has been going in the wrong direction. And I think eventually the nail will hit. The nail will, what did I say? What's the expression? The nail on the coffin?

• 1:33Speaker 01

  Something like that.

• 1:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, but you get what I'm saying.

• 1:36Speaker 01

  When I was younger, I loved CNN, mainly because this is a little bit skewed to me and self-promotional. When I was young, I lived in a hotel in Seattle. You remember that, right? You've been to it a long time ago. I had a condo in a hotel. Olive Eight by Hyatt. And they wrote an article about that. And I got tons of press around the homepage, and that was cool, whatever. I got on also one of their TV shows and was a business agent during Thanksgiving years and years ago. So overall, I had a good experience with CNN. The reason I'm not a fan of CNN isn't because of what they do or they don't do. From a general perspective of people saying it's fake news or not.

• 2:16Speaker 01

  I stopped liking CNN because they said I was running for Senator or Governor or something. And they took my picture. And put it on and said it was me who's running. There's a lot of Neil Patel's in this world. I technically was not running and I forgot which state it was for. So I was getting bombarded with text messages, phone calls. And they were streaming me on TV and my picture all the time. They're like Neil's running. And they weren't saying really much about me, but enough people watched CNN, at least back then, when I was getting tons of phone calls. And I was like, man, these guys can't fact check to actually see which Neil Patel it is. And I was getting irritated and I even tweeted at them back in the day. They didn't remove it. And I was like, man, screw these people. And I literally got probably

• 3:02Speaker 01

  hundred to 200 phone calls and messages.

• 3:04Speaker 00

  Wow. Congratulations.

• 3:06Speaker 01

  Uh, yeah. And people are like, oh, how can we support you? And I had to keep texting people back and they're like, haha, stop joking. And I'm like, dude, this is just getting irritating.

• 3:13Speaker 00

  Dude, th- this is the thing with legacy media, right? They're still trying this stuff. And then the, the whole like, you know, the, the salute. The whole Elon salute thing this week was just nuts, right? Um, but by the way, I, I talked to my, my younger staff and I say, hey, like these, they're people in their mid twenties. I'm like, hey, do you trust the, the media? They're like, no, we don't. Um, so people have woken up. They've gotten over it, which is why you're going to see this continued fall of legacy media. Cause they continue to play these games. If they just focus on making the product better, they still have a chance. There's still a chance. But if you keep trying to play these games like, oh, so and so is like, you know, we're not going to use the word. Um, Elon is this, Elon is that. It's like, dude, that stuff is like, you might as well go, go do something productive.

• 3:55Speaker 01

  And I think what's going to end up happening is if you end up going away from what you know or skewing things. You're going to end up losing traffic and trust, which actually brings us into a really good, uh, topic of, uh, HubSpot's traffic going down.

• 4:12Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 4:13Speaker 01

  Right? You saw the pages that cause HubSpot's traffic to go down a hundred percent. This is according to SEMrush.

• 4:18Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 4:19Speaker 01

  And disclaimer here. It's not actually HubSpot's Google Analytics. So what percentage do they go down? Who knows, other than HubSpot? I actually don't think their SEO traffic going down is going to affect their business one bit.

• 4:32Speaker 00

  Yep. Well, at this point, you want to talk about, like, they are known, they're known, and a lot of their sales are, they've been going up market for a while. And so, and again, they're, they're a known entity in the CRM space. So, but I'm looking at some explanations here, by the way, in the comments. So this was tweeted by Ryan Law. And I know my, my friend Guy Tonno tweeted this morning, so HubSpot lost 80% of their SEO traffic or something like that. But it's, it's highly unlikely due to AI, because we would see similar patterns across other sites. But the most likely explanation is that the, the algo change that happened recently. And so they're ranking for a lot of unrelated top of funnel things. And so it makes sense to cut that. You, you should lose that traffic.

• 5:12Speaker 01

  And to clarify, these unrelated terms for things like famous quotes, small business ideas, quotes, cover letter examples, letter of resignation, how to make a graph in Excel, leadership styles, PR, website development, real estate license. These are all things that HubSpot really doesn't do.

• 5:34Speaker 00

  Yeah. Look, HubSpot's a great company. They have a great SEO team, but just know now, a lot of their stuff is driven by sales motions. And then the other thing is Dharmesh is going hard on agents and that's going to be, I, I think he's going to be able to capitalize on that. And that's going to, somehow, I think that's going to drive traffic and conversions. And that's going to relate to HubSpot in the long term. So I think they'll be fine. They have a strong team.

• 5:56Speaker 01

  They have a really strong team. You and I are on the same page. We don't really check our analytics that often. The update happened in December. Did you check your analytics since then?

• 6:06Speaker 00

  Nope.

• 6:07Speaker 01

  I haven't either. Did you check it the day after the update either?

• 6:09Speaker 00

  No. And like, I didn't even know when the date was. So like, yeah. But I, I do put pressure on the team just to check, for them to check and then for them to keep things updated. But that's about it.

• 6:18Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I keep up to date with what the updates are and what's happening. But for us, we generate most of our revenue from RFPs, referrals, whether it's from employees, clients. So we focus on the channels that drive majority of our revenue. We do keep track of our SEO traffic for the page that drives leads and the keywords that we rank for that drive, you know, real customers. Like, we used to rank on page one for the term SEO. And our team used to spend a ton of time updating it. So I asked my team, all right, go back for a whole year and find out all the people that we got as a customer from that page. And we did this for a few years and it was a whopping zero. And I was like, cool.

• 7:03Speaker 01

  Who cares if you're using it in a pitch presentation? Stop wasting your time updating this page. They're like, you sure? And I was like, anyone who's typing in the word SEO is usually looking to learn about the subject. They're really, really far off from paying us to do their SEO. Because we tend not to work with smaller businesses. I'm like, this is just gonna be a waste of time.

• 7:23Speaker 00

  Intent matters. You know, interestingly enough, um, so I had my um, head strategist today. He shared a call with me and then he was on a pitch with a, with a prospect. And the prospect was like, hey, look, like, great presentation and everything, but come on, like, I can do a lot of this stuff using Claude and AI now. And like, I just want you, like, I wanted to understand from you guys, like, where is your business going to go? And sure, we're paying X amount here, Y amount here, Z amount here. Um, but like, you know, isn't this stuff just all gonna be like machines in a couple of years? Um, and so I think we're gonna, that thought is probably pretty prevalent. And um, we should probably talk about it at some point, how to optimize for search everywhere optimization.

• 8:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, but going back really quickly to.

• 8:06Speaker 00

  HubSpot?

• 8:07Speaker 01

  I know, people complaining like, hey, isn't Claude or ChatGPT just gonna take over a lot of this stuff? We used to get that when some of the stuff came out. We don't really get it anymore. I don't know if you get it often on.

• 8:18Speaker 00

  No, that was only the first time. So he, he said, and I didn't, like, the team responded beautifully to it. Um, and so I, but I think the people that do understand that machines will replace repetitiveness, but they won't replace creativity.

• 8:35Speaker 01

  Funny enough, this will go live on my ex profile in a few days. We did analysis of this and uh, what Eric's looking at is how long are people spending to write a blog post that actually ranks on page one of Google?

• 8:48Speaker 01

  And I remember at our agency early on, people used to tell us, hey, we don't need you for content. We can just end up doing it. And we ended up losing some revenue over it.

• 8:58Speaker 01

  Majority of those customers ended up either A, coming back, or B, their traffic just declined and they didn't come back and they felt that they can figure it out and they're just gonna keep doing it through AI. But we didn't really see anyone successfully just transition with pure AI related content. So we were starting to look at data on how long it actually takes to write a blog post. And back in 2015, the average was around two hours and 10 minutes. This is for blog posts that actually gets traffic and ranks, right, from SEO perspective. Go to 2022, it ramped up all the way to three hours and 52 minutes. That's a huge difference. That's almost double. And the big reason being is blogging and ranking on Google has gone more and more competitive and it's much more saturated. There's only so many results on

• 9:43Speaker 01

  the first page, whether there's 10 results, eight results, or 12 results, it doesn't matter. There's still only so many results and there's only so much people are gonna scroll down. So you gotta put in more time to do the research, create something that's a masterpiece, something that's amazing, so that way it can actually rank high. When AI came out and in 2023, it really started taking the worldwide storm. It went from in 2022, three hours and 52 minutes, that people were spending two hours and 11 minutes to produce a blog post that ranked. But what we were finding, because we were working with a lot of these contractors and companies, is those blog posts didn't do as well in the long run. So you shoot up to 2024, the time went to two hours and 51 minutes, which is still more than 2015, but

• 10:28Speaker 01

  less than 2022. 2025 is forecasted on our, through our surveying and internal data, around two hours and 59 minutes, roughly three hours. What we're finding is AI can help you save time, but it's not at a place yet where you can just click a button and it can just replace humans. It's far from it. And counterintuitive, even though AI is getting better, people are actually spending more and more time to create content, even though AI is getting better. The reason being is it's more competitive than ever and you need that special touch of originality, which you're not getting with AI.

• 11:03Speaker 00

  Like I said. Machines for repetitiveness and humans for creativity. We're going to give you some hard numbers on AI customer support. So Ankar Nagpal, who sold Teachable. So he tweeted something out. He's just trying to get a sense from people that have gotten good at using AI for customer support. So the CEO of Intercom said, so Fin by Intercom has 3,900 customers. So that's their customer support agent, I'm guessing. So on average, it resolves 54% of queries in its way. When properly configured, it increases CSAT. So that's customer support, something score. You know what CSAT means?

• 11:40Speaker 01

  Uh-uh.

• 11:41Speaker 00

  Okay. So that's that. And then I believe Salesforce said it's 86% or something like that. And then this other guy over here tweeted, he says, "Giga ML, our resolve rate is 81% of tickets. For Zephto, they get 60,000 tickets per day, 1.8 million per month."

• 11:59Speaker 01

  I think the numbers and the percentages of the quality resolved tickets are lower than what some of these people are claiming like Salesforce, et cetera, because they're pitching the solutions. But I do think it is great and it can help you solve customer success. And it'll get better and better over time and solve more and more of them.

• 12:21Speaker 00

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• 12:56Speaker 01

  The kicker here for marketers is This technology can also be used to communicate with customers when they land on your website and try to convert visitors into leads. And it can, in essence, not just be customer support, but it can help nurture and move people throughout the funnel. So then that way you can increase your conversion rates. And I think that's, at least from a marketing perspective, that's a big thing that we're not really seeing too many companies leverage yet.

• 13:24Speaker 00

  Dude, there's a tool, you know, have you heard of hume.ai?

• 13:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:27Speaker 00

  Okay, so hume is the most natural conversation that I've seen that you can have back and forth with it. So I messaged them, I was like, hey, when are you guys gonna have like 11 labs integration? And also, hey Jen as well, because if you can do that, then like, okay, game over, right? Then you put on your site, and it's just like a Neil Patel talking to you all day. It's Eric Hsu talking to you all day. And it's also an infinitely patient Neil Patel and an infinitely patient Eric, right? You can ask me however many questions you want, it's okay, I'll be there for you.

• 13:53Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 13:54Speaker 00

  Yeah. So I think that's gonna be great. Let's talk one more AI thing. This is from Paul Graham, founder of Y Combinator. So he said, I talked to a CEO of a moderately big tech company who said they've replaced Figma. So Figma is like Adobe, you're doing design work, you're collaborating. He says they've replaced Figma with Replit. So Replit is a code editor, it's an AI code editor. I've been talking about it quite a bit. You can build prototypes, you can design landing pages. And he said, this surprised me because I don't even think of them of being in the same business. But he said, Replit is so good at generating apps that they go straight to prototype now. And then Greg Eisenberg, who's also speaking at the YPO Global Marketing Summit, he's like, dude, they'll sit in a meeting now, and then one of the engineers might just be prototyping using Replit.

• 14:36Speaker 00

  And then by the middle of the meeting, he's like, hey, I got this prototype ready to go.

• 14:40Speaker 01

  I love it.

• 14:41Speaker 00

  Yeah. Guys, the age of the AI introvert, it's here.

• 14:45Speaker 01

  I don't know if I told you this last week, but the biggest problem we're facing in our company right now when it comes to product is not engineering anymore. It's product and getting the product people to move faster to keep up with engineers, because engineers are using AI to just do their job so much faster. Product people need to use AI as well, and we have product people that are using AI. But you still need them in the loop. They're just not moving as fast as engineers. And that'll be solved on R and within thirty days, Mike's going down to Brazil to solve it.

• 15:18Speaker 00

  Oh, of course.

• 15:19Speaker 01

  You know.

• 15:19Speaker 00

  That's so good. See, look, you gotta, you gotta be involved and you gotta be the pusher. You gotta have ideally multiple pushers in the company.

• 15:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:25Speaker 00

  Yeah. By the way, by the, the, the AI product thing is, I saw a tweet about this. It's the same exact point. So if you use something like a cursor, you're gonna be five X faster as an engineer. And then if you use like Devon, you might even be like, you can multiply these, right? So our engineers, one engineer can become ten or twenty engineers. The thing about product people, the tweet said, look, product people are basically screwed unless the product people become enabled by AI. Then one product person can become ten product people. But if you don't fix this now, you're basically screwed.

• 15:54Speaker 01

  What we found is with AI and product is you still need the person to be methodical and just create the best experience out there. And AI is great. It's not perfect yet. It goes back to what Eric and I have been saying for a while now, in which if you combine AI with the human, you're gonna get much better results. And I showcased that in one of our earlier episodes, talking about how long it takes to write a blog post that ranks on page one. And people are still spending more time, you know, AI has helped reduce time, but from twenty twenty-three to twenty twenty-five, people are spending more and more time because you need that human touch in there. The same goes with product. You still need it in there, but if you're not using these tools to become more efficient, you're just making a big mistake.

• 16:36Speaker 00

  I'm very optimistic. I mean, I'm very optimistic about business in general in twenty twenty-five. Basically what Stanley Drucker Miller said. Well, we'll end on, on this note. So you saw what the Anthropic CEO said about AI, right?

• 16:47Speaker 01

  Uh, it depends what you're saying, but I also know they just raised a billion, a million, was no billion dollars extra from Google. I believe that is sixty billion valuation.

• 16:55Speaker 00

  So he said, over the next two or three years, I am relatively confident that we are indeed going to see models in the workplace that consumers use and that gradually get better than us at almost everything. Almost everything. He said, look, he said, my philosophy of talent is that talent density beats talent mass every time, which is what we just said earlier. He said, you want a relatively small set of people where almost everyone you hire is really, really good. He's like, these models will go off and do a bunch of things and check in with you every once in a while. Think of it as having all the piping, all the inputs and outputs of a human operating virtually.

• 17:29Speaker 01

  I do think AI is going to change a lot of businesses over the next three years. But at the same time, whether it's Anthropic or OpenAI or Nvidia, it benefits them to push AI.

• 17:37Speaker 00

  They're incentivized to say that.

• 17:39Speaker 01

  Yeah. I, I think there's going to be some sort of in-between. I think it was the Google CEO or Elon Musk that said, a lot of what we've seen with AI has pretty much come out. There is going to be a lot more changes, but the other changes that are going to happen in the future are going to be much more harder to accomplish than what we've seen. You know, uh, since the early days, because a lot of the low hanging fruit has been done. And now it's really the hard stuff that they're working on.

• 18:05Speaker 00

  You know what I think AI is eventually going to do? I think what it's going to do, it's going to make all people realize that being on the beach, it gets boring really quickly. And it's going to unlock creativity because the thing is entrepreneurship is creativity. Being an artist is creativity. It's going to unlock creativity for almost a hundred percent of the world. And they'll realize that's the point of everything, not retiring on the beach.

• 18:25Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 18:25Speaker 00

  All right. So that is it for today, guys. Go to marketingschool.io/agency to learn more about the Agency Owners Association. And that's the group where you're going to see our churn numbers get even better. Goodbye.