00:27:17 · Guillaume Moubeche
[00:27:17] S1: So just to be clear, sorry to interrupt, but just to be clear, it means that the ad space you bought, for example, for a big creator, instead of having that ad space talk about HubSpot, you would talk about another creator inside the program, that way, your show would would jump to...
00:27:37 · Kieran Flanagan
[00:27:37] S0: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We would talk about HubSpot. So we we we could do whatever we want with half the inventory, and so a lot of it would go to HubSpot, and then some of it would go to other career programs. Nice. You could only... If you were the... And then the other... There's an incentive to get up the tier and grow your audience because if you're the top tier, you can get cross promoted by the entire network. But if you're in the bottom tier, you can only get promoted by the other people in the bottom tier. Now sometimes, like, if you're doing well, we can give you a bump and have some of the bigger shows cross promote you. And so we started that podcast, and then we went to YouTube. And we... We've recently started... We've been doing a lot of that on newsletters. We bought the hostel. We bought a couple of other newsletters since then as well. So that has actually surpassed... We used to create a lot of our demand through search content, like a lot... You know, blogs and all of these other things. We generate way, way more demand now through that network than we did through the the other... The kind of more search driven content. And so that was one of the that was one of the plays we invested in terms of... Now that that... I I think if you're if you're watching this, you're like, sure. Like, you know, it's pub... There's a public figure that we spent $2,027,000,000 on the hustle. It's not easy to build that out. I do get that. I think that is, like, the ability for a big company to do that. But the learning for any company is, well, what is the unfair advantage? How can I win in something? And I do think creators are part of everyone's marketing strategy, whether you're big or small. It just, it varies in terms of what kind of scale.
00:28:59 · Guillaume Moubeche
[00:28:59] S1: Yeah. And whenever you have to allocate your budget and you see that SEO typically is going down like 80%, Like, do you decide to stop SEO? Like, do you decide to maintain it with like a smaller team? Like how exactly do you manage all of that?
00:29:18 · Kieran Flanagan
[00:29:18] S0: No, we were early to pivot the SEO team into like SEO plus and trends and optimization. Now SEO, a lot of that traffic was informational. And informational is basically we acquired so much traffic because we figured out how to teach you things. And then based upon teaching you things, we could monetize a small sliver of that traffic. But because we acquired so much traffic, it actually equated to a lot of customers. So you have your informational. That all went because... Why did that go? Because AI turned informational content into actionable content. Right? Forever, we would... You think of pre AI, I would be like, okay. You know, I really need to figure out how to make my Facebook ads much, much better. And so I Google, like, top 10 ways to make my Facebook ad ad campaigns, like, way better. And I read that, and then I figure out how to apply that. AI is, like, killed that now because AI is reading the blog post. And I go into AI and they say, make my Facebook campaign better. And it... Like, it's reading the blog post, and it's doing the action for you. So it's completely killed the need for a lot of informational content. But transactional search still works pretty well, which is, hey. I'm searching for products, and then I'm doing this kind of initial research, and I'm trying to figure out what's the right products for me. So there's still some value in ranking for transactional keywords, which are ones that were... That are in the buying process. However, I still think all of that's going to disappear into the AI engines because the AI engines are gonna be a much better source for you to understand how to buy products. And I think there's a stat that says by 2027... So traditionally, 80% of all buyer journeys in B2B started on search. By 2027, which is next year, which is crazy, it's predicted that 80% of them will start in answer engines. And I suspect we'll see by the end of the decade everything start in an answer engine. I I don't know what Google are gonna do with their blue links. And so we were pivoted pretty hard into how do we appear in ChatGPT, how do we appear in all these answer engines, and become... We are the most visible brand in our vertical now in those answer engines, and we figured out how to kind of become more visible there.
00:31:22 · Kieran Flanagan, Guillaume Moubeche
But the, you know, the difference is that traffic is way less measurable and trackable, which is a problem. [00:31:28] S1: Do you feel like the best way to improve, like, your... I think it's called GEO, like the optimization on ChatGPT and other, like, LLMs. Like, do you think that the... All the content you created on YouTube, the fact that you're partnering with creators, etcetera, has helped you, like, tremendously? Like, what do you think is the impact of social on all of that?
00:31:52 · Kieran Flanagan
[00:31:52] S0: Yeah. No. If you look at where the platform source citations from, so citations really drive how visible you are in these platforms. And they're constantly changing these, so you'd have to go and, like, refresh. You'd have to go ask them what their big... You know, you can go get this information. For example, OpenAI used to rely heavily on Reddit, and I think over time, it's tried to decouple itself from Reddit. But it certainly is looking at places like YouTube. Google is in particular looking at YouTube. They look at LinkedIn. So the part of the value of having and working with creators is not only in the impressions or direct conversions, but it's also in driving citations. And, you know, the example... A good example of this is affiliate programs. Like affiliate programs, you would actually pay someone to promote you. They would have an affiliate link. They would click on that link, and then they get a certain percentage of that revenue. Now you could have an affiliate network that is really just for citations. Right? Like, that actually is talking about you in all these different places, and they don't even add a they don't even to add a link. They just need to, like, mention your brand with the phrases that you care about. And that actually can improve your visibility in these answer engines.