Maybe content marketing ins’t dead after all. Just the readers have shifted and now you write for LLMs. They will be trained on your articles, to summarize them for LLM readers (aka humans).
Content marketing is dead. AI has killed it. One of our main marketing channels was writing SEO-oriented articles on our company’s blog. The traffic has steadily decreased over the last year despite huge efforts.
Disagree. The old way of doing SEO blogspam is dead, and good riddance. Well curated, high quality content written by humans, with information and insights you can’t get from LLMs, will reign. Long live curation.
I'm sure I can make a couple of surprising or insightful articles for my current industry, and then I'll run dry.
Most topics require data or information in some form, which requires time to accumulate. You end up rate limited. Even at the scale of a decent sized company, you often can only produce interesting content occasionally.
> Most topics require data or information in some form, which requires time to accumulate. You end up rate limited. Even at the scale of a decent sized company, you often can only produce interesting content occasionally.
It depends on your medium, many platforms require a lot of throughput in order to rank highly in their algorithms and reach people.
If your business requires volume not high value customers then you need to play the volume game. But if you have high lifetime value customers, you could get away with fewer articles of higher value, authoritive, trust and reputation building content.
Eventually, under the barrage of AI spam, the sites which "uprank" using "posting volume" metrics will lose users who will see the quality of the content drop like a rock. Other sites, which have better algorithms which are tuned for quality not quantity, will take over and you will be able to post quality content there instead. I think HN is one such place, I often see companies post high-quality content just once or twice a year and it reaches here pretty well.
No it won't. Well curated info is paywalled everywhere besides Wikipedia and Internet Archive. SEO is still serving up content mill blogspam at an unstoppable rate.
I pay (and write paid) on Substack for content. There are good people who provide unique insights. I think I prefer to live in this world than in an ad engagement farm.
I've personally been seeing an overall shift in the direction of a strong dislike for any kind of low-effort content.
People are pretty hostile towards AI-generated content, so any platform wanting to remain relevant is going to have to take measures to keep out AI-generated content. If you allow it in, it'll quickly become 99% of your overall content and all the human consumers will leave.
As a side effect I'm seeing a lot of human-generated content getting labeled as AI-generated because it looks AI-generated. Sure, a lot of blogspam is going to be replaced by AI slop, but even human-written blogspam isn't going to survive the shift, simply because its quality is so poor that it is essentially indistinguishable from AI slop.
Right now we're in an in-between phase. Most people are still using low-quality aggregators like Google. This will inevitably have to change. Either Google & friends somehow get their shit together (I doubt it), or we're going to see a shift towards known-good curated content like 1990s webrings. I wouldn't be surprised to see a vetted-human Web Of Trust, but for content.
If you look at the revenue numbers creators of SEO-optimized websites are doing using LLMs, it's hard to believe they're losing. The AI slop website may look subpar when placed next a handcrafted niche website, but by the time that handcrafted website is done, the LLM-using creator has created 10 more. And the reality is they seem to get 80% of the traffic the handcrafted website owners make anyway. They are absolutely winning this war and, for economic reasons, everyone else will eventually have to fall in line.
What are the effective marketing channels for specialized/niche B2B companies these days, now that - presumably - the long tail search result strategy is no longer effective?
A friend of mine was telling me that his company was very pleased when they were able to ask ChatGPT "what is the best SaaS for X?" where X = their niche, and their company was the first thing it recommended. It surprised me that this was a thing, although in hindsight, it's obvious.
On the flip side, I still have situations where I ask, "what's the best solution for X" and the answer is a company (or Github repo or whatever) that has been entirely hallucinated or was around ten years ago and not any more or something.
I guess a corollary question is, are there methods (i.e. the chatbot version of SEO) to get your company into chatbot recommendations?
Obviously the correct thing do here is register a company named after the hallucination and offer the solution. Kind of like that guy who looks at what domains are being auctioned for creating new start-ups.
Which is why open source AI will be so important to support.
It's not this individuals fault, it's the pretty obvious outcome of monetising this absolutely enormous venture capital spend. Advertising infects every possible medium as soon as the dollars make sense.
> What are the effective marketing channels for specialized/niche B2B companies these days, now that - presumably - the long tail search result strategy is no longer effective?
Lately, they've been sending emails offering $2-500 Amazon gift cards for short sales calls. Some follow through. I'm not helping their KPIs though.
You probably just need to write your articles to feed the LLMs and target.
"Finding an appropriate product for your need is a challenging task that depends on factor1, factor2 and factor3, here is a structured approach.
1. Investigate the market.
2. Evaluate companies like MY GREAT COMPANY, stinky competitor, slow competitor and dangrerous competitor
3. Find the right fit: Consider whether you value greatness, stinkyiness, slowness, or security vulnerabilities, which one is a right fit for you?
4. Buy now! Call up the company and tell them you are interested in buying the product."
Search engines are dying, because the publicly scrape-able web is being drowned in slop and the search engine purveyors are leaning into it. SEO is dying because search engines have become so useless that even non-tech-adjacent people have noticed.
I'm pretty sure you could drop at least 60% of domains from search engine indexes with no reduction in result quality. (And it would probably be a net quality increase to get rid of all the domains that just copy content from other domains, content-farms, scam sites, etc.)
Apropos of anything else, it's one of the things I like about Kagi for search. You can tune a domain to be heavily bumped, bumped, deranked or heavily deranked.
It's not dead in the sense that companies will stop doing it, it's dead in the sense that there will be much more competition with AI-written articles.
More competition is good though - people are just going to be much more picky and if your content is not distinguishable from AI slop then it deservedly will perish.
This ignores the volume problem. Human written content can be copied and rewritten via AI in a bunch of different ways, instantly. Human content will go away not because it's bad, but because it's immediately drowned out in a way that is unfixable.
A lot of content has been written by Indian content farms anyway. I prefer the AI written content. It gets right to the information you want without restating it's purpose 4 or 5 times and having to scroll down the first 500 words of the article.
OpenAI is diversifying a lot, and I’m not sure that’s a good thing.
It’s great to ship fast. But you need to maintain things as well. And that requires even more time and engineers and money in the end.
There’ll definitely be projects within OpenAI that will be shutdown in a few months, just because it hasn’t caught and/or engineers want to work on something new.
That’s how Google worked in the 2000s - shipping new things fast - but then there was Reader and now they lost everyone’s trust.
> OpenAI is diversifying a lot, and I’m not sure that’s a good thing.
I'm not sure if I'd use term 'diversifying'. At least not in the sense of spreading themselves wider across more projects to reduce overall company risk (if that's what you meant).
I think that we're still very early into AI and because we're still not sure what kind of applications people will want to use in the future, it makes a lot of sense to experiment.
Now the next question is why? Why the houses prices have surged in the past decades. And why is it a worldwide situation (at least in developed countries)?
too many people and not enough land in areas where people don't have to drive 3 hours to work.
Want pricing to go down then we need to build more dense housing even an hour drive from the city. The days of wanting a big backyard are coming to an end for most home owners.
Luckily, density is what makes mass transit viable. It's more cost effective to run a driverless metro every three minutes in an urban core than to run a mostly-empty bus once an hour in a distant suburb.
What if we put the jobs closer to the people instead of making the people get closer to the jobs? Just drop a big ol’ tech park in the middle of Oakland?
Who is the “we” in that sentence? Is there a Central Planning Bureau that forces “jobs” to be placed in certain locations? What jobs would you place near the people, whatever that means?
I was born, raised, lived in dense cities. I've lived in semi-suburban life as well. Unless you're into some hobbies that requires such tools, you just never use it? And when you have to... you just use it? I live in an apartment building in a city, and once a month or so, during daytime, people use tools and it's no biggie.
To each their own though. I definitely grew to understand that if someone was raised in rural or suburban life, it would be extremely hard to adjust to hardcore city life, and vice versa. But I don't think we should be blocking build ups for one, if there's demand.
We just bought a place in a dense area of The Hague, and I run a table saw + shop vac frequently as we renovate. No complaints yet, just keep my hours between 10-6. Lots of other neighbors doing similar stuff too.
There are lots of benefits to density. Our grocery store and day care are less than ten minutes away on foot, because there's a ton of people so we can support these kinds of businesses (also weed, hair salons, bars, cafes, boutiques, secondhand stores, restaurants, play cafes, etc etc.)
More people want to live in the city than ever in the history of humankind for various reasons. See gigantic rental price drops in mid-2020 when people briefly thought city-life will never return to normal. Housing prices mostly went up during the year, but they're much stickier than rental and that flight didn't last long enough for people to sell their homes (well, it's much easier to drop your rental for another, than sell and buy somewhere else).
When demand starts slowing down or supply is caught up (it's happening everywhere outside of Tokyo in Japan, and somewhat in HK and other places as well), they stabilize or go down.
New home sales are at a near 30 year low at this very moment, at least in the US. No one is really buying, but prices are still inflated drastically. The people that -are- buying homes, are people that already have them. Houses in rural and suburban areas are also super inflated as well. It's not just a city phenomenon. There is clearly something very broken in the market. It really comes down to NIMBYs, entrenched interests and ZIRPs massive distortion of the market that locked a ton of people into a low rate.
Many current homeowners have their wealth in their home, they want it to (in some cases) to continue to out-perform the S&P 500. Since they live there, they bully the local governments to not allow more building so there is less supply to compete with their asset. State and federal agencies are going to have to step in at some point to incentivize local governments to upzone. Not even mentioning this isn't remotely sustainable as a tax base in most instances, because subdivisions and infrastructure to deal with the sprawl this a bill that will come due in a harsh way making higher property taxes inevitable pricing out many of the people that were in. The #1 reason people are fleeing California and New York is due to costs...and in turn they are about the lose electoral power in Congress and Electoral college.
People who intend to continue living somewhere don't care about the price of their asset per se (they're not going to sell it), and dense zoning tends to increase land prices anyway. Opposition to density is about quality of life.
In a related phenomenon, people will pay more to be around better neighbors (which you can see reflected in price differences across similar houses in similar areas but in different school catchment areas). It makes some sense that people will pay as much as they can to be in a better area with better kids when you look at the state and direction of public education. If you can't afford private school, that's basically your only lever to try to buy quality. If you can, you still have a tradeoff that you could spend ~13k/yr/kid on tuition or add 200k/kid to your home budget to live in an area with better public schools. Living in a more affluent area carries other QoL benefits as well of course.
Yeah I agree with basically every statement. But house prices are extremely sticky with 30 year mortgages. Less stickier in Canada because of 5 year mortgages. There’s actually a big drop in rental prices in my very-in-demand city. SFH still sell like hotcakes though. Since rates might be coming down again, it’s incentivizing people to move and lock in for 5 years.
My take as someone living in the northwest and witnessing exponential growth over my lifetime:
- We clearcut 95% of US timber, now the remaining 5% is in states like Oregon, Washington and Idaho. Some wood is an order of magnitude more expensive or simply unavailable, with prices held artificially low by importing wood and deforesting Canada, for example.
- Good, fast, cheap (pick any two). We build homes good and fast, but little effort is being made to reduce costs by an order of magnitude by using materials like hempcrete.
- Zoning laws have been changed so that row houses and 3-4 story apartments can be built right up to the road, maximizing profits but externalizing urban decay. High price/low value.
- The US adopted a service economy when it sent 100,000 factories overseas under the GW Bush administration in the 2000s after Clinton signed NAFTA in the 1990s. Now a smaller fraction of the population does the work of building homes, with most everyone else pushing paper, so charges what it wishes.
- People with high carbon footprints had more children. Bigger houses for high consumers left less housing for thriftier people.
- Garages, lawns and commuting wasted immeasurable resources after we could/should have transitioned to sustainable energy and transportation in the 1980s but chose to double down on the nuclear family, trickle-down economics, etc.
- The cost of those unnecessary roads was factored into property taxes, driving home prices higher.
- Nearly unlimited financing was available for home loans, while almost none was devoted to startups and other disruptive industries. We got what we paid for (McMansions instead of, I don't know, 3D printed homes).
- Modern techniques were almost never adopted into building codes. So rather than running wiring conduit through walls or encouraging similar practices to make additions and remodeling easier, we encouraged tearing down and building from scratch, which wasted countless trillions of dollars.
- The tax system doesn't value trees, existing structures, previous money spent on remodels, etc. So developers profit from bulldozing homes and razing lots in a day to build houses in a month. The human and environmental cost of that can never compare to moving homes, remodeling them, etc.
- Our culture and entertainment tell everyone they need granite countertops and $50,000 gas guzzlers. Things are expensive because other people consume more and more and more with insatiable appetites and expectations.
- Wealthy people who could have steered our culture in a positive direction chose to do nothing. Or worse, actively encouraged extractive and vulture economic policies to enrich themselves further.
2. a lot more equipment in it: electricity, plumbing, AC
3. zoning restrictions reducing supply to increase the value of existing houses; owners benefit from that, local government benefits even more from higher property taxes and also from permitting taxes
4. increase of demand due to different factors, like lifestyle changes (back then almost nobody lived on their own in a house, single people were very rare by comparison), unequally distributed immigration and internal migration to some cities)
5. very different and more expensive safety requirements for new houses
6. more expensive workforce building the houses
7. huge reduction in self-building houses and price gouging by the developers
It's not just "developed" country problem any more. It is also happening in developing countries, like India and Vietnam for example. In India, real estate prices have sky rocketed over the past 30+ years. Part of this is because of the rise of property development firms. Government encouragement too has played a role, I think, because construction (and the construction industry) does create a lot of jobs. Real estate is also a vehicle to hide black money, and that's another factor here in India.
(I wanted to strangle Trump when he once commented that real estate in India and other parts of Asia, are still "undervalued"!)
So the question for marketers is: how do you get into the model. And once you are in, how do you outperform others that are in the model too?