Matt Bailey [00:00:01]:
Here we go. My own little closet that looks really, really impressive. Alright. I'll do a quick intro, and then we will jump into it. Well, hello, and welcome to another edition of the endless coffee cup podcast. As always, I'm your host, Matt Bailey. And with me today, you might have heard him before, but it's John Sciotta from News Dash. John, how are you doing today?

John Shehata [00:00:26]:
Hey. How are you doing, Matt? It's good to come here again.

Matt Bailey [00:00:29]:
Good to talk with you. And I'll tell you what, the reason why I it's been, like, burning in my mind that I've got to talk to you because of all this news about search generative experience, AI, publishers. I you know, John, it's like one of those the sky is falling type things. You know? I I listen to different people, and, you know, I just wanted your opinion on this. Is this going to be as big as they're promising, or is it, you know how do you see things changing over the next few months or few years?

Matt Bailey [00:01:05]:
Yeah. To be honest with you, I keep shifting my mind, on that. Like, when I when this thing started, I thought this is gonna be end of all. Right? It's like, oh my god. And it used to be huge. You will see it if you have a white listed account. You will see it on almost every search. Right? The data was not that good, and I was like, okay.

Matt Bailey [00:01:29]:
This is gonna hit, everyone very hard. Right? And then after a while, the they kept, iterating on the the UX. Right? And it kept shrinking and shrinking and shrinking. So no more the default, like, the expanded view. Right? And the majority of searches, you will get, like, either shrunk, which is, like, couple of lines and then or, like, hey. Generate AI or generate the, the the snippet. So, and I said, okay. And then that kept happening and happening and happening.

Matt Bailey [00:02:05]:
And then they removed the the date. It's like, they're not committing. They're not committed to, to have any specific date to publish the SGA. And then then on top of that, when you see Bing results, they haven't gotten any market share at all. Right? So I think this whole thing, and I'm gonna come back to my own opinion, but I think this whole thing is more like the space race where, like, Russia and US, who gonna get to the moon first or the space first. Right? Or it's like Bing and Google. In early days, we have index 1,000,000 pages and the other search engine, we have index 10,000,000 pages. And so I think Google there was more of like, oh, we need to be always on the front runner or the frontier of any new, advancement, right, to technology and stuff like this.

Matt Bailey [00:02:56]:
And they saw that Bing took the upper hand. But after after the market share numbers and everything else, it's not like people change the way they do things. It's not like people switch to Bing to enjoy free chat gbt because it's free there. Right? So I think that's my opinion. I think they're gonna slow things down.

Matt Bailey [00:03:19]:
Yeah.

Matt Bailey [00:03:20]:
And I think it get if they publish it, if, I I think it it gonna be in a very moderate way. It's not gonna be expanded. It gonna be shrunk. It's not gonna be for every single query, but definitely, it gonna impact different types of content more than others.

Matt Bailey [00:03:42]:
Absolutely. And and being in the publishing industry and and dear listener, you know, I would recommend go and listen to an earlier podcast. I'm gonna link to it where you can get John's cred. He's been in the publishing industry for many years. So if you wanna know what's going on in news and publishing, John's the guy. How you know, have you seen this effect publishing right now? How some of the AI has been working in and and how they've been changing results?

Matt Bailey [00:04:10]:
Right now, it's still only for white, white listed accounts. Right? So you you you don't see the major impact, And we don't know how many people are white listed to see the labs and see all that stuff. So I think it's still, not open to the public. So, like, we cannot examine it with our tool and stuff. But going back to the point I mentioned before, I think once it goes out there in the public, and it depends on the frequency and saturation and was like, how many people will see it, I think you will have different types of content that get impacted differently. So if you think, for example, about about affiliate content, right, where like, or commerce content, right, Where publishers, publish content like, hey. These are the best in vacations, this summer. This is the best, men's sun class sunglasses, in 2024, or this is the best whatever.

Matt Bailey [00:05:07]:
Right? All of these kind of, like, commerce content where publishers earn revenue or commission based on sending traffic to, like, Amazon or, any of the commerce sites. I think if if you see the Google, SGE experience, when you search about that, it was like, oh, here is the top 10, best vacations, right, for you and your family, and they give you everything, or this is the tip top ten best sunglasses for men. This is the criteria. These are the top 10, And then this is the best price for each one, and you click on it and it gives you all the stores and the prices for each one. I think Google will eliminate the middleman Mhmm. From the equation or most of it, and get a lot of this traffic, especially if they're gonna try to push Google Shopping, and, Google Direct Pay. So this is gonna have a huge impact. But it's catch 22 because Google has developed that information from the publisher content.

Matt Bailey [00:06:12]:
Right? Right. If you remove the incentive from publishers no longer writing about that content, the quality gonna degrade, over time. Right? Because you're only gonna have low quality content for, like, you know, spam sites or other low quality sites where they don't care if they get, like, few pennies here and there. Right? So I I think it's gonna be catch 22. So this is one type of content, but there are so many other types of content. Another one for publishing, which I think most interesting for publishers and breaking news is I thought in the beginning that SGE will not show up for sensitive topics. Right? And will not show up for, like, breaking news. Right? Or recently developed news.

Matt Bailey [00:06:56]:
Like, an earthquake just happened in, LA, for example, or a war just erupted in this country, or this congressman or woman, just got impeached or, like, outsed. Right? So, like, you think about these kind of incidents and you say, you know what? It's, Google will not get into that. Right? But, recently, as I've been tracking it more and more, I remember was when Kevin McCarthy was out, from the Congress, SGE started showing up after 6 to 8 hours Wow. Saying, hey. When I get the whole facts, you know, you click on it, and it tells you at 6 hours ago or today, this happened, and this is the sequence of events and the right? And these are, like, 3 or 4 articles. Right? So what happened now, it pushed all top stories or the news box, news module all the way down. And in a state of me going to the publisher to understand what's taking place, actually, all what I have to read is Google summary, and I know exactly what happened. And so on and so there are so many, other content types.

Matt Bailey [00:08:00]:
But if this gets fully developed, it gonna be, a big impact, Again, based on how many people will see it and interact with it.

Matt Bailey [00:08:09]:
Oh, absolutely. I, you know, the I think the fear is that Google is going to take over the whole front page, and it's going to be Google generated content. Google, you know, their own product. Like you said, their their own product, from shopping, their summaries of the news. And, you know, there's a you know, it's funny. I think in in any time Google has changed something, there's always been those that are just, you know, Google's evil. Google and and I feel like I'm listening to them more because of this. Because but I would say the only thing that, you know, that that I would say is contrary to that is I have never seen Google make so many missteps in so little time

Matt Bailey [00:08:55]:
Yeah.

Matt Bailey [00:08:55]:
As they have in the past year. Yeah. It's been absolutely amazing that they'll overstate or they'll release, and it's broke or it doesn't work or it's just bad. Yeah. It it's been an interesting past year with them.

Matt Bailey [00:09:11]:
Absolutely. I mean, a lot of SEOs are complaining about the quality of the results, the the spammy results all over, especially around Google properties. Right? Mhmm. So it's it's very interesting what's going on with Google. And this year are gonna be like, will are people impacted? Do people see the difference? Will people change search engines? Or do you know? We have been using Google for 20 years, and it's very hard to change right now. I'm talking about our generations. Right? I think newer generations, I don't know. I wonder if they search at all or not.

Matt Bailey [00:09:48]:
They do little search, but newer generations, as you know, is like they live on social. Right?

Matt Bailey [00:09:53]:
Yeah.

Matt Bailey [00:09:54]:
And and that's why some social platforms are becoming search engines. Right? It's like and and I think, like, if you if you study the China, right, you will see that search is not a big thing at all. Everyone lives on their social apps. Right? You buy. You talk to your friends. You you browse and explore, and, you know, you do everything. The the social app for you is everything. It has everything.

Matt Bailey [00:10:23]:
And I think with newer generation, I think this is where US is heading in few years.

Matt Bailey [00:10:30]:
Yeah. That is absolutely you know, people get locked in. I I still laugh, you know, the other day. Like, how many people are still using Facebook, as I got on to Facebook to see what was going on. It just I was surprised how many of my friends were still there and and very active. But, yeah, I think Google has gotten baked into things, but, yeah, like you, I think it's funny that, you know, people rail against big tech, but the one thing they don't wanna give up is their big tech. Yes. They don't wanna give up their phones.

Matt Bailey [00:11:00]:
They don't wanna give up their search engine. They don't wanna give up their precious Google Drive. You know? So it's it it's strange to see that contradiction. And I I kinda wonder how far Google has to go in burning reputation, before people start to take notice of it, as you said, with the the quality of the results, the you you know, will people recognize that all of this information is coming from Google? It's not coming from a, a trusted name or a trusted domain. You know, will people respond to that? You know, there there is something to said about, you know, publishers build reputations. Yeah. That is part of that news industry.

Matt Bailey [00:11:43]:
Absolutely. And I, I think I don't know, I think the next 5 to 10 years is gonna be very interesting. Mhmm. Very, very interesting. For SEO as an industry, for search engine as a user behavior, right, there is a lot of question marks how things gonna go over the last, the next few years.

Matt Bailey [00:12:07]:
Absolutely. It is, a strange time we are living in because, I can't think of another time, you you know, over the you know, since this digital marketing industry has come about, I can't think of another time in the past 20, 30 years that just within a year, year and a half, so much has changed and really turned upside down.

Matt Bailey [00:12:31]:
Yeah.

Matt Bailey [00:12:32]:
So yeah, it's it's funny seeing everyone's predictions about SGE, but like you said, I've seen you know, it's getting pulled back more and more and more. But yet that fear is still there, especially among publishers.

Matt Bailey [00:12:45]:
Yeah. I mean, one thing to consider, Matt, too, is this is the very first development in Google that is that is impacting revenue negatively. If you think about it. Right? So Google biggest revenue source is still search and display ads. Right? It's the number 1. Right? And if you if you're planning I keep repeating this example because it's a really good one. If you're planning a vacation for your family with 2 kids, age, I don't know, 14 16, right, into a warm place in the winter season, right, by the beach. Right? Imagine if you do search after search, probably gonna take you, like, probably 2 weeks, and let's say maybe anywhere from 50 to a 100 search queries.

Matt Bailey [00:13:36]:
Right. Refining, looking, reading, reviewing, finding hotels, looking, and so on. Right? So imagine a 100 searches over 2 weeks. Right? And how many display ads you're gonna come across. Now imagine you go to, Google and say, s g e. What are or barter, Gemini now? It keeps changing. Right? Exactly.

Matt Bailey [00:13:58]:
I was like Typical Google. Let's change the name again.

Matt Bailey [00:14:02]:
And I was like, hey. Recommend education for me and my family, h next month in a warm place. Right? And you put all of this and Google is like, oh, here are the best places. Okay. For this place, can you give me the best hotels? Here are the best hotels. Right? So you can finish this journey that takes 2 weeks, a 100 searches, and maybe one setting with minimal ads displayed. So you lost all this ad revenue. So that makes me feel like you know? Or sometimes you have to lose to gain, but that that's that's a big thing.

Matt Bailey [00:14:41]:
Right? The loss of display revenue from these kind of journeys.

Matt Bailey [00:14:45]:
That is big. And I I think if we've learned anything about Google, it's all about the revenue. It is Revenue is everything and especially, you know, search and display. That is the golden egg, and they will do anything to improve that. You you know, we we go back to, you know, how many thousands of shades of blue do they test to see what people will click on the most. And this is a company that's driven by revenue. So you bring up an excellent point that, you know and, absolutely, it's all about the revenue. So, you know, are they pulling back because they're seeing a drop in that? But at the same time, you know, if I get my questions answered, you know, now you're gonna hit publishers if you go to their sites and there's no ads.

Matt Bailey [00:15:32]:
You know, we're we're pulling that art. It is it is essentially poisoning a big ecosystem.

Matt Bailey [00:15:39]:
Yes.

Matt Bailey [00:15:39]:
And like you said, it's not just the the revenue of the ads you're gonna see on Google. It's It's the ads on the sites that you see. This is this is potentially altering their entire, revenues, you know, 80% of the revenue stream.

Matt Bailey [00:15:55]:
Yeah. And and with publisher as an industry, that is already hurting. Right? Mhmm. That still the majority of publishers depend on, display ad revenues on their sites. Right? So it's all about the traffic and and very except exception for very few publishers where subscription revenue now is big and center, but the majority of publishers still the this, depend on the ad revenue on their sites. Right? This is gonna be a huge impact when you start seeing less and less traffic and this ad revenue becomes cheaper and cheaper year after year. Right? I I think it is gonna really impact the the the industry, and and it reminds me do you remember Craigslist Yeah.

Matt Bailey [00:16:39]:
When

Matt Bailey [00:16:40]:
it was launched? Right? Back in the days, publishers used to make a ton of money from classifieds.

Matt Bailey [00:16:46]:
Right.

Matt Bailey [00:16:46]:
I don't know. Almost like 3000%

Matt Bailey [00:16:49]:
Right.

Matt Bailey [00:16:49]:
Right margins. Right? It was huge. And then Craigslist was the disruptor. Right? It came. It give people for free ads and something like this. That killed a lot of publishers. Right?

Matt Bailey [00:17:01]:
Yeah.

Matt Bailey [00:17:02]:
And I'm not I'm not judging as a good or bad. I'm not saying. I'm just making an observation. I think we're gonna go into an era where a lot of publishers, especially on the revenue side, gonna be impacted unless they start discovering and growing alternative revenue models than just depending on, ad revenue.

Matt Bailey [00:17:23]:
Yeah. Let me ask you. You know, you you see a lot of publishers, you know, you and then and I'll give you a chance to to talk about Newsdash a little bit as well. What are some of those, you know, what are some of those alternatives looking like? Where are some publishers turning away from Google in order to supplement and and start to build over, you know, like you said, the next 5 to 10 years. Where else are people looking to start to build that audience besides from Google?

Matt Bailey [00:17:54]:
Yeah. I think the the biggest revenue sizes are still to remain ad revenue, ad display revenue, subscription revenue, commerce revenue, which is like the commission model that we spoke about. Right? Few publishers are testing with, like, you know, YouTube, direct sell. Right? Sponsor social sponsorships and stuff like this. But these are peanuts. Right? It's not like huge ones. Right? So but still, some of them have their own apps and, or they're selling their own subscription en masse for, like, certain apps. These are the the the most popular ones, and I think publishers have to depend less on Google and increase direct relationships with users.

Matt Bailey [00:18:49]:
Right? So you have to convert all your users who are coming from Google and social media and all the different places into a direct relationship, either through an app, through, emails. And I know emails are, like, it's still very good, actually. And, actually, users who subscribe to emails are most likely to subscribe to the site and pay money, right, if they see value. Right? But these are the the common sources out there.

Matt Bailey [00:19:17]:
Absolutely. I I have found myself spending much more time at Substack, you know, getting that direct relationship with writers, with publications, you know, and paying them directly. And Yeah. You know, that was the one thing. I think the the promise of the Internet was going to be a democratization of of writing, of music, of of content, and it's kinda like, you know, we've seen the opposite. Yeah. And if anything, it got consolidated more and monetized by the companies that, were the gatekeepers. And so now I I think we're seeing a little bit more of that rebellious spirit, coming into the industry.

Matt Bailey [00:20:01]:
Well, John, tell us a little bit about Newsdash. I wanna give you a chance to talk a little bit about that and and, you you know, what you're doing, to work with publishers and and help them market their content.

Matt Bailey [00:20:12]:
Absolutely. So we have 2 software, that we developed, and we have won so many awards last year, which which is awesome to be recognized by the industry. We won, like, the for Newsdash, and GD Dash. Newsdash is all focused on real time, SEO. So we track the trends every 15 minutes. We, we track the rankings every 15 minutes. We send publishers alerts. So near real time as as much as we can, to identify missed opportunities or areas low hanging fruit or areas to optimize, and then we'll give them a lot of historic, reports and a lot of, research tools and so on and, like, news topic authority indicators.

Matt Bailey [00:21:00]:
And we even track, like, index to publish or publish to index timing, how long it takes to go. So there is a lot on the real time, and we have we're very fortunate. We have a lot of, like, big names, and we're in 29 countries. So this is awesome. And then GD Dash was like, we started it last year or end of the year before, and it's mainly focused on 3 elements, Google Discover analysis. So we take all the feeds of Google Discover, and we analyze the content of the publisher or any site that gets Google Discover with the same kind of technologies that Google utilize analyze content with. Right? And then we tell people, this is what you need to write about. This is what drives your discover traffic.

Matt Bailey [00:21:42]:
And then we also do the same thing for search. So we take all the Google Search Console data, and then we put it in reports that can be, you know, fathom. Right? Because, like, if you have if you have, like, 500,000 keywords and 1,000,000 URLs and something happen, 10,000 So we consolidate the data and present it in a way that you can actually get actionable insight from and understand exactly what happened. And then we finally would track Google Discover feeds now, which is a whole new thing that we just launched, a month ago where you can say, do you know what? We write about, Taylor Swift all the time. Right? Are we winning? Which what type of content is winning? What are the most visible sites and stuff like this? So we can track Google Discover, through entities, which is, like, the foundation of Google Discover, the same way you track Google search through keywords.

Matt Bailey [00:22:40]:
Wow. Those are some incredible tools. I have to ask, what's it like knowing what's trending before everybody else? That's it.

Matt Bailey [00:22:51]:
It's great. Right? So it it depends on what type of publisher we'll work with. Some publishers have, like, you know, reporters everywhere and stuff like this. I wouldn't claim that we will know what's trending even before them because they are on the scene. But we give them some few hidden gems or or opportunities or stuff that they even wrote about, but it's not working for them. Right? So this is one benefit. Other publishers and many publishers have limited resources. Right? They don't have the same kind of, like, you know, numbers that out there.

Matt Bailey [00:23:25]:
These publishers like, oh, this is good. This is good. This is good. Now what we do is we give them them the size of opportunity. If you you can only write 20 articles a day. Right? It's it's not about everything is trending. It's about, like because we do near real time search volume for these trends, we're the only tool in the world that does that. So we can tell them, do you know what? This is a bigger opportunity, much bigger opportunity than other opportunities.

Matt Bailey [00:23:51]:
So this is where I see the the true value of trends. It depends on the size and and the resources of each of the publishers we work with.

Matt Bailey [00:23:59]:
That is amazing. That is an incredible set of tools, and I, John, I have been recommending it to, anyone I talk about in the publishing industry because, they have got to be using Newsdash, and and what a great set of tools. And congratulations on the award. That was amazing to see.

Matt Bailey [00:24:19]:
Thank you so much, Matt. It's always great to join you here, and hopefully, we meet again soon.

Matt Bailey [00:24:25]:
Absolutely, John. I look forward to our next conversation. Have a great one.

Matt Bailey [00:24:29]:
You too. Thank you. Thank you.

Matt Bailey [00:24:31]:
And thank you, dear listener, for tuning in to another edition of the endless coffee cup podcast. I look forward to our next cup of coffee together at endless coffee cup. Thank you, John.

Matt Bailey [00:24:43]:
Thank you. That was great, Matt.

Matt Bailey [00:24:45]:
Yes. Absolutely. You know, we got everything that we needed, and your entire

Matt Bailey [00:24:49]:
it was a good one. Absolutely. Yeah.

Matt Bailey [00:24:52]:
Yeah. We will connect again because, I'd love to keep this going. You know, publishers are having a lot of heartburn right now, and I kinda wanna bring that up and and bring that to the forefront. So Absolutely. We'll be revisiting this topic often.

Matt Bailey [00:25:07]:
Absolutely. Anytime. And let me know if there is any opportunities that might arise over there. We'd love to go back.

Matt Bailey [00:25:13]:
Absolutely. I I get it. I would too. Okay.

Matt Bailey [00:25:18]:
Thanks, man.

Matt Bailey [00:25:18]:
Alright, John. Take care.

Matt Bailey [00:25:20]:
Alright. Bye. Bye.