517: Breaking Updates With Google, AI, Amazon And More With Toni Herrbach

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You’re listening to the My Wife Quitter Job podcast, the place where I bring on successful bootstrap business owners and delve deeply into what strategies are working and what strategies are not with their businesses. Now you all know that I currently run two podcasts, this one which is called My Wife Quitter Job and my other podcast called Profitable Audience with my partner Tony. Well recently, Tony and I decided to pool our resources together and merge profitable audience into My Wife Quitter Job. So from now on,

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This podcast will have a new segment to the show called Profitable Audience, where Tony and I will riff about content creation and making money online, just the two of us. But these episodes will be in addition to the regular interviews that I normally conduct on the show. But before we begin with this first episode, I want to let you know that tickets for the 2024 Seller Summit are now on sale over at sellersummit.com. The Seller Summit is the conference that I hold every year that specifically targets e-commerce entrepreneurs selling physical products online.

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And unlike other events that focus on inspirational stories and high-level BS, mine is a curriculum-based conference where you will leave with practical and actionable strategies specifically for an e-commerce business. Every speaker I invite is deep in the trenches of their business, entrepreneurs who are importing large quantities of physical goods, and not some high-level guys who are overseeing their companies at 50,000 feet. Now, I personally hate large events, so the Seller Summit is always small and intimate. Every year, we cut off ticket sales in around 200 people, so tickets sell out fast.

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and we’ve sold out every single year for the past eight years. Now, if you’re an e-commerce entrepreneur making over 250K or $1 million per year, we also offer an exclusive mastermind experience with other top sellers. The Seller Summit’s gonna be held in Fort Lauderdale, Florida from May 14th May 16th, and tickets actually go up in price this Thursday. And from here on out, they’re gonna go up in price every two weeks. Also, if you haven’t picked up my Wall Street Journal bestselling book, The Family First Entrepreneur yet, it’s actually available on Amazon at

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Now onto the show.

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Welcome to the My Wife Quitter Job podcast and a new segment to the show called Profitable Audience, where my business partner, Tony and I discuss all things related to content creation and building an audience. And in this episode, Tony and I are going to discuss the latest news in the online business space for 2024 because a lot has changed. So we haven’t told each other what we’re what our topics are. Yeah. So this could be a crapshoot here. I don’t think so. I don’t think so. I don’t think we subscribe to the same publications.

02:57
We probably don’t. You’re probably going to be talking about, I don’t know, lifestyle stuff, and I’ll probably be talking about tech is my guess. Wow. Wow. If that’s not an Oscar snub. I don’t know. Is that true? I don’t know. I’ve got some tech stuff. Okay. All right. So you want me to start or you want to start? I’ll go first because this is an interesting one. And we actually just released a podcast on Tmoo a couple of weeks ago when you’re listening to this. And I just read an article yesterday that said Tmoo’s ad spend jumped

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1000 % in the last like six to nine months, which is not surprising considering, you know, the episode that we did where we talked about how they’re just like blasting basically right now everything. But what I did think was interesting about that information is that 76 % of that ad spend is on social media. I believe it. Do you know, is it Instagram or TikTok or? They didn’t say.

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But they basically said, you know, their big non-social spend is going to they’re going to do another Super Bowl commercial this year. They did one last year, which I don’t remember. I don’t know if you saw the Super Bowl commercial for them last year or not. I actually don’t even remember who played in the Super Bowl last year. Because I only watch for the ads. Didn’t the Chiefs beat the Eagles? Oh, the Kelsey brothers played each other. Yes, I should remember that. So anyway, so they’re going to do another Super Bowl commercial this year.

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But then the majority of their ad spend will be on social media. The other interesting thing that they said is when Tmoo advertises, they don’t focus on a particular product. Like they’ll do a carousel ad with like a headband in one frame and a drawer organizer in the other. So there’s like, it’s almost like absolute chaos, right? I see their ads in everything, everywhere I go actually. So.

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I don’t see their ads a ton. What’s funny, I don’t see them on social media. Where I see them is like in a sidebar on like a news site. That’s where I tend to see like maybe it’s retargeting because I have been to the website a couple of times. I see them on TikTok. I see them on Instagram. I see them on YouTube. Like some crazy Chinese lady with a bad accent comes and talks. I guess that works. OK, total side note. But have you seen the crazy Chinese lady on social media?

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who does product reviews where she literally like holds the product up, throws it down and slides it. And then the next product appears. No. So she’s got millions of… I didn’t see her on TikTok. I heard about her from a site. Basically this girl has gone completely viral and she doesn’t even talk about the product. She literally will like take a purse. She’ll hold it up like aggressively, slam it down and throw it to the side and grab the next product. And in each video she does like eight or nine items.

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Um, which just goes to promote them or I mean, I don’t know, but I guess it just goes to show you that having a shtick, like doing your own thing, like, cause like everyone’s like, Oh, everyone does product reviews. Everyone talks about stuff on Tik TOK or Instagram reels. Well, not everybody’s doing this, like this aggressive, you know, and she’s like this tiny little Asian lady. She’s like hurling products to the side. Right. So anyway, just goes to show you that if you have a unique take on something, you can still be successful.

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So Tmoo is losing like $30 in order. Yeah. According to this article on the Wired, this is an older article. It’s like May of 2023. But yeah, they’re just trying to take over the market. I actually have a couple of YouTube videos coming out on Tmoo. You know what’s really funny is Tmoo has been reaching out to me a long time to create a video for them. And so finally I was like, all right, let’s see how much they’re willing to pay. And so I say, okay, I’ll do it for $10,000.

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And then they said, well, our budget is not that high. Can we give you a whole bunch of Tmoo products? Can we give you 872 Tmoo products, which equals a thousand dollars? Yeah. So, but what’s funny is I am coming out with a Tmoo video, but it’s probably not going to be what they’re expecting. Well, they’ve already emailed you once.

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But no, what I’m saying is they’re not gonna, they wouldn’t be willing to pay for this type of video that I’m putting out. Right? Just because the content is going to be unbiased and. Yeah. So the one thing I was thinking, I was thinking to myself, so Timo is spending a lot of money on ads. Seventy per six, seventy six percent of that is going to social media. Should we look at that and go, OK, should we be moving our ad spend to like social media? Right. Tick tock shop or tick tock ads, Instagram ads.

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And then I thought, I don’t know if I would follow what Tmoo is doing because right now they’re in a bleeding money phase, right? Like they’re in a throw money at everything. So if you’re listening to this and thinking like, oh, well, Tmoo is doing it. Maybe I should try it. I wouldn’t take that advice. I wouldn’t do anything that Tmoo is doing unless you have just a gigantic budget. Yeah. And they’re just going to drive the ad costs up. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Actually, you know, what’s funny is like Tmoo is literally advertising for every single product under the sun. Yes. For all of my search terms.

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On Google, I see Tmoo now. So they’re just like blanketing every single demographic, I think, every vertical. Yeah, I would agree with that. But we’ll see. We’ll see what happens. It’ll be interesting to see in like two or three years what happens. I don’t know if I released a podcast episode on this yet, but people are getting a little pissed that China essentially or Tmoo doesn’t have to pay any taxes, import taxes or sales taxes, because everything’s coming directly from China and it all falls under

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less than 800 bucks, which means they don’t have to pay taxes. Right. And people are getting pissed, right? Because it’s basically destroying a lot of these commodity type businesses. Yeah, for sure. think I yeah. Okay, so my piece of news is about a week old, think, at this point, but New York Times is suing OpenAI for copyright. Okay. Because they claim that OpenAI has used New York Times articles to train it. And they’re suing for

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billions of dollars in damages. This is interesting to me because depending on how this case goes, it could really affect content creation. For example, if OpenAI, I’m sure they’ve crawled my site because I can say, hey, write this in the style of Steve Chu and they know who I am. So clearly they’ve crawled my website, right? If they lose, if OpenAI loses, that might mean that you can charge

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to get your content crawled by AI and maybe potentially get compensated for it. But if they lose, then I guess nothing happens. But I’m pretty sure this case is probably going to go on for a very long time. I can see this case going to the Supreme Court. And there’s still that case of, I think it was earlier last year, middle of last year, artists were suing Mid Journey and other AI image creation tools because they’re stealing the same

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style or likeness of art. I think that one’s a little harder to prove. I don’t I think this is going to get really, I don’t know what the word, I want to say the word swampy because that’s what it reminds me of. Like I feel like it’s just going to get really gross with like people coming after AI for, for content. Because if you think about like, think about books, right? People write a work of fiction or nonfiction, right? Like, you know,

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You wrote a book. It took a long time. was a lot of work. You know, you’d probably be pretty ticked if your book came out like the AI version of your book, right? Like if because that’s AI just can copy other people’s things, basically. Right. It’s verbatim, right? I not verbatim. But it’s like the ideas and everything else is like this. The spin that you put on something can be copied. Right. It always has been someone just had to. It was a lot more work before. Right.

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Yeah, I’m just thinking like, is anything really original these days? Right. Because then that brings up like the whole I’m probably going to botch this, but like wasn’t 50 Shades of Grey like fan fiction from Twilight or something like a lot of like big series and books came from fan fiction from other books. Right. So it’s like this is this has already been happening for years and years and years. It’s just like how much of your own uniqueness are you going to put on something?

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to then make it yours. I think the problem with AI is there’s a lot of people out there that get information from AI and don’t put any spin on it, right? It’s basically like copying word for word at that point. You lost me at Twilight. Sorry. So I think I could be getting the series wrong, but I think Fifty Shades of Grey was a fan fiction book about Twilight where it’s like.

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Fan fiction is basically where they change the characters and the scenery, but the entire plot and everything is the same. it could be the wrong book, but basically some of these really huge blockbuster books that have been made into movies and made all this money started out as fan fiction from a book that was written before. And all they did was change the main characters. So it’s not vampires, it’s something else kind of thing. So it’s not much different today.

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except for you did change the characters, you did change the scenery. Now the thing is set in outer space versus this or whatever. So that’s where I think it’s going to get really ugly because we’ve already been doing this, but it felt like a little more creative. Now it feels zero creative, right? It’s just like, let me plug this in and then spit out this information and then just use it. You know, it’s funny is Jane, my wife, Jen’s been complaining that all the books she’s been getting from Amazon now.

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Yeah, crap. She uses Kindle Unlimited a lot and she’ll you know, she’ll try new authors, but she suspects that AI is generating some of these stories and which is 100 % totally crap now. Yeah. Huge problem. So yeah, so I just feel like it’s going to get worse and worse, right? Because the problem is now people are just using it as a shortcut and not actually putting their own spin on anything. So along those same lines, since we’re talking about AI, you know, Chinese sellers on Amazon are using AI to create

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Amazon listings. Right. And there’s products on Amazon now that say that are titled, I cannot fulfill this request. It goes against open AI use policy. So literally they’re writing these scripts to list all these products on mass and they’re not even checking. Wow. The title. Right. See, that’s where the problem that’s where the problem comes in. It’s like it’s not even you’re not using AI as like a jumping board, you know, diving board off into something of your own. It’s just like literally

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Copy and pasting. I mean, this is all done by a script, I’m sure, or a program that’s just mass listing millions of products. But I mean, is Amazon not even checking for this stuff? How can you have a title that says, I cannot fulfill this request? goes against OpenA. So I feel like Amazon should have just an AI tool that immediately puts down listings that have that in the title. There’s keywords in the title that immediately flag a listing. Yeah.

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I mean, this is a huge problem. Well, speaking of another thing about AI, it’s interesting. don’t know if you saw this, but LinkedIn just announced that they were discontinuing their lookalike audiences. Oh, OK. OK, totally a clickbait headline, right? Because I mean, I don’t run ads, but I know you’ve run ads and my friend Andrew runs ads. I’m in the space. understand. Lookalike audience are really valuable.

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Right, like because it allows you to target people that are very similar to your current customers, right? They have the same, you know, profile qualities. So I saw this title on like six different places this week, right? And so, and I was like, well, I don’t really care about LinkedIn, so I’m not gonna read it. But then when we were like, hey, let’s talk about news, I’m like, well, this might be interesting, right? Like why is LinkedIn doing this? You know, our friend Chase is like crazy growing LinkedIn, talking about how you should be using it, all this stuff. So I was like,

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Well, it sounds like LinkedIn is kind of growing. So why would they do something that makes no sense? Well, they’re discontinuing it because they’re doing predictive audiences, right? So now it’s all AI, like predict, they’re going to use AI to predict the audience as opposed to look like, which will probably in the end be more effective once they get enough data about people, although they probably have tons of data about people already if they’re LinkedIn users.

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But that was in none of the headlines. It wasn’t like they’re getting rid of lookalike audiences to go with predictive audiences. It was like, they’re getting rid of lookalike audiences. I like, that’s I don’t actually understand the distinction because lookalikes is predictive. You’re finding a group of people that are similar. So I would think of it as like, so let’s just talk about a lookalike audience on Facebook. So you upload your group of customers.

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they’re all 35 to 40, right? So Facebook is gonna pull people who are 35 to 40. They all are in toddler Facebook groups. So they’re all in, like, pull people with toddler Facebook. Like, they pull, so I feel like with AI, it’s just predicting people that are most likely to have that behavior of taking the next step. So it’s pretty similar, right? But it’s not, to me, it’s like they’re just kind of changing the verbiage a little bit.

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So anyway, but I thought that was an interesting, very click baity news title because it’s like, well, they’re not really, and you can actually still use lookalike audiences on LinkedIn. They’re just not going to update that group. So it’s basically like whatever bucket of people you had when it sunsets, like February, whatever is going to be like, you could still use that bucket of people in May. It’s just not going to dynamically change. So they’re not going to add new people, you know, drop people off based on behaviors.

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I just wanted to take a moment to tell you about a free resource that Tony and I offer over at Profitable Audience that you may not be aware of. If you are interested in learning how to make money with content, whether it be through blogging, podcasting, or YouTube, we put together a comprehensive six-day mini course on how to get started blogging that you should all check out. It contains both video and text-based tutorials that go over the entire process, including a full tutorial on how to set up your first content website. This course is 100 % free.

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and you can sign up over at profitableaudience.com slash free. Once again, that’s profitableaudience.com slash free. Now back to the show.

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So since we’re talking about advertising, Google just as of January 4th, eliminated third party cookies from the browser. I saw something about this. Yeah. So for anyone who’s listening who has no idea what that means, let me just give you a brief overview of just cookies. Like cookies are these little files that get placed on your browser to identify who is browsing. It’s literally like this little code. And that code is like an ID that you

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can be used to look up like this huge database of all your information. A first party cookie is a cookie that is placed when you visit someone’s website and it’s placed by the website owner. But third party cookies are like, know when you see ads on like a blog, let’s say you’re on someone’s blog, that means another company, not the blog owner, but another company can actually insert cookies on your browser as well. Google’s eliminating the ability for

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other companies, not the owner of the website, to put these cookies on your browser. Basically what this means and the implications of this really is that it’s going to hurt advertising. It’s amazing. If you were to ever look at the amount of cookies that are interested in your browser, you would probably be shocked. So prior to this change, you go on a website that has Google AdSense on it, for example. You’ll get like

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cookies placed on from practically every single advertiser, whole bunch of different platforms outside of your own cookies. And that means like all these companies are tracking your usage across the web, assuming you don’t have cookies blocked. And what’s ironic about this is Google is the one eliminating third party cookies. And I think it’s smart on their part because they have a lot more information about the user outside of these cookies. So essentially, I think Google is strengthening their monopoly in the online advertising space.

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I mean, they didn’t have to go through anything to do that. They can just make that decision. mean, they control Chrome, which is the most popular browser, right? Right. And traditionally, let’s say you were a different ad network that wasn’t owned by Google. You would rely on these third party cookies to do the tracking. Google is not allowing cookies, third party cookies anymore, but they own the browser. Right. So they’re cooking you all the time.

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Well, they’re not using cookies probably. They’re just tracking directly through their platform. And they have Android also. Every website you go to, everything that you click, they already know. Right. So the way they pitched it though was like, yeah, we’re not going to let other people collect your data anymore. Just us. Yeah, exactly. Just us. So then we’ll sell it to these other people for some premium. mean, Apple’s been doing that for a long time, right? So Google’s just.

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taken a page out of Apple’s book, yet they still have all the information. Yeah, that’s a real bummer. We should have saved that till the end. Oh, it’s kind of that’s a kind of a deflating news story. Well, you were talking about advertising, so I know that. Yeah, I have more advertising stuff, actually. But so I’m curious because I actually don’t know this. Can you see where your cookies are? Yeah. Well, you can’t see the information. It’s really just an identifier.

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But yes. Can you tell who’s cookied you somewhere in your… Yeah, you can. Yeah, you can to a certain extent. All you got to do is right click a web page and then click on Inspect, which is the debugger for Chrome. And then you can just look at your cookies and what’s stored for that. So they’re all in there? Yeah. For example, if you were to go to Bumblebee Linen’s, I don’t know if… actually haven’t checked recently if this has been reduced, but there’s probably like… I don’t know.

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50 cookies if you visit because each one of my tools that I have on the site, Postscript, Klaviyo, all that, they’re all putting cookies on. But there’s not like a place where like I’d have, so if I went to Bumblebee Linens, I could see everybody that was cooking me from Bumblebee Linens. But I couldn’t, there’s no way to see like every place in the past week that’s cooked me. In the past week? Yeah, you can’t, I mean, these are just files on your browser and you can see them. You can see how many there are, yeah. Where?

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in the debugger for the browser. But that’s only if like that only shows me what’s on from Bumblebee linens. It doesn’t show me from. Oh, you just mean in general Old Navy, which I was on, you know, three hours earlier. You know what I’m saying? Yeah. Yeah. I’m sure there’s a way to do it. I just have never tried to do that before. I would be afraid. I would be afraid like I because I I don’t mind being so I just feel like we do this for a living. I don’t mind being tracked and everything because I kind of want to see what comes up. Like I like to see

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how my behavior influences what I see. since I don’t do anything, I feel like I don’t do anything interesting on the web. I’m not worried about like, oh, you visited this webpage. But I would be curious to see all the different third party I wouldn’t wanna know. Actually, since we’re talking about advertising, here’s a funny fact. You know how a lot of people are using ad blockers? Mm-hmm. Well, some people are using ad blockers for YouTube so they don’t have to watch the commercials. Mm-hmm. Right? So YouTube,

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I don’t know if this is still the case because there was backlash for it, but YouTube was purposely slowing down their experience loading for people who had ad blockers. I’ve so okay, here’s where I get the hate mail. You can buy YouTube premium and have a premium experience where you don’t get ads, right? So it’s like to me, it’s like, you’re kind of skirting.

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the system like with the ad blocker. So it’s like, you’re not going to have as good of experience. I don’t know, considering there is a premium model with no ads because you’re all this. This is where this is what’s always bothered me about the Internet and what’s bothered me about like, I don’t know, users of the Internet. I remember when I was blogging probably two or three years in and this is back when, you’re putting up a three, four, five posts a week.

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Every post is like heavy content, right? Recipes, DIY projects, how-tos. And I would have people email me complaining that like, they had to have an ad or like, oh, well that’s in a fit. Like people mad about it, right? And I’m like, you would have to go buy a cookbook, you know, for $29 or you would have to go buy a manual to do this or you’d have to buy a cleaning how-to book. Like, especially before the internet was like as crazy as it is today.

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It’s like, you’re complaining to me that you see an ad when I’m giving you all this information for free. Like that’s always bothered me because I’m like, I’m teaching you how to do stuff. Like you teach people how to do all sorts of stuff on my way of quitting job. Who cares if there’s an ad, who cares if there’s a way for you to make money from it? I think I mean, I agree with you, but I always think maybe I’m biased. I’m sure I’m biased because that’s what we do. But like.

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If you need, like if I need something, so for example, we have this puppy, right? She’s good, but she probably, I probably need to get a trainer just to like work with her on some behaviors, cause she’s big. And it’s like, am I willing to pay a trainer to come to my house and train the dog? 100 % I am, right? But if I wanted to do it myself and read articles and go to like Kristin’s site, right? And read more articles on things like, know, pets and training and things of that nature, then.

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that’s fine too, but then I’m saving probably $500 by not hiring a trainer. So I should be okay with an ad, right? It’s like, it’s an either or it’s not, you know, I don’t know. No, I, I, I agree, but just people have been trained, you know, to get free stuff. I know, I know. So it’s annoying, but anyways, they got a lot of backlash, so I’m not sure if this is still happening. I just thought it was really interesting.

25:49
I think they should do that because I just started making YouTube videos and let me tell you, it’s not easy. just made a, I made, I made a video this morning right before recording. My hands are still sticky from this video because I was making a chicken marinade and um, I

26:06
Of course, I’m making a recipe, but I’m doubling it because it’s for my family. And I have everything in a Ziploc bag with this marinade and I go like to zip it up, but I push pressure down on the bag and all the marinade comes out all over me, all over my hands. And it’s like oil and vinegar and all this stuff. And I’m, you know, as I’m filming myself, which of course I’ll keep in. Yeah, perfect. That’s like, did you do it That’s video gold! Yeah.

26:31
But it’s still, I like wash my hands like four times, but I can still feel it. So yeah, listen, if you’re making a video, you deserve to get some ad money. Cause it’s it’s a pain in the heinie. I’ve made like seven videos this week and I was like, wow, I’ll watch every ad happily for these people. That’s really impressive. You filmed seven videos this week. I have no audio issues. Thank God. So yeah. And now I have like six short.

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scripts written, so I’m probably going to film those either today or tomorrow. So, but speaking of like using the internet to find information, I don’t know if you saw this, but TikTok is growing as a search engine with Gen Z. But what’s interesting is once again, the headlines were very misleading, only really in the categories of recipes, workouts and fashion, which is honestly what I think TikTok’s good for.

27:23
Like the recipes on Tik Tok are actually really, I mean, some of them are terrible. I can’t stand when they like put uncooked pasta in a dish, but yeah, Jen, and whereas the boomers like zero desire to search on Tik Tok for anything. So I actually use Tik Tok now to search for problems and solutions. So our heat press actually just broke yesterday and it gave out this weird error code and

27:49
I couldn’t find like all the search results in Google were crap. They were like affiliate sites saying, this is the best thing ever. That was another piece of news by the way. Oh, okay. Yeah. That one’s a big one. could do a whole episode on that one. But anyway, so I went on YouTube next and it was still kind of crappy, but people were just doing reviews and I didn’t want to wait, watch like a 10 minute video just to get a simple answer. Yeah. So I went on Tik TOK and there’s a whole bunch of people complaining about this same error.

28:17
And then different people had different ways to fix it. Some guy had to take apart his heat press. And then I just discovered that our heat press is still under the 30 day return policy at Amazon. So we just returned it. But the point is that TikTok had pretty good information and you don’t have to watch anything long. It gets right to the point. Well, that’s what Jen Z said is they like the digestible size of the content. So actually reading that made me think, OK,

28:43
Cause I was gonna do, so I wasn’t even gonna do recipes on YouTube. And then Andrea was like, you gotta do recipes on YouTube. They’re just such a pain. Like I am not a chef. I don’t need people telling me my knife skills are bad. I know they’re bad. So I was just like, I don’t really wanna do recipes. But then she talked me into it. But now that I just read that and I’m like, actually a lot of people use TikTok for recipes. And most recipes really can be presented to you in three minutes, know, a minute to three minutes. They’re not, my recipes aren’t complicated.

29:12
I’ll probably I’ll probably just see if my guy can cut him down. I don’t want to film him twice If it involves filming him twice, I won’t do it. So we’ll see I should do a last-minute recipes for dudes Like I made a chicken nugget pizza the other day. I was just gonna say is it your chicken nugget quesadilla? We JD’s seafood pasta with the gold

29:34
So what came up in my memories just the other day was when my son made the I always think of you he made the buffalo bites quesadilla So he took the whatever the Frank’s buffalo bite. So they’re the boneless chicken wings He chopped him up and then he used like sour cream Monterey Jack cheese and more hot sauce, of course, because he’s a boy

29:58
and like made a quesadilla with it. And it smelled so good. I came out of my office. Like I remember this when you made it a couple of years ago, but it was on TikTok. It was on a Facebook memory. was like, I remember that, that boneless quesadilla. I was like, if I liked hot, spicy food, that thing would have been awesome. little sour cream to dip it in. You’re good to go. Yeah. Yeah. So I mean, TikTok, you know, I’m going to try it. So we do have someone talking at Seller Summit about TikTok shop.

30:25
I’m going to try to get TikTok shop because I have a contact in the person who runs it. I’m going to see if they want to actually come to the summit, maybe as a sponsor to answer some questions because it’s growing like gangbusters. Yeah. Despite that setback where people were getting banned just for doing stupid stuff, I think that just happens in the life of any platform. Yeah. So this is funny. So I just happened to. So both my kids play volleyball.

30:52
And whenever you play volleyball, you have to travel to these tournaments and you actually get to know the parents pretty well. And so I met a parent who does AI video, literally like stuff that people are using for YouTube automation. And what is surprising, because I asked her about it, because I, oh, maybe I’ll give it a try. Like, I’m not going to do YouTube automation, but her service, which is called Rizal, actually will

31:22
take any script, create B-roll narration titles, and turn it into like a video. That’s pretty good that you’ve scripted. And also like if you, if you say any statistics, it’ll automatically like detect them and flash them up. the service is really good for podcasts also. So if you have two heads, two talking heads, it’ll literally change the picture to the person speaking. Interesting. And also do annotation. So

31:50
That one’s not released yet, but I can’t wait to give it a try. since we’re friends now by nature of this, she’s taking a couple of my podcasts and we’ll just see how goes. But it could save a tremendous amount of time in just editing. remember how I talked about Opus in Office Hours, a couple of that. Opus is a tool that basically generates AI clips out of your own existing YouTube videos. Her tool takes it one step further and, you know,

32:20
literally just whatever you type in and finds B-roll for you. And they have access to the largest library of B-roll. Anyway. that wasn’t like the whole piece of the news. Like it turns out that large news outlets are doing this too. Meaning they’re just having AI generate the content. Not a human and just posting it. And you would think that large media outlets would want

32:49
you know, they’re writers to write the content for these things. Yeah. But I think just right now it’s like the wild, wild west. Like anything that you throw up, you know, in quantity, eventually something’s going to hit. We’ll see. I know. I just found that surprising because I know that I would never put out pure AI content. I know. Unless it was just an experiment where I just generated like a thousand pieces of content and just posted them. Right.

33:17
But all these big news outlets, I’m not going to name any names on here because, know, she kind of told me in confidence, but big names that you’ve heard of are doing this. Meanwhile, the New York Times is suing. Yeah. Meanwhile, yeah, exactly. I was actually looking at my YouTube feed. It’s just the other day, probably a third of it was AI generated content on YouTube. And I think it’s because I watch

33:47
Actually, you have my YouTube account. watch a lot of sports sometimes, so sorry for messing up your algorithm. I watch a lot of sports stuff. And all these sports news things are now AI generated. I have noticed that about the sports stuff. And not only that, it’s false. I don’t want to bore anyone, but one of these videos I watched claimed that the Warriors did a trade when in fact they didn’t.

34:17
But it got me to click on the video. It got so that’s I think the problem is there’s a lot of stuff that’s not true. And now it’s harder to find what’s true and what’s not true. Yeah, it got me to watch the ad because you have to watch one before you get the video. And then even though I clicked away, they still got paid for that ad, right? Yeah. That was a depressing one, huh? So I have an interesting one. OK, all right. So the FTC just ruled that TurboTax

34:47
can’t advertise as a free service. Okay. So TurboTax is one of the shadiest. I’m not recommending TurboTax, but I, there’s an interesting point to this, but go on talking about TurboTax. You know, they make a lot of the, a lot of their money from TurboTax every year. used to work there. Oh, I didn’t know that. Yeah. She used to work it into it.

35:14
Okay. Oh yes, I did. I forgot that they own Termitaks. It was there before they actually started doing all the shady stuff. But they have a free version, but they hid the URL. They hid the URL so that you couldn’t find it. And the only thing you could find was the paid version. Well, apparently about 70 % of the people don’t even qualify to use the free version, which is why the FTC

35:43
has told them they can’t advertise as something that they have a free version because the majority of people can’t use the free version anyway. And so basically it’s a lie, right? Like it’s not free because you don’t, it’s not free for you. might be free for, it’s probably free for like every 19 year old that works an hourly job, right? And that’s it. It doesn’t live in a state that you have to pay state income tax. What I think is interesting about this is that,

36:11
I wonder if this will eventually trickle down to, and it probably won’t, right? Because these people are small. mean, TurboTax is huge, right? Like it’s a huge company. They run a million ads from January to April. But there’s so many marketers out there that advertise that you can come to something for free, but it’s like barely free, right? It’s like what you get for free is garbage. And then, you know, it’s an immediate pay. And I wonder if that will eventually trickle down into things like that.

36:41
I mean, I think we advertise a webinar. We don’t advertise. We promote. So we don’t even actually run ads. But we have a free webinar. But I believe that our free webinar, you could easily get started and start doing things and never sign up for our paid course and have success. And we know people who go to all the webinars and do things on their own. It’s very possible. Now, if you want in-depth handholding,

37:09
cheerleaders plus like every question you’ve ever wanted answered under the sun, you sign up for the paid version, right? Which is true for most things. But I wonder if this will ever trickle down on a lot of these, what I think are pretty sleazy marketers who advertise things as being free, but they’re truly not free. Yeah. Yeah. Turbo tax, man. You know what I don’t get about this country? And I’m sure there’s some shady deals in there somewhere, but the government wants people to pay taxes, right? They want them to do it right.

37:39
so they can get paid. So why doesn’t the government just put out a free tool? It can’t be that difficult. mean, I technically they do. put out the forms, but you have to have a PhD in accounting to do the forms. But it’s a paper form, right? Yeah. Oh, I totally agree with you. they should. Well, they should just simplify everything, right? Like it’s so complicated that it’s like you clearly don’t want your money. I’m pretty sure it’d be pretty easy to put together some software.

38:08
That’s like 75 % of what TurboTax does. Oh, 100%. And just give it away for free and it’ll probably encourage more people to file correctly or even file, right? Yeah. I don’t know. There’s just things, some things that are just, I just don’t get. So Intuit must have some deal with the government, some crazy deal where maybe the government’s getting paid. Well, now they can’t advertise it as a free service anymore. So, which has been their, that’s been their

38:37
of their marketing strategy for as long as I remember them being online, like advertising online. If you guys are listening to this, go ahead and Google TurboTax. This scandal has been going on for years. Yeah, they’ve been doing all sorts of shady stuff. It drives me nuts. Okay, my last piece of news is kind of depressing too. All of your news has been depressing. I’m trying to think if I have anything positive.

39:06
Well, okay. So Google Podcast is going away. Okay. I know that doesn’t affect I don’t know what Google Podcast is. It’s a podcast app to listen to podcasts. Oh, okay. Is it for Android users? It’s the one that I use, which is why so the three people that are using it are going to have to find another way. You can’t listen on Spotify? What do you use? use the Apple’s app. Okay. Yeah. Okay. I don’t like Spotify. Have you ever used Spotify?

39:37
Not to listen to podcasts, I use it all the time to listen to music. Okay, do you have a paid version or do you have a free version? yeah. Oh, you have a paid, okay. So I’m using the free version. Yeah. And it just constantly has bugs or stops, ads and whatnot. So it’s not really like a pure podcast experience. That makes sense. So yeah, I’ve had the paid Spotify app for a long time, mainly because

39:59
The main reason why I got Spotify was to have music to listen to while running or at the gym. And there’s nothing like an ad for like hemorrhoid cream that will slow your rundown. Right? Like it’s just, didn’t want, I was like, I just need to be able to listen to my playlist and be able to download it and not even think about it. And so it’s worth it. And I have like the whole family accounts. My kids have, you know, they can listen to stuff and all that jazz. So. those are the ads you’re getting. I’m getting hair loss ads and erectile dysfunction now.

40:27
Everyone gets the erectile dysfunction. They’re all over the TV. They’re everywhere. Like, do we just watch shows made for 50 year old men? that the deal? Okay. Let’s this on a positive note. Give me a positive piece of news. Oh, you need a positive note? Okay. This is kind of positive. had two. Actually, I’m to do one that’s not positive. It’s just information, but people need to know this. So by the time this podcast airs,

40:54
The new DMARC regulations will go into effect about having the unsubscribe on your email. So if you’re not in compliance with that, you need to do it like immediately because we’re already gonna be past the deadline when you hear this. But an interesting thing that I read this morning actually was for your spam rates, you want to keep it below 0.1%. So that’s your goal for spam and never, never, never get above 0.3%.

41:23
So if you’re looking for like a benchmark for your email list and what you’re sending, that’s where it needs to sit. Now, most people sit there just fine if you’re sending out good content newsletter type stuff. But if you haven’t ever checked that, this is the time to do it and then make sure that you are really culling your list before, well, now when you hear this, it’ll be done. Make sure you get those people that are non-engaged off your list. Yeah.

41:51
I mean, we didn’t do a good job of explaining all this stuff. I mean, we explained in the class, but Google and Yahoo are basically cracking down on email spam. and Tony mentioned DKIM, SPF, and DMARC. These are just technical terms for ways to authenticate the email to make sure that you were the one sending it. In the past, you didn’t have to implement these things, but today you do.

42:19
And this goes into effect, I believe February 1st. Yeah. So this will be out after that date. Yeah, this will be out after that date. in the event that you do any email marketing, you have to get that set up. And practically every email marketing company that I know has been just sending out mass emails. Yeah, you know about this for sure. But what I haven’t seen, because everyone’s talking about the spam, but no one’s given like a hard number. Like this is where you need to keep it. And then Drew Sinaki came out with something a couple of weeks ago.

42:48
about it, of course, him saying, but this is why you should use direct mail. And then I read something today on a reputable site. can’t remember which one I was reading, but so yeah, just make sure you’re in compliance with that. It’s always been 0.1%. You know, what’s funny is a long time ago, I used to send out emails in different chunks. I’d send it out to my most engaged and then all the way down to the least engaged. Yeah.

43:18
That’s the wrong way to do it. I just set it all in aggregate now because then like they look at the spam rates percentage wise, Percent. And by amassing everything together, the spam rate is always going to be lower. Yes. I do have good news to end on. OK, I forgot. And then I remembered again, I didn’t have it in my browser, so I don’t forget someone we know just started a newsletter and you must subscribe.

43:48
Do know who? Who just started and used it? One of our friends? good, good friends. You’re not talking about Chanel, are you? No, our friend Dana Jean-Zemes just started a newsletter. all right. It is called Gap Pond, and you can subscribe. She has no idea that I’m saying this. She’ll probably kill me. You can go subscribe to it at gappond.substack.com. Oh, she started a sub stack. Excellent. Yes.

44:14
And it is basically talking about her gap year that she took between selling her business and retirement. So she sold her business and she was like, I’m not ready to retire, but I don’t want to buy another business. I’m going to take a gap year. People take gap years all the time. So, and she has made no promises. She’s like, I don’t know how often you’re going to get an email, but it is very good. Highly recommend. I think anytime you can learn from someone like Dana, you should.

44:40
you should sign up and digest everything. So go subscribe, gappond.substack.com.

44:50
Hope you enjoy that episode. Now both Tony and I will do news episodes whenever something brand new comes out that could potentially affect the world of content creation. For more information about this episode, go to mywifequitterjob.com slash episode 517. And once again, tickets to the Seller Summit 2024 are now on sale over at sellersummit.com. If you want to hang out in person in a small intimate setting, develop real relationships with like-minded entrepreneurs and learn a ton, then come to my event. Go over to sellersummit.com.

45:19
And if you are interested in starting your own eCommerce store, head on over to mywifequoterjob.com and sign up for my free six day mini course. Just type in your email and I’ll send you the course right away. Thanks for listening.