AI blog generating $26k per year!? A case study.
I've been really interested in buying a website/software, so I've spent a lot of time browsing listings on several business brokerage websites. One day, this travel blogging website really caught my eye. The listing price was $55,000 with annual revenue of $26,000+ and annual profit of $20,000+. So the profit multiple was around 2.75. I wouldn't be surprised if a brick-and-mortar business had such a low profit multiple, but this is a high-margin, easy-to-scale content business! They're usually not that cheap. Luckily, this broker was super transparent and pretty much showed me all the information I needed to figure out what was going on.
A blog that made fortune
First, the listing had the website name revealed, so I pulled up SEMrush to check its traffic:
Uh-oh, looks like something's happening this year and the organic traffic just went south. As a travel blog, the Covid dip makes sense, but why did the traffic fall off a cliff this year? Looks like this is a failing business and the owner is just trying to squeeze the last bit of value out of it. No wonder no one's buying at a 2.75 profit multiple.
Then I went back to see the financial statements, and there was no surprise - it drastically went down:
Now we should measure this business in terms of ARR, which is like $10k profit at most. A 5.5 profit multiple is actually not too bad, but given this website is going downhill, the owner probably needs to set their expectations lower.
Looking back, we can see that in Sep 2023 this website had a revenue of $5.6k, and it had around 30k organic traffic. This website had around 118k organic traffic at its peak, so that translates to more than $20k per month of revenue! That's actually an insanely great source of income. Then I scrolled to the expense section, and the total monthly spending was less than $400. This is so impressive. But it also made me wonder: how could they produce so much content with that level of expense?
Google SEO and AI generated content
Yes, you guessed it right! It must've been using AI-generated content. I opened up the website, grabbed an article, and input that into zerogpt.com and boom!
100% AI generated! I also read a couple of articles myself. Some paragraphs just didn't make sense. So this business is purely run on AI-generated content. That kind of made me sad because: This website has been running since 2017, and there was no good AI model back then, which means they probably genuinely built this website and now they've just decided to give it up and use AI to keep producing content. And that has dire consequences. On the other hand, I don't know how long this website has been using AI-generated content, but apparently, it can still make some money off of it.
According to Google's official documentation, they're not particularly against AI-generated content:
Appropriate use of AI or automation is not against our guidelines. This means that it is not used to generate content primarily to manipulate search rankings, which is against our spam policies.
If you see AI as an essential way to help you produce content that is helpful and original, it might be useful to consider. If you see AI as an inexpensive, easy way to game search engine rankings, then no.
My personal take
I've been building another blog and I tried to use AI to generate content for it. I tried ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity as well as some paid software in the AI writing niche. The results were unsatisfying. The AI-generated blogs are just too "AI" - reading them gave me a feeling of soullessness, and most importantly, they're not very useful.
However I do feel that AI can be very helpful if used right. First, it is very good at proofreading and grammar check. For every article I wrote, I copy past it into Claude and let it proofread for me. Secondly, we can use AI to do research. I use Perplexity to give me some inspiration of the topic, it usually sets up a good foundation for me. The writer would still be me, AI is playing a good assistant role here.
Conclusion
The bottom line is, whether using AI or not, you still want to follow Google's E-E-A-T guideline: expertise, experience, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. Nowadays, the internet is becoming more and more polluted with useless, repetitive, and misinformative content. I believe platforms like Google will be working hard to find high-quality content and rank it highly.
As content creators, our goal should be to leverage AI as a tool to enhance our work, not replace our unique voice and insights. By combining AI's efficiency with human creativity and real-world experience, we can produce content that's not only SEO-friendly but also genuinely valuable to our readers.
In the end, success in the digital content world comes down to providing real value. While AI can help streamline certain aspects of content creation, it's the human touch – our personal experiences, critical thinking, and ability to connect with readers – that will ultimately set our content apart in an increasingly crowded digital landscape.