Buzzfeed Shutdown – Ai Seo Content Apocalypse

BuzzFeed a 437 million dollar a year content Powerhouse so then why is it closing its doors and shutting down forever BuzzFeed says it will use AI to help create content stock jumps 150 percent BuzzFeed is using AI to write SEO bait travel guides BuzzFeed is quietly publishing whole AI generated articles this begs the question is AI at fault for buzzfeed's downfall we can see here back in March of 2021 the stock price was hovering right around ten dollars a drastic decline happens in 2022 then in May of 2022 this thing starts tanking like crazy and then it drops under a dollar in January 20th of this year right before they announced the AI Revolution the stock then jumps from 94 cents to almost four dollars practically overnight now if we can start to understand the reason BuzzFeed is failing I think that can help you put a lot of money in your pocket because let's face it BuzzFeed is nothing more than an online content creation engine and while we might not be able to emulate the 437 million dollar success that was BuzzFeed I think we can learn a lot about how to make money online and also avoid some of the pitfalls that arise when using AI generated content so first let's dive into the business model if you were to look at BuzzFeed on similar web you can see that they have about 99 million visitors each and every month and those visitors are averaging about 2.5 page views so that's roughly a quarter of a billion page views per month and if we scroll down here and take a look at where the traffic is actually coming from we can see that 41 percent is direct that means people type in buzzfeed.com or click a link that drives them to BuzzFeed and 33 percent is actually coming from organic surge that means people go to Google MSN Yahoo search for something and BuzzFeed pops up so if you were to search Harry Potter house quiz you can see number one is Wizarding World number two is brainfall and number three is none other than BuzzFeed we can also see about 16 percent of their traffic is coming from social that's probably like click bait or people sharing stuff on social media or even their YouTube channel Facebook groups Facebook ads and using this keyword tool ahrefs I can actually see what they rank for in Google how high they rank and how many people each and every month are looking up these Search terms so it's actually very simple what we have here is a basic content publishing platform they go out there and look up what people search for in Google then they create a piece of content about that let's say they're looking up something like Pizza Hut melts that gets over a hundred and nineteen thousand searches a month on Google and because BuzzFeed is ranking number five that's driving about 9 000 visitors a month to their website and using search engine optimization they're able to build a Powerhouse getting tons of traffic each and every month and this traffic drives ad Revenue the advertisers pay BuzzFeed for the traffic that they get on their website and we can see here that they rank for all kinds of different things but remember not all search engine terms are worth the same amount of money the word Pizza Hut melts isn't really worth that much at all because they're just looking up whatever a Pizza Hut melt is so that one's probably only worth a couple of pennies per click at best however if we go over here and click on CPC or cost per click we can see that some of the keywords like sell my house fast Austin is going for about 70 dollars for one click to a website and if we isolate the term sell my house they rank for pretty much every city in the United States and since that traffic is expensive they make a lot of money so if they're making 437 million dollars a year and they get traffic from Google for free why are they going out of business well according to USA Today it's because of the tech recession tough economy declining stock market decelerating digital ad Market but something doesn't seem to be stirring the Kool-Aid so I decided to do a little bit more digging using the calendar feature of our keyword tool here we can see that when they started doing AI their ranking started dropping pretty drastically now this might be unrelated but we're going to dig into this and figure out what's going on we can also see results for last year they actually have a lot of new search engine rankings coming up you can see those here listed in green however when you look at this year we can see that there's a lot of losses and a lot of rankings dropping we also need to take note of the amount of commercial intent keywords that they're ranking for for example over here we have roller skates wedding dresses outdoor furniture prom dresses Mother's Day gifts and more yet over here it looks like just a bunch of random stuff so the question is did using AI hurt buzzfeed's reputation as an online pop culture news source well let's take a look at the content if I was to search sitecolonbuzzfeed.com quote a Hidden Gem I can see that there's literally tons of AI articles written about why a certain vacation spot is a Hidden Gem and we can see here this article was written collaboratively by Buzzy our creative AI assistant wait a minute let's check out how many BuzzFeed articles actually mentioned this we'll go to Google put this in quotes right here and we could see here there's thousands and thousands of results coming up written by Buzzy and we could see that Buzzy is listing new articles pretty much every day however I don't think this is what's leading to the decline of BuzzFeed actually that started a lot before they introduced Ai and as a guy who makes money online I know that this business model actually works really well take a look at a company called wikiHow this is a company that could use AI to help them find different information for their articles again we want to use AI to help us not just do the work for us and we could see here the monthly traffic value of wikiHow is over 18 million dollars each and every month and instead of being like Buzzy and BuzzFeed and just tackling every different pop culture idea they're actually ranking for very specific stuff that leads to things that make them money and as you can see here the keyword self-service car wash is looked up on Google almost 300 000 times a month wikiHow shows up number two and since this keyword has commercial intent they are making tons of money from the ads running on this page so was AI to blame for the downfall of BuzzFeed no this has actually been a long time coming from having too many expenses and not being able to manage the business properly but for people like me and you who want to make money online Distributing content we can actually use AI to help us in a very simple way I'm actually using AI on my websites to gain rankings daily but it's important to note that you always want to focus on what the customer needs focus on providing value to the people searching and looking at the wikiHow busines