⛏️ Weekly Picks

• Behind the scenes of scaling beehiiv in year two (Link)

• Next Net Media acquires LinkBuilder.io (Link)

• Website with 300M impressions dies after being dropped by Google News & Discover (Link)

• Reddit is the new parasite SEO. (Link)

• Will G/O Media Be Dead Soon? (Link)

• Arena Sports Group revenue up 11% YoY, Sports Illustrated & The Street saw their best quarters for search traffic. (Link)

Give Your Brand An Unfair Advantage - Free

Building an iconic brand may not be as hard as you think. With Scott Galloway’s Brand Strategy sprint, you’ll get an unfair advantage over your competition.

In this sprint, Scott breaks down practical insights from companies like Apple, Nike, & Uber to help you apply the same frameworks to your own brand.

For 30 days only, you can get The Brand Strategy sprint, normally $179, for FREE, when you use the discount code: SCOTT100.

 📈 Market Update

Newsletter business listings are 50% of websites this week:

We wonder how long it will take for newsletters to flip websites as an asset class. They are certainly far easier and free to start on platforms such as beehiiv.

And they don’t require any technical knowledge such as the horrificness (we know that’s not a word) of maintaining Wordpress, or having to learn topics such as AI-driven SEO strategies for semantic search, or deal with every expanding EEAT acronyms.

 🎁ChatGPT Wrappers Unwrapped

Startups, and their investors, had a reminder this week that relying on a third party can be pretty perilous.

The past 12 months have seen a wave of AI businesses built on top of OpenAI’s ChatGPT technology - so-called ChatGPT wrappers. These provided additional functionality on top of ChatGPT’s rather basic offerings - for example interacting with PDFs.

Unfortunately for them, OpenAI announced that much of this functionality would be added to ChatGPT as standard in the near future, making many of these start-ups virtually worthless.

Yet another reminder about the risks of building your business on someone else’s land.

Read more →

📰 Classifieds

Online Magazine Blueprint: Discover 300 profitable niches to launch a successful paid magazine, in this free guide. Get your copy

Beehiiv Done For You: Letter Operators are currently running a $99 offer in November to set up a new beehiiv account, helping you to quickly launch your newsletter (or switch from legacy platforms such as Convertkit). It even includes a copy of The Newsletter Is The Business. Check it out

🏇 Entrepreneur Ridealongs

Empire Flippers, one of the large web business brokers, has been running a series of Entrepreneur Ridealongs - basically interviews with successful entrepreneurs, many of whom have sold their businesses on the company’s platform.

They include an audio production niche site, a healthy food blog and many other great examples of the type of niche site many of you will be running.

Check it out→

Newsletter Shoutout of the Week