AI Content Farm: Zero to $16,000 in 2 Months

Fery Kaszoni recently tweeted about a website called CoopWB that is using AI to generate content at scale and dominate Google search results 🤖

According to Fery, the website gets 12M monthly visits and earns over £60,000 ($73K) per month in income from display ads 🤯

The timeline, per Fery’s tweet…

• They bought an expired domain sometime in 2023
• Published 1 article in July 2023
• Published ~5,000 articles in August 2023
• Published ~15,000 articles by September 2023
• Getting 12M organic visits per month by September, per Semrush

Fery calls this..

the largest AI hijacking of the SERPs that the world has ever seen

The site even ranks for competitive keywords like Kanye West net worth.

It seems they were mostly rewriting and paraphrasing content that already exists, since GPT has a knowledge cut off. (Or at least it used to.)

However, Fery’s numbers should be taken with a grain of salt 🧐

I checked the site’s traffic with a bunch of different keyword tools and Semrush is by far the most generous. I’ve seen other traffic estimates range from 240K/month to 4.7M/month.

According to the official Google Adsense Calculator, a site in the entertainment niche – which this site probably falls into – would earn a maximum of $6000/month per 1M visitors from Google display ads.

So $18,000 per month is likely a more realistic estimate for the site’s earnings 💰

Which is still impressive for a young site full of AI-generated content.

Although, as someone replied to Fery…

There’s no way they maintain those ranks once google figures out it’s just basic content.

Fery’s response…

Even if they tolerate it for 5 months, they have already made £200K+ [$243K+] from ads, with this traffic.

Again, the number is probably much smaller than that.

But even if it was $200K+, methinks this is a short-sighted approach to SEO 🙈

Why create a site full of crappy content that is likely to get penalized by Google before long?

When you could instead create a site with quality content that Google will love long time? 😍

Yeah, I get it: you can probably make money faster with the first approach.

But keep in mind the story of Rick Guerin, who was a business partner of Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger – two of the richest people in the world – back in the 1970’s.

You never hear about Guerin anymore, and when Buffett was asked why, he replied…

Charlie and I always knew that we would become incredibly wealthy. But we were not in a hurry to get wealthy; we knew it would happen. Rick was just as smart as us, but he was in a hurry. 

And so actually what happened was that in the 1973-74 downturn, Rick was levered with margin loans. And the stock market went down almost 70% in those two years, and so he got margin calls, and he sold his Berkshire stock to me. I bought Rick’s Berkshire stock at under $40 apiece, and so Rick was forced to sell shares at … $40 apiece because he was levered.

By 1990 that same stock was priced at $8000+ a share, a 200x increase 🔥

So yeah, don’t be in too much of a hurry to get wealthy. It’s hard to make wise decisions when you’re desperate to make a buck.