Episode 692: The Real Reason Your RPMs Are Low And Other Insider Secrets From Raptive With James Baldwin

EBT692 – James Baldwin

Intro 00:00

Food bloggers. Hi, how are you today? Thank you so much for tuning in to the Eat Blog Talk podcast. This is the place for food bloggers to get information and inspiration to accelerate your blog’s growth, and ultimately help you to achieve your freedom. Whether that’s financial, personal, or professional. I’m Megan Porta. I have been a food blogger for 13 years, so I understand how isolating food blogging can be. I’m on a mission to motivate, inspire, and most importantly, let each and every food blogger, including you, know that you are heard and supported. 

[00:00:37]   

I know you have all kinds of questions about RPMs ads, optimizing your site for ads. Words you shouldn’t put on your site to be more optimized for RPMs and ads and all the things in between.

[00:00:53]   

Well, good news for you. I interviewed James Baldwin from Raptive and he gives us all the info we need to know about how to make sure our sites are so optimized for RPMs. You guys are going to be raking in the RPM money after listening to this and doing some finessing on your sites.

[00:01:14]   

James also talks a little bit about the Google search rater guidelines and how we should be approaching that. He talks about third party cookies, are they actually going away? And he talks about those AI sites that are stealing food sites content and what Raptive is doing about that. This episode is totally packed with so much value. I know you’re going to love it. It is episode number 692.

[00:01:40] Sponsor   

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[00:02:17] Megan Porta   

James Baldwin and his team of ad performance experts work to help creators make as much money as possible by analyzing network data, troubleshooting ad and designing ad strategies for industry leading RPMs. James lives in Fargo, North Dakota with his wife and two kids and farms on the occasional summer fall weekend.

[00:02:42]   

James, welcome to Eat Blog Talk. So happy to have you here. How are you?

[00:02:47]  James Baldwin 

I’m doing well. How Are you, Megan?

[00:02:48]  Megan Porta 

Doing good too. It’s a Friday afternoon. The weekend’s almost here, so it’s a, it’s a good day. Super excited to chat with you about all the things you know so much about that we food bloggers don’t necessarily know as much about. So we’re going to pick your brain today on RPMs and ads and ad revenue and all the things that we’re dying to know about.

[00:03:11]   

Before we get into all of that though, do you have a fun fact to share with us?

[00:03:15]  James Baldwin 

I do, I do. And the folks who have met me in person know this, but I am very tall. I am 6ft 7 inches tall. And so yes, I get asked still about my height all the time. And then the follow up question. Yes, I, I did play basketball in College. Minnesota Division 3 school.Nothing of note in terms of basketball career, but yes, did play.

[00:03:42]  Megan Porta 

That’s so funny. How are you? Being tall is always equated to, are you a basketball player? That’s hilarious. My college roommate, we’re still good friends and she’s also really tall and everyone would ask her that, how did you play basketball? Do you play volleyball? She was like, no, no, stop asking.

[00:04:02]  James Baldwin 

Right. Yes.

[00:04:03]  Megan Porta 

Yeah. Love it. So let’s get into this because I know we have a lot to talk about. Now. You work for Raptive, correct?

[00:04:11]  James Baldwin 

Yes.

[00:04:12]  Megan Porta 

Okay. And Raptive is. Well, why don’t you just. If anyone is not in the know, just describe what Raptive does.

[00:04:21]  James Baldwin 

Yeah. So Raptive is the largest ad management company in the Internet and in fact is the largest source of ad impressions on the Internet. So when like an ad buyer looks at the, the ecosystem and says, like, I would like to buy ad impressions, if they look at just, you know, the total number of dollars spent of ad impressions on the Internet that flows through Raptive.

[00:04:47]   

And really, like, we don’t own. Well, technically we have one tiny, small test site, but other than our small test site, we don’t own any sites. We manage the advertisements for, you know, folks kind of spanning from, you know, maybe folks who consider themselves bloggers to, you know, creators, professional publishers, and all the way up to some, you know, you know, very large sites that, you know, aren’t in any way shape or form a blog and whatnot.

[00:05:15]   

So it’s, it’s. Yeah, we, we run their ads, make them money and, and they can just focus on the, the things that they’re amazing at.

[00:05:22]  Megan Porta 

Yeah. Yeah. You guys do such a great job. My blog has been with Raptive for. I was trying to figure it out. I think it’s been at least eight years or something like that back when you were Ad Thrive. And I’ve just. I love you guys. You’re the best. Not only do you do a great job with, you know what you’re good at the ads, but your team is so nice.You’re all so nice and lovely. So just have nothing but good things to say about you guys.

[00:05:47]  James Baldwin 

That, that is good to hear. Honestly, this is going to be silly but like we, we have a channel in Slack where we like celebrate just those things where it’s like, oh my goodness, Megan emailed in and like, you know, and giving each other kudos and like it’s, it’s certainly a part of the culture of just to like, how can we have like genuinely good humans, you know, because like the people we serve are great humans and so how can we, you know, like.

[00:06:13]   

And that’s kind of just part of our core values to be human and make things better and whatnot. But it starts with great humans.

[00:06:20]  Megan Porta 

Yeah, well that carries through. You can definitely tell that. You guys prioritize that. So let’s talk about some of the things that I hear these things all the time just floating around in our space. One of them is discrepancies between RPMs. Why would one site or one blogger get, you know, for an example, like $20 RPMs as an average versus another site that gets like 60 or 70 or I’ve even heard of more recently, why that discrepancy?

[00:06:50]  James Baldwin 

Definitely get that question all the time. We have a large support team, to be honest, that like is answers that question of, you know, all the time. All the time. And I can, there’s many things that we can know and you know, can, can easily, you know, kind of quantify and whatnot. And there’s some things that are, that are advertiser preference and whatnot.

[00:07:09]   

So let’s start with the things that we can. We could just know, you know, the, the biggest driver of this discrepancy is US versus non US traffic. And really not just, and not just those two buckets. But even like US traffic is really, really high RPMs compared to that. You know, Canada is a little bit less and Australia, New Zealand are, you know, right in there.

[00:07:27]   

Then you have the UK, which GDPR knocked that down. Then you have kind of like after the UK there’s some other like the EU, there’s some other like smaller countries. And then you have like Germany and the Netherlands and kind of, if you will, northwestern Europe minus France. And then like France is kind of like clustered with like Southern Europe and as you get like to Spain and Italy, like RPMs are not great and, and then, you know, Africa, chunks of Africa.

[00:07:57]   

There’s, there’s, you know, hot spots and whatnot. But you know, Africa, like India, Indonesia, you know, whatnot, kind of low RPM, Singapore, decent RPMs, but tons of traffic and whatnot. So there’s lots of different things. Like ads right now don’t even run in Russia. So if you go viral in Russia, you won’t serve any ads because they’re sanctioned, they’re sanctions.

[00:08:18]   

It’s an odd kind of thing of like Google has like no ads and you know, per the United States, no ads are allowed. So, so yes, there’s all. So that’s like the biggest driver. Like, that’s like first and foremost, if you know, if you’re, you’re checking with your friends, US traffic, then there’s ad layout and whatnot.

[00:08:34]   

And it’s not even so much like the settings. Settings matter for sure, but especially in food sites, it’s where are you putting your ads? I’m going to kind of use some general rules of thumbs. It can vary, but like generally 65 to 75% of readers and their time is spent on your recipe card.

[00:08:51]   

Okay, so some folks may, you know, may run one ad in the recipe cards or no ads in the recipe card or an ad kind of pushed down out of the way. Okay, you can do whatever you want. But if you’re comparing, say to somebody who has, you know, an ad alongside there, I’m going to talk desktop, but ad alongside their ingredients, you know, some ads in the instructions and you know, whatever.

[00:09:12]   

There’s if it’s, you know, the same recipe, nice long recipe, and there’s 2, 3, 4 ads in the recipe on the one site versus one, and they’re kind of 2, 3, 4 ads and they’re like where the reader’s spending your time, that’s going to earn quite well. You know, you have one ad kind of pushed down or pushed above the ingredients or whatever.

[00:09:29]   

Kind of put like, I just want this out of the way. You know, that’s going to earn a lot less. Additionally, in content, content kind of works. Similarly, there’s places where the readers are spending time in your content, generally speaking, on recipe sites there, where the, where you’re kind of like detailed out like, oh, here’s some of the ingredients and here’s the step by step.

[00:09:47]   

That’s, I think like a lot of folks have evolved their, their, their post to have like a detailed, step by step with images and whatnot. Well, that’s where the readers are going to spend their time in your the meat of the post. Oftentimes we’ll see creators block that out. They’ll use a Gutenberg blog and like, I don’t want any ads in here.

[00:10:04]   

That’s totally fine. But like, that’s where the readers are spending time. So that’s kind of where, you know, that’s where advertisers want to spend their money. It’s like a billboard, right? You know, if you were a billboard company, would you want your billboard on the street where the cars drive by or on the side street where the cars don’t drive?

[00:10:20]   

Like you’re going to pay more money for the one that is where the car’s driving. So those are some of the nuances that we see in terms of ad layouts. So having ads where folks are spending their time, it’s less and less about more ads, but it is about, hey, how do we have an ad kind of always on screen, if you will.

[00:10:39]   

Like in addition to the footer ads. And this works for active other, other ad providers too. The footer ads, the sticky sidebar ads, all of those, they refresh every 30 seconds. Okay? If they’re on screen, they’re going to refresh. And every time that the ad refreshes, it’s a fraction of a penny. I wish we could just say it’s a penny.

[00:10:55]   

It’s not quite a penny, it’s a quarter of a penny or something. But like it’s a little bit of money. But if you think about that, if somebody is, you know, you know, so, so the more like, oh, if you always have a recipe ad on screen, even as they’re scrolling, you know, they scroll to the next section of your recipe card and oh, there’s another one that gives you the opportunity for that to keep refreshing and that page view to kind of keep earning the maximum.

[00:11:17]   

If you say I don’t want ads where the readers are spending their time, then you just lose those fractions of pennies. But like the folks listening to this podcast, right, we’re talking tens of thousands of visits a month. Then like those fractions of a pennies times 10,000 visits really adds up. So, so that’s, that’s the, you know, placement of the ads is important.

[00:11:39]   

The third piece, and really I maybe should have said second, is just reader behavior. And specifically how long are readers on your site? We can think of the recipe journey as for readers in maybe three, we’re trying that we’ll try this out. Tell me what you think you’re making. And specifically we’ve kind of thought through this on email.

[00:11:59]   

It can vary depending on traffic source. But if you have people coming from email, if you send out an email, and I, I know this cause I watch my wife read emails from food bloggers, you know, food creators. Like, she gets an email, she’s laying in bed. It’s the, it’s the 15 minutes in between when her alarm has gone off and the kids have not yet woken up, right?

[00:12:19]   

That’s how much time she has. Like, oh, like that recipe looks good. Maybe we’ll make that this, you know, and, and it’s like a quick, it’s a 20, 30 second page view. It’s like, oh, does this actually. Do I actually want to make this right? And so I kind of call that like discovery.

[00:12:32]   

And that can happen a lot of different. That could happen from Google. That could happen from Pinterest. It used to happen a ton in Pinterest, right when pins used to go viral and you’d get like, oh my goodness, I had a, you know, it might have been a hundred thousand page views. Like I had 100,000 page views.

[00:12:46]   

Like just this huge spike. And all of those pins were people like quickly checking the recipe and like, okay, this looks, yeah, I’ll, I’ll pin this and come back to it. And now the trick is that those, that spike, those discovery page views are low RPM because they’re only 15, 20, 30, 40 seconds, right?

[00:13:03]   

You maybe get one ad refresh, but you don’t get a ton. You get a little bit. It’s valuable, it’s great, but you don’t get a ton. Now the second type and oftentimes this is from Google and what I would say see from Pinterest right now is more of like a, like a meal planning.

[00:13:18]   

Like, okay, I know I want to make meatloaf. So like, hey, I have this meatloaf. Like I’m gonna come back to it. It could be from, from email. Like, okay, I saw that email, you know, a week ago. Now I’m actually going to make that meatloaf. I’m going to re click. And now I’m going to spend a couple minutes like, okay, what are, what do I have in the pantry?

[00:13:37]   

Like, oh, what do I need? Okay, I need some hamburger. I need some breadcrumbs. I need, you know, like, okay, low on ketchup. Got to get to Costco, you know, whatever. Like that’s like planning and it’s a couple minutes. And that’s a medium RPM page view. Like, that’s good, but it’s not super high.

[00:13:51]   

The third is then cooking. Okay? And when you’re actually. When your readers are actually cooking off of your site, it’s a very high RPM. Okay. Because that page view now could be 10 minutes. I think of a chicken cacciatore that my wife had me make off of one of our. One of the sites that we work with.

[00:14:07]   

Raptive. Like, I was on that site. Felt like all afternoon. You know, I think it was 45 minutes that I’m like, you know, chopping mushrooms and like, how. How do I. The chicken and sear it and then I boil it or simmer it. Anyway, it was all day now, so that page view, like, I probably made, like, I probably showed up as like, a 350 RPM page view for her because I was on it so long.

[00:14:32]   

Now, the trick is that, like, that mix on your site of your traffic that is in, like, discovery mode. Like, oh, what’s this? To, like, okay. Like, you know, do I want to make this? Like, hey, I’m considering it. To, like, actually cooking is. Is. And like, how long does cooking take? Like, say, for instance, cocktails.

[00:14:53]   

That’s a. That’s generally low RPM content. Cocktails are great. It’s amazing. People. People love them. There’s a good amount of traffic out there. But, like, how long does that cooking page view take? Like, it’s about 50 seconds, right? Cause you’re like, okay, an ounce, ounce and a half, you know, a little. Little this.

[00:15:11]   

And. And you’re done. Like, okay. I just needed to make sure that I had the amounts right, which is great. That chicken cacciatore took, like, you know, hours, which is great, too. But what we’re. We sometimes find is it’s like, oh, should I just do, you know, these big aspirational recipes that take all day?

[00:15:26]   

And it’s like, well, maybe. But the trick is there. What we generally tend to see is that the percentage of those page views that maybe are like, actually people cooking is kind of low because it’s almost like an aspirational recipe versus, like, meat meatloaf. You know, it’s like meatloaf or banana bread or, you know, some of these, you know, that, like, yeah, there’s a lot of people cooking this.

[00:15:47]   

You can see by the data. You can see that it’s. It’s wildly higher RPM and whatnot. So. But we kind of see that. And so that’s one of the big differences is, like, how long Are readers actually spending on the page? Because again, your ads are refreshing every 30 seconds. Same Raptive, other ad providers all the same.

[00:16:05]   

And that’s why like, even if say, you know, somebody who’s high RPM switches ad providers, they’re going to have a high RPM. Like somebody who’s low RPM is going to switch ad providers, they’re probably still going to have a low RPM because you’re like in a month, you’re not going to change the reader behavior a ton on your site.

[00:16:25]   

It might evolve over time and whatnot. But. And that’s why too, if you look at the RPM by page in your safe, you’re with Raptive with, you know, performance by page. You can see, you can see like, oh, here’s these pages, here’s how many. You can see like an impressions per page view.

[00:16:39]   

And it, like there’s some pages where I can see 30, 35 ad impressions per page view. And it’s not because we have 35 ad slots. It’s because no, there’s, you know how there’s maybe 10 ad slots. But that footer ad on average shows 10 impressions because on average, you know, somebody’s on the page five, five and a half minutes.

[00:16:58]   

And that’s a huge, huge difference. We’re working, I will say if you’re, if you have a site with Raptive and you’re kind of interested, we have more data behind the scenes than we have in our creator dash. We’re working on getting more of that in your hands, but we can even like share.

[00:17:12]   

Like, here are the pages that have more footer ad refreshes. We can give you kind of the overall, you know, for your site, like, oh, on average you, you have three and a half footer added refreshes per kind of initial impression. That gives you a sense of like on average. But I see food sites that are at like 2 or 3 and I see food sites that are at 7 and footer ad refreshes.

[00:17:32]   

And that’s just this huge discrepancy because it’s not just the footer ad. It’s the recipe ads. It’s the videos that you’re, you know, the video ads that you’re running. All of those are basically just the longer they run, the more money they produce. So and that, that is the, the biggest difference between, between a lot of sites.

[00:17:49]  Megan Porta 

So interesting. I’ve never heard that described before. So I mean, if people are coming to your site and just not making the recipe, that’s probably going to affect your ads or your RPMs hugely. It sounds like.

[00:18:01]  James Baldwin 

Yeah, yeah. And so. And you can kind of think about it, the thing that makes food kind of an outlier in terms of RPM, right? Because a lot like, yeah, I work with folks, travel. It finances its own outlier because it’s like credit card companies and banks, but, like, you know, travel, crafting, fantasy football, like, all these different things.

[00:18:20]   

Like, food is this, like, outlier. And we’ll all have, like, you know, some dude who runs a gaming site, he’s like, should I start a food site? And I’m like, well, if you’re a great cook, maybe. But, you know, because he’ll, you know, he’ll see these RPMs, he’s like, what are these ladies doing?

[00:18:33]   

Like, why? How do they have, you know, 60, 70 RPM? And I’m here with 12. And I’m like, it’s an outlier because of the cooking, like, the actual time spent cooking. One of the other interesting thing is, and I chat with folks, some folks have articles about food. Okay. And articles about food don’t earn, like a recipe does.

[00:18:53]   

It earns like an article does, which is a quarter, maybe of a recipe. And so that’s just. Yeah, yeah. So if you. If people, like, like, oh, this is interesting. This is a curiosity, but never actually cook it, then you know that page is going to earn much more like a article does than, say, a recipe.

[00:19:12]  Megan Porta 

So optimizing for ads, is that something we can do on our own? Is that something we should rely on an ad network for? How do we go about doing that?

[00:19:24]  James Baldwin 

Yeah, so one of the kind of unique things at Raptive is we have a pretty sizable team dedicated to supporting our creators and actually proactively reaching out with suggestions. And it will kind of vary season by season. Like, if we have some. Sometimes it’s like, oh, we don’t have huge recommendations. So then we’re chipping away at small recommendations and, you know, you know, but we’re proactively going through all the sites we work with and sending out emails.

[00:19:53]   

So you will see that. And I just would encourage you. Now, they are going proactively just through the list of, like, who haven’t we chatted with in a while? So I know some folks are like, I want to be chatted with every two months. Okay, great. Like, email in. Fantastic. And, you know, you.

[00:20:07]   

The people who email in are at the top of the list. So you can. You can certainly email in and whatnot. In terms of, you know, we just would encourage folks. I know, like, I. I hear lots of, you know, lots of different things. One of the things that we’re actually doing right now is we’re turning down ad density, especially on, you know, on kind of all sites, but especially like food.

[00:20:26]   

Google had their search rater guidelines that, that were published in January and there was a whole. I wish they would have picked like a really great recipe to like slice, like analyze. They picked like a post that was all about this creator’s like, trip she had. You know, so it was kind of like a traditional blog post, like, oh, here’s my family’s trip and here’s pictures and you know, all this stuff.

[00:20:47]   

And at the end, here’s a recipe of, you know, something that we, we had on this trip. And they’re like, oh, well, it’s, you know, the content’s a little off topic for the recipe. And it’s like, well, yeah, you know, like that, that wasn’t super helpful or on task Google, but thank you.

[00:21:04]   

So what we. So we were trying to like, read the tea leaves of like. What do you mean? And they, they mentioned things like, oh, there’s a lot of, there’s a lot of like, secondary content. Right? And, and, and really what they meant is like, things that are not super important to, to the, the core.

[00:21:19]   

Like the primary content is probably the recipe card. And at least in, in their mind, you know, it’s like, oh, I want the recipe for this thing. But there’s probably other things that like, you know, are very important. And one of the things that, that like we see a lot is like chatted with a creator who, she was working on a crème brûlée.

[00:21:36]   

And she said, I have done 23 versions of crème brûlée. And she’s like, I finally landed on one. And for her it wasn’t just like, I want the, the best crème brûlée. She’s like, I need a one that, you know, that’s kind of like user friendly, like easy to make and, and you know, foolproof that, you know, whatever.

[00:21:53]   

Because that’s kind of her, her brand, her niche. And you know, she’s like 20. And I’m like, hold on a second. Like that is extremely important to kind of articulate and maybe even talk about like, oh, you know, like, if you wanted this, like, if you need a little bit more of this, like, you could do something like this.

[00:22:07]   

You know, there’s like a lot of process and a lot of discovery and a lot of science that you’ve kind of done that is beyond just like, this is my kid’s favorite dessert. You know that like is very meaty and very like, you know, primary content. And why not? So it’s not that like the blog post part of is totally get rid of it all.

[00:22:27]   

It’s more like no, like really think through the things that are the primary, of primary importance. And sometimes there’s things where you’re like, yeah, you’re maybe stretching for some words there. You know, you’re, you’re doing the old college paper. Like I get to 12 pages. Like I think in this day and age the good news is that Google’s saying that they don’t really want that, you know, but being careful then even about like how many email subscribe widgets do you have?

[00:22:51]   

Like some, you know, one or two. Definitely. I was just chatting with somebody and we were going through a popular page and she had four like in her content she’s like, oh my goodness, I didn’t even know I had four. Like, yeah, number four probably isn’t doing much for you. So there’s, there’s those things and whatnot.

[00:23:06]   

And then along along with that is ads. Right. The nice thing is, is that if you’re shortening up your content just in general, you’re going to probably reduce the number of ads. But we’re also dialing ad density down a little bit. And for us it’s actually driven a little bit by the SEO side.

[00:23:20]   

And, and the, what Google is saying is SEO may take into account in the future. Like it doesn’t, we’ve done lots of testing and ads don’t impact SEO that we can detect yet, maybe in the future. But they kind of be hinting that like too much scrolling could hurt SEO or could hurt search positions.

[00:23:38]   

But what we’re seeing is too from premium advertisers, especially with the economy being very interesting right now. You know, my retirement account looks very interesting from day to day. But with that, what we’re seeing is premium advertisers are demanding more or maybe demanding less. They want, hey, you know, it’s, it’s the old ad density where you know, like, hey, let’s stuff in as many ads as possible that’s kind of out the window.

[00:23:59]   

The premium advertisers are willing to pay more for sites that, you know, have kind of a premium ad experience. That means ads where readers actually are. But that means also like not just stuffing all the areas where readers aren’t full of ads. So we’re spending a lot of time reducing ad layouts, kind of trading like, oh, we could get rid of these two and put One here and you’d probably be ahead of the game.

[00:24:20]   

Um, so I would highly encourage you to engage with your ad provider. You know, just get things dialed in and just know, like, folks spend their recipe, their time in the recipe card. It’s probably where you want to show ads. The rest, like, you know, you could probably get by with way less ads outside the recipe.

[00:24:36]   

The Google search rater guidelines. So there are human beings that actually, and I think maybe fewer than there used to be, but there are some humans actually, but I don’t know, a hundred percent. I. There’s. But there are humans that Google has actually go to sites and kind of. And they give them this.

[00:24:52]   

It’s over 100 pages long of these guidelines. And somebody who knows SEO should probably talk to all the specifics. But in there they actually talked about food sites and you know, some different things. And what, and what they’re focused on is there’s like different ratings they can give. Like a lowest low, I think like a medium and a high and a highest are like four. There’s all sorts of criteria which would, I mean, would be a whole podcast episode.

[00:25:18]  Megan Porta 

Sure.

[00:25:19]  James Baldwin 

But anyway, all these. And so some of the things with this, the food in particular, that they were like, how easy is it to get to the recipe card? So like a jump to recipe button. They’re like, if you have a jump to recipe button that’s easy to find, that’s like, that weights more towards at least kind of average to highest versus like I couldn’t find it or it wasn’t there.

[00:25:42]   

And I’m scrolling a mile and a half and you know, and whatnot. So that’s kind of the, the general, the biggest thing to take away. And so we talked about, you know, like, related posts, we talked about email, we talked about ads, we talked about fluffy text. Like, highly encourage folks to clean stuff up. The other thing is images. Sometimes food sites can show five finished product images. And you know, it’s just, I’ve chatted with folks and it’s like, oh, you know, I break up my sections or whatever. And it’s like, okay, like that was maybe how we used to do things.

[00:26:17]   

But like now Google’s pretty. Indicating pretty strongly that that’s maybe not how they want it. And to readers, like, they don’t want to scroll and scroll and scroll. So we’re encouraging folks as much as possible switch to horizontal images. Like, that’s a great way to reduce scrolling. It’s horizontal. And then, and then number two is like, just use images to serve readers.

[00:26:37]   

But like, if you’ve done a glamour shot or two, you know, of your cake or your pasta or your steak or whatever you’re doing, fantastic. But you, you know, number three, number four, number five, probably like the readers are already either sold or not sold, like they’re going to cook it or not, but.

[00:26:53]   

And it’s probably not going to be image number four that’s going to convince them. So you just probably don’t need that, you know, use images where it’s, it’s appropriate, you know, in some of the, step by step. But even then, like, sometimes I’ll see like, here’s pasta set in a stock pot and I’m like, like, and sometimes you’ll see the big, big vertical image and I’m like, ah, I don’t, don’t think that one was necessary, you know, and so like, just like you taking all of your steps to just like condense.

[00:27:17]   

And the good news is I think that these are things that readers want. So it’s not like, you know, really, it’s not so much even optimized for Google. It’s like optimized for readers. Maybe some of the things that we felt like, oh, Google wants us to do this thing, so I’ve got to do this.

[00:27:29]   

I got a, you know, another 500 words because Google wants it. The good news is I think that they’re, they’re getting into a world where that’s not so much the case. We can kind of just continue to focus more and more on optimizing for readers.

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[00:29:19]   

So by adhering to some of those things in the search rater guidelines, we are impacting our RPMs positively? Hopefully, yes.

[00:29:29]  James Baldwin 

So so far. So the nice thing is, and I can speak for sure for Raptive, I can’t. So we’re doing a lot of testing with folks who are testing all sorts, myriads of things of horizontal images. You know, some folks are moving the recipe cards, some folks are, there’s all sorts of things, you know, just, just removing fluff and like, oh, okay, good goodness.Or, or taking things that you’re like, ah, these are like somewhat important and you know, moving them below the recipe. There’s different things. And what I would encourage is so I’m on, on the revenue side, I would encourage you just, just to try if you’re like, I’ve always wanted to test like, yeah, like give it a shot.

[00:30:05]   

And my one kind of asterisk is like, whatever you try, just like take a look, make sure that your Raptive video player, that sticky video player that earns a big chunk of your revenue, whatever, after you’ve made your changes, make sure that that thing still plays. Like, but before somebody gets onto the ingredients that that thing is playing and, and earning money and whatnot.

[00:30:25]  Megan Porta 

Okay.

[00:30:26]  James Baldwin 

And then keep track of your before and after. Like, I made this change April 15th. You know, we’ll celebrate tax day by making changes to our sites. And like, okay, I made this change. Don’t make it on like your top post, please. But like on a, if you have something, you’re like, oh, this one gets a thousand page views, you know, a month.

[00:30:43]   

And you know, if it, if you know and it’s not my bank, your mortgage is not riding on it. Okay, I’m going to make some changes. I’m just going to see and then, you know, we can check RPM before, after whatnot. But a lot of these tests we’re seeing, we’re seeing minimal impact.

[00:31:00]   

We are certainly losing some ad impressions like on the content side, like, but what we’re seeing is that readers are maybe spending a little bit more time on the page kind of making up for it. So we’re not seeing like RPMs are way up, but we’re also not seeing that RPMs are way down.

[00:31:13]   

Just be, just be careful. Just like, you know, and if you, if you’re with Raptive, you can just email in and say, hey, just checking in. I, you know, made this change here. Could you take a look, you know, and whatnot. And the team is very happy to, to, you know, or you say like, I made this change this day.Could you check before and after, you know, they’re very happy, very happy to help.

[00:31:35]  Megan Porta 

Okay, cool. Why Sometimes I go into my RPM section of my dashboard and I’ll see an RPM that’s like $250. And that just like why, why does this happen? And if, like what is there anything, if anything I should do with that post?

[00:31:54]  James Baldwin 

Yeah, my guess is that that post has $250 RPM is probably very low in page views or very low.

[00:32:02]  Megan Porta 

Yes, it’s usually. Yep.

[00:32:04]  James Baldwin 

And so what we’re. What you’re looking at there is. Is largely just caused by a very small sample size. But yeah, when you get down to a sample size of like, if, like. And sometimes I’ll run a report and it’s like, yeah, I’m looking at like one reader. Like I don’t know who they are, but it’s like, oh, this one page view and sometimes it’s like 10 cents and sometimes it’s $500.

[00:32:23]   

And so that there is this enormous difference, same page, whatnot. So what you do see, and that’s why I would generally recommend that you don’t look at pages RPM that have less than 150 or 200 pages just because out of 200 you kind of like get it. But yeah, just know that, yeah, there are, there are page views that probably are earning $1,000 RPMand obviously, you know, earning zero.

[00:32:50]   

I suppose if, you know, somebody blocks ads. So. And there’s kind of everything in between. But yeah, it’s. But what. Generally what we’re talking about at RPM is like, you know, the averages. averages over thousands, tens of thousands of data points and all of those outliers kind of all get washed up.

[00:33:06]  Megan Porta 

Okay. Come together. Okay, that makes more sense. Yeah, it’s always a little bit alarming. I did see a $1200 RPM post a while ago. I was like, what that. That would be amazing if that just started flooding the traffic in and the money. But like you said, it’s usually for really, really low page views.

[00:33:26]   

URLs as well. I have a question about those. I don’t remember what you guys call them, but they’re red flag words or words that we should maybe avoid putting in our content. Because, okay, yeah, advertisers flag them or don’t like them. Can you talk about that and how do we know what those words are?

[00:33:45]  James Baldwin 

Definitely. So the concept is that there are companies out there that they’ll crawl your content and they have. And I should start on the advertiser side. When an advertiser is setting up a campaign, right, for it happens. And this is like a default screen in the platforms they call the DSPs where they’re literally punching in.

[00:34:08]   

You know, how much do I want to spend? Which audience do I want to target and whatnot? One of the things that they can say is like, okay, what sort of content do you want to avoid and the options, you know, it’s like, this is probably not perfectly accurate, but I always like to, when I train my team, I’m like, okay, imagine that you’re, you know, you’re 23, you’re just out of college, and here you are at the button.

[00:34:27]   

You know, you’re the button pusher. You know, you’re trafficking deals. So you get to this screen. Okay, well, you know, all you know is that, you know, you’ve heard that the CEO is like, I don’t want in my ads showing on anything bad. Right. Well, so you have a bunch of checkboxes of things that could be bad.

[00:34:43]   

So, you know, check, check, check, check, check. Right. Almost. And it’s just kind of the way, like, so, but it could be anything. It’s like alcohol. Do you want, you know, Nope, don’t want it on alcohol. Now the reality is that the alcohol could be like, this person got arrested for, you know, public intoxication.

[00:35:01]   

Which, like, yeah, you don’t want your ads on that. Maybe. Or this could be like, oh, here is this rum cake. You know, like, but that checkbox is just alcohol. Yeah, and similar, you know, similar. You have, you have violence, you have politics, you have like, you know, all of the different things.

[00:35:19]   

Religion just kind of on down the thing. So the part where there becomes difficulties for creators is like, yeah, like rum cake. Like, oh, it’s a great cake. It’s, you know, whatever. You’re not getting drunk, like, it’s fine. Yeah, but because, you know, you, you use the word rum three times in it.

[00:35:36]   

The automated bots that are crawling your site are like this, this look. Oh, it has, it has rum in the title. Must be bad. You know, and it’ll say like, okay, that’s A, you know, it’ll, it’ll ding it. And maybe sometimes there’s, there’s a little bit more nuance. Sometimes there’s like medium alcohol and high alcohol now and they’re like, oh, maybe it’s, it’s a medium now.

[00:35:54]   

It’s, you know, it’s mentioned a couple times, but so that, that’s the biggest thing. We have a tool in the Raptive dashboard that helps some. We pay for the data from one of the providers, one of the data providers that works with advertisers to help them identify which pages they want to avoid.

[00:36:11]   

So if you go into your Raptive dashboard on the left hand side, you’ll see brand safety. You might have to open up the performance tab or whatnot, but you’ll see brand safety there. And you can actually see are there pages that have been dinged. Now that is not the full list of every page, but hopefully it gives you an idea.

[00:36:29]   

One of the silly examples is we had somebody who, she had a Margarita post and she, you know, she’s writing it or she had, she’d written it and somewhere in there on this page, it was then noted that it was flagged for hate speech. Well, there’s nothing bad. One of the, Sorry. One of the biggest places to be careful is comments.

[00:36:49]   

You don’t want to let people post, you know, F words or any swear words. You don’t want to let people post that was intoxicating or that’s so addicting or you know, like, you know, like just like any of those sort of things. Because like, if you get a bunch of people saying like, oh man, that’s so addicting.

[00:37:07]   

And you know, and then all of a sudden they’re like, oh, that must be about drugs.

[00:37:11]  Megan Porta 

Yeah.

[00:37:12]  James Baldwin 

So it’s, it’s part of it is that’s why the reason we have the dashboard is to help people. But it’s just too like, as you’re approving comments, just be very aware of like, is there a secondary meeting meaning to these words? Anyway, back to the hate speech Margarita, it turned out. And our team, if you see a flag and you’re like, I don’t get it, I have no idea.

[00:37:30]   

Like, don’t worry, you’re in good company. So we have a team that they’ll dig. They have some tools that try to help and we’re trying to actually maybe get something with AI because like, AI is actually, it’s like some like parsing language AI is pretty good at. So you could say like, hey, AI, something on this page could be construed to be with hate speech or something.

[00:37:49]   

Anyway, in this, this was in the pre AI days when we had to do it all human powered. One of my managers, she was digging through and finally she found the word limey. It was a limey margarita. And it turns out that limey is a can be a derogatory term for like British folks.

[00:38:05]   

And sure enough, she deleted. She made it like a lot like turn limey to lime flavored. It was no longer beat speech. And the CPM like jumped by 40%. Yeah.

[00:38:17]  Megan Porta 

Oh my gosh.

[00:38:18]  James Baldwin 

It’s like a silly example. And it was like a small page for her. I don’t think it, you know, it was a couple bucks. But it’s just be very cognizant of, you know, I, I have like, you know, say religious food food bloggers, right. You know, we, we. I think I can’t remember if we’re in Ramadan or just finished Ramadan or maybe it’s just to start.

[00:38:37]   

But you know, you have, if you have a menu item that’s like hey, Ramadan recipes. And you have, you know, Ramadan everywhere or Easter or Passover, you know, like these different things that are great, you just want to be careful of. Like hey, if this is a lamb recipe for Passover, fantastic. That could make sense to have Passover in that, that recipe, you know.

[00:38:55]   

But like if you have that as a menu, you know, item that’s on every page, you could, you know, your site could get dinged for, you know, for like that relit like, oh, I don’t want to be on anything about religion. And you know, bots are not smart. And it’s like I see religion on every page so I’m going to just avoid this site.

[00:39:14]   

So those are the things to be very, very cognizant of. And then two, like I know one really, really smart food creator that, that I was working with. I don’t know all the story, but must have been a bad day. She’d written an oatmeal post. At the end of it she just included some four letter words.

[00:39:29]   

Cause that was how the day was going. And it became a very popular page. And it was like, you know, and. But it was always low RPM and we’re like, I don’t know, I don’t know. And finally I read it. I just sound silly. But like I’m looking at all the ads, I’m looking at all the stats.

[00:39:43]   

I’m a numbers guy. I don’t always read. I read it and I got the end. I was like, oh, you, this, this, this. Like I don’t know what happened but like probably, you know, on this very popular oatmeal page, it’s probably time for this to, to go. She’s like, oh man, yes, of course, you know, so it’s just, it’s just good to kind of keep that in mind of like, you know, we want to be personable.

[00:40:08]   

Like, like that’s more and more important brand and authenticity whatnot. But like too sometimes people’s brands, like, it’s like, does your brand need to include that four letter word because it’s costing you 10% of your revenue?

[00:40:20]  Megan Porta 

Yeah, right. Yeah. It is something that a lot of food bloggers aren’t aware of. We started talking about it in some of our groups and people were blown away. They were like, what? I use the word. One of the words I can think of is addicting because people use that all the time to describe brownies or food that you can’t stop eating.

[00:40:39]   

So going back through and just seeing your content with a different lens and seeing how that could be construed as drug related or I think one of the words for me, I can’t remember exactly what it was. I think it was irresistible. It was something that kind of had an insinuation other than food.

[00:40:58]   

And so I deleted a bunch of those instances and my RPMs went up for those posts. So I mean, yeah, it is worthwhile going through and just doing a little bit of an audit. What kinds of words are you using? And the comments too. I did not think of the comments.

[00:41:15]  James Baldwin 

Yes. And just as an aside, I’ve been working with a food creator. She had accident, maybe accidentally allowed links in her comments. And so she was getting all these really positive comments and then people were like, they’d add a link and like they’d like hide it. They’d do it smart, you know, it’s like, oh my goodness, this is the best recipe.

[00:41:31]   

And like the word recipe would be linked and it was like links to all sorts of garbage on the Internet. It was like SEO, you know.

[00:41:38]  Megan Porta 

Oh no.

[00:41:38]  James Baldwin 

Kind of like there were, yeah, naughty sites that her site was linking to and she was like, oh my goodness, I had no idea. And then it was a bunch of work. So it’s just like you should never, ever, ever allow people to link on your site. Don’t let them link their gravatar or you know, anything in the comments because yeah, like you just never know.

[00:41:57]   

All of a sudden they’re going to be, you’re going to get a Lot of comments. And they’re all going to be like, you know, well, there was like box. There’s like buy boxes and you know, to much worse stuff.

[00:42:10]  Megan Porta 

Oh, gosh. Yeah. Good to have on our radar. Thank you for that one.

[00:42:15]  James Baldwin 

One other thing that download, the word download is gets flagged for like illegal downloads. Like, you know, so, so if you’re like, hey, download my ebook. Like, don’t say download my ebook. Say like, get my ebook. Like, claim my ebook. You know, whatever. We’ll see on occasion, like, somebody will get flagged for like illegal downloads.

[00:42:36]   

And we’re like, oh, nothing here. And it was like, oh, it’s just you had two or three email things that said download. And part of the. It’s real frustrating that these systems are not sophisticated. And they’re not sophisticated because, like, there’s so many ad impressions out there, there’s so much traffic, there’s so much content that like advertisers don’t need to advertise on all of it.

[00:42:57]   

So they can kind of like these tools are just like, oh, it said download twice probably bad. Or it said limey probably bad.

[00:43:04]  Megan Porta 

Right. Download is not one I would ever have thought of that’s not been on my radar. All right, I have a question for you, James, about something that’s been kind of ominously looming over our heads for a couple of years now.

[00:43:19]  James Baldwin 

Yes.

[00:43:19]  Megan Porta 

You probably know what I’m going to ask. Ask the third party cookie situation, is that actually going to happen? Is it going, are they going to go away?

[00:43:28]  James Baldwin 

Yeah, well, it’s a very interesting situation. Google, you know, said like, we’re going to give readers the choice. That was last year in 2024, which some people were like, great, they’re, they’re not going away. And I was like, well, you know, if we see how, if you see how say like Apple, like I have an iPhone.

[00:43:46]   

If you install an app, like, and you know, and it’s not like a baking app, if it’s like a fantasy football app, you’re gonna see like this screen is gonna be like, please, please, sir, please click allow. On the next screen. There’s gonna be a pop up that says like, allow tracking. And then like you go to the next screen and it’s like the screen is like, this app wants to follow you everywhere on the Internet.

[00:44:06]   

And you’re like, you probably want to click this like you want to say no. And that, that is how Apple gives you the choice to like, you know, let apps do the equivalent of third party cookies. And so we kind of expect like yeah, Apple is going to do something like that, that presumably they are going to do something that 95% of folks are going to say oh, that sounds scary and say no.

[00:44:29]   

And that is if Chrome does not get sold like Chrome, the DOJ has, has said, I think, you know, it’s looking more and more likely like they’re, they’re at least going to try to make Google sell Chrome, which interestingly would then probably get rid of the need for the user choice. Because if Chrome was its own independent company or you know, not owned by Google, many of the concerns that existed with Google getting rid of third party cookies won’t exist and they maybe could just flip the switch and get rid of third party cookies.

[00:44:59]   

So at Raptive we’re still spending a ton of time just preparing the technologies, preparing the technologies so that hey folks who want personalized ads, how can we give them great personalized ads? You know like kind of joke but you know, like the reason that there’s foot fungus ads a lot of places is because a lot of people have foot fungus and you can kind of cast a wide net, you know, you can just kind of throw them out there everywhere and like you never know who’s going to click.

[00:45:26]   

But like if you don’t want the Internet to be foot fungus and you know, you won’t believe, you know, what, you know, President Obama did got me for my house and on my mortgage rate and you know, all of those silly ads that we’ve seen over the years that like personalized ads is like the opposite of that.

[00:45:43]   

Those are non personalized ads. They’re just, you know, hey, like they’re bidding a little bit of money to, to, to show it to, you know, as many people as possible. So we’re working on, you know, a ton of amazing technologies to help, you know, our, our, our the creator sites recognize readers, share, share those personalized ads and seeing, to be honest, huge, huge RPM boosts.

[00:46:04]   

I think there was just this, this past month a couple things that rolled out another big chunk of RPM boost. There’s a couple things now that you know are going to be another percentage points of RPM increase for Raptive creators as those things roll out. And that’s like with third party cookies still around because like Safari doesn’t have third party cookies.

[00:46:23]   

So we’re seeing great revenue wins there and it gives us a lot of confidence when you know, the existing Safari, which doesn’t have third party cookies, which is pretty limited and its ability to get IP addresses and different things when we can see, those technologies work on Safari. Then we know, okay, these are probably going to work when Chrome goes away.

[00:46:40]   

And, and, and look, now creators are making maybe 3% more on Safari or 4% more on Safari whatnot, kind of as we just continue to build. So now on the advertiser side, there’s some, they’re kind of entrenched. Like they’re using third party cookies and Google. Every time Google delays, they like stop preparing.

[00:46:59]   

And then it’s like they get a month before, like, oh, it’s going to happen now we got to prepare. So chances are whenever it happens, there’s going to be a week or 2 where RPMs are going to be really bizarre. You’re going to see individual page views where like some, you know, somebody has not updated their Chrome and they’re the last person in the world with third party cookies.

[00:47:18]   

And like they’re getting, you know, $10,000 RPMs because these advertisers who forgot to like flipped a switch and are like, they’re all bidding as high as they possibly can, you know, so, so you’re gonna have some of that. And then, you know, and oh my goodness, why? You know, I was supposed to spend $1,000 yesterday and I spent 200.

[00:47:37]   

Why? And what do you mean? Third party cookies are. So there’s gonna be, yeah, some bumps for sure. But the nice thing is more and more we’re projecting like, like, yep, the, the future is, is bright, especially for creators who have just deeply engaged audiences that you’re engaged with. I encourage like commenting.

[00:47:54]   

Commenting is great. Like get in there with the comments and like engage because, like, that’s a great way that people, you know, share their email address with you and whatnot. That helps your ads pay more. But two, they’re like engaged and they realize like, oh, I’m actually chatting with a human here. It’s not just, you know, some nameless, faceless food site.

[00:48:13]  Megan Porta 

Isn’t it funny how something that was like doom and gloom, it’s the end of the world, we’re all going to die, our blogs are going to explode. Can turn out to be really not a huge deal. I feel like that so often happens in our industry. Definitely the case for the third party cookie situation.

[00:48:30]   

But thank you for all of that. And then last question for you. The AI sites that are stealing content is Raptive on the case about this.

[00:48:40]  James Baldwin 

Yeah. So I have to give our onboarding and policy and compliance people a ton of credit. So we started seeing, pardon me, you know, kind of questionable site. Well, and there’s Always been questionable sites, right? There’s always been, yes, you know, sites where you’re like, ah, this is a, this is a site on gardening.

[00:48:59]   

But I don’t know if you’ve ever picked up a spade, you know. And so like our policy and compliance team. And then, you know, plagiarism has always, always been an issue. We see that, gosh, I don’t know, three times this past week where people, in fact they would just copy the whole site.

[00:49:15]   

Some Raptive site also gets copied and we’re like, you know, like, and we see like, because if you copy, if somebody copies your entire Raptive site, including your Raptive ad script, the ads that will show on their site will earn for the Raptive creator, not for whoever.

[00:49:30]  Megan Porta 

Right, whatever.

[00:49:31]  James Baldwin 

And so we’re seeing like, we’re like, why is there money being made from. And page views, why are there page views coming from, you know, something else? And it’s like, oh, they copied your site. So we see that more and more. But our policy compliance unit’s always been very, very strict in like reviewing and even, I mean some of the just like investigations that they’ll do.

[00:49:51]   

And they’re like, oh, we saw an application from this kind of blah, blah, blah and like, you know, here is the person, you know, and like, you know, they’ll find the person behind it. And like not like, you know, like okay, like yep, like oh, and you know, they got a site in already and we re reviewed that and like oh, that one was questionable too.

[00:50:07]   

Like we shouldn’t have been working with them. So they’re extremely strict and that just continued into AI, you know, and, and so we, you know, now every now and then we’ve had a, we’ve had a handful, I think 50 or so sites that had been in. Sometimes they, you know, somebody sells their site and then somebody buys it and all of a sudden it was great content and then now it’s, you know, they’re, they’re just pumping out AI driven nonsense.

[00:50:29]   

And so we’ve unfortunately had to kick, you know, 50 or so sites out, which is always disappointing because like, like, oh like that was a real human once. That was, you know, that was like somebody that, you know, we really enjoyed working with, you know, maybe before he or she sold the site and whatnot.

[00:50:46]   

But so for us that’s the biggest thing and we know this, that if those folks didn’t, if you couldn’t make money from like spamming just AI nonsense into a blog post and posting it on Pinterest, then people wouldn’t do it right. They’re doing this because they want to make money, you know, just like all sorts of other, you know, things that they could do.

[00:51:06]   

And so for us, that’s our biggest burning conviction of like, no, like we’re gonna do our best to make sure that they don’t make money from Raptive and whatnot. At the same time, you know, these, these folks are, you know, doing quite well on Pinterest and whatnot. And so we’re working a lot with Pinterest.

[00:51:20]   

We’re working with the C suite at Pinterest on down to help them understand like, and even there’s things where like you, if you search for oftentimes a creator site, like it’s not like you know, chicken breasts recipe, it’s like search, search for your site and it’s like you can’t even find your own pins because it’s like there’s a bunch of AI, you know, just glop and whatnot.

[00:51:41]   

And so we’ve spent a ton of time, just about every meeting that we’re having with Pinterest right now gets to this because it, it impacts the readers, you know, like sure, it looks good. So readers are like. Or users are like oh wow, that’s an impossibly cheesy grilled cheese. And it’s like, it is like you can’t actually make a grilled cheese that’s this tall, you know, and so but like people click it because they’re like wow, that looks amazing.

[00:52:05]   

And, and so like we’re really working because it’s like yeah. But then the reader’s quite disappointed when you know, that recipe doesn’t turn out to look anything like what, you know, what they made or it doesn’t work because it actually wasn’t tested. So, so, so you know, so we’re working. That’s like the biggest thing that we’re doing is we’re working with Pinterest.

[00:52:20]   

We’re working, you know, just like say like listen, this is. How can they help help them identify these sites? How can they understand like the impact that like hey, you know, like Pinterest is a symbiotic relationship, right? They benefit when real amazing creators post amazing content. You know, if you’re looking for a DIY bunk bed, you know, and some.

[00:52:40]   

And all of a sudden you can’t find how to make a DIY bunk bed. You find like a bunch of impossible non plans but like really cool looking photos. Eventually you’re going to go search somewhere else. And same with recipes and same with all of the different beauty tips, all of the things that people are going to Pinterest to search for and whatnot.

[00:52:58]   

So we’re very optimistic about the medium to long future, but right now it’s kind of a bumpy road. And so we’re just really working to cut off the monetization. And we have hundreds of these sites apply. They’re like floods of these sites. And the disappointing thing is you see them and you’re like, oh, my goodness.

[00:53:14]   

That site has 400,000 page views a month, 500,000. Has 2 million page views a month. You’re like, oh, wow. We’re, you know, this is amazing. I’ve never heard of this site. I don’t know like who they are, but wow, congratulations. And then you’re like, oh, oh, red flag. Yeah, it’s AI, you know, and you’re like, you know, so we’re certainly leaving money on the table, but you know, for us, like, we don’t, we don’t want to just like try to make a quick dollar or quick million bucks, you know, at the cost of the real humans that we’re supporting.

[00:53:39]  Megan Porta 

I so appreciate that. I. There was one site. There’s not many things that trigger me and get under my skin, but this is one of them because we put so much work into our sites. So there was one site in particular that had ads on it. Not Raptive ads, but I literally made me want to cry every time I looked at it.

[00:53:57]   

I was like, how in the world can. Oh, it just drove me crazy. So I, I truly just so appreciate that you guys are doing this and you have standards and values and you’re holding to them. So thank you.

[00:54:11]  James Baldwin 

Yeah, yeah, no, thank you. It’s, you know, I think short term, it’s. There’s some pain. You know, it’s. You don’t always make as much money as you could short term, but I think long term.

[00:54:20]  Megan Porta 

Yep.

[00:54:21]  James Baldwin 

Yeah, it’s going to be the right thing.

[00:54:22]  Megan Porta 

Yes. Okay. So thank you, James. This was all amazing. I know this is going to be absolutely devoured by so many food bloggers. To end do you have words of inspiration for us? Just, I don’t know, whatever comes to mind.

[00:54:36]  James Baldwin 

Yeah, you know, I’m. I’m reminded of a conversation I had just this week. You know, and you know, this lady, you know, her traffic was down for her. It was, you know, AI on Google was, was, was taking a bunch of her, her searches and she said, you know, she’s like, this is just the industry that we’re in.

[00:54:54]   

She said, and it feels like every few years something like this happens, right? You know, now we have AI and Pinterest, we have, you know, Google, there’s Recipe, Quick View. There’s a lot of things out there that are, you know, oh, my goodness, how are we going to do that? At the same time, you know, there’s others, cool opportunities.

[00:55:11]   

I’m talking to people who are figuring out how to drive traffic to their sites from TikTok and Instagram and different places that maybe historically haven’t ever been a traffic source for creators. And I just want to encourage you, just, like, keep on keeping on, keep trying, keep innovating. You know, try the things that people tell you are working for them.

[00:55:31]   

Try things that maybe nobody else is trying. And we just want to encourage you. Like, the reason that your site has probably has gotten to be a really good size maybe historically, maybe still right now, is because, like, people actually want to find your content. They want to find your recipes and the unique kind of flavor that you’re bringing to the world.

[00:55:53]   

And, you know, we can’t always control, you know, what tech, giant tech companies do in the moment, but we just want to encourage you. Keep on keeping on. I was chatting with a lady. 50% of her search traffic had just gone away. She was just devastated. I know she was. You know, there’s health problems.

[00:56:10]   

Like, there was a lot going on. And, and she, she just kept at it. She tried a bunch of new things. She tried some platforms she had never tried before, and it was so fun. I chatted with her just a couple months ago, and it had been. It had been about a year.

[00:56:25]   

And she said, like, James, like, I’m. My traffic is back. She’s like, my traffic is back to where it would. I never believed it could do it. And it’s like. And, you know, I just want to encourage folks. Like, she thought she was done. She thought it was over. And we hear about people getting discouraged and like, I just can’t do it anymore.

[00:56:41]   

And I just want to encourage you to keep encouraged because, like, you’ve built something amazing before. And if you just keep trying, keep doing, sometimes it’s going back to the old things that maybe when you just thought, I’m just a blogger sitting here answering every comment, you know, but like, just keep trying to do those things.

[00:56:57]   

And, you know, we’re seeing a lot of people eventually break out, you know, break out of the funk and, and kind of. And reconnect with our audience in a deeper way. And so that’s, that’s my big encouragement to you all.

[00:57:07]  Megan Porta 

Wow. Great encouragement to end on. Thank you so much for that. I know that will give a lot of people hope. We’re going to put together a show notes page for you, James. If you want to go peek at those, you can head to eatblogtalk.com/raptive so if people want more information about Raptive, maybe they want to apply for the network.

[00:57:26]   

Can you tell them where to go for that?

[00:57:28]  James Baldwin 

Yeah, yeah, sure thing. If you just want to apply and you’re like, hey, this sounds amazing, I will say we have a 50,000 page view a month minimum. And I guess if you’re at 48, don’t tell anybody, but they might let you in. But you know, like it’s, you know, so that’s 48, you know, 50,000 pages a month minimum.

[00:57:47]   

And so if you’re at least above that, you can go to raptive.com/apply. It’s very, very simple. At the same time, if you just want to get a hold of me or my team, I like always aspire to answer all these myself. But I realize that sometimes I’ll get like 40 questions and I’m like, oh, I’m not great at email but if you just want to, you can just email me directly.

[00:58:08]   

It’s [email protected] I’m very happy to answer questions, talk through things or whatnot or potentially even just like get you to somebody who can. We have a lot of experts and amazing analysts that are spending all day. Maybe it’s your site’s Raptive. They actually know your site and are on it, you know, once a week or you know, if you’re not with Raptive but you know, have some questions. Very happy to to help.

[00:58:31]  Megan Porta 

Thank you, James. This was amazing. I so appreciate you and thank you for listening food bloggers. I will see you next time. 

[00:58:41]  Outro

Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Eat Blog Talk. Please please share this episode with a friend who would benefit from tuning in. I will see you next time.