JustAnswer’s Unique UGC Play

Welcome to this week's issue of the Niche Media Publishing Newsletter.

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Let’s get started with this week’s topics.

Building UGC?

Reddit is the clear UGC winner in Google, but I’ve been curious about other examples, too.

Lily Ray has a great dive into an oddly effective play by JustAnswer.com.

Their playbook relies on copy pasta from their chat support transcripts. I’m not sure this specifically is durable (HIPPA anyone?), but intriguing nonetheless.

I would not suggest everyone go out and copy this playbook, but if we examine the future needs of AI, there’s something here.

1. AI is hungry. AI needs insights. AI can’t JUST rely on bloggers, creators and publishers to produce enough quality insights at scale.

2. Nuanced, long-tail conversations - with follow ups, clarifying questions, etc.. - IS more scalable and useful with the right UGC model.

If I squint, I can imagine a future where these UGC communities, or “services” like JustAnswer, can license these insights for a pretty penny.

What’s interesting about JustAnswer is that they are a service-based company today, charging to help users solve a variety of support questions with real-time chat. At a certain point, the “cost” to the user might be free because the VALUE generated and licensed to AI engines is more lucrative.

Three Ships: Purveyors of Parasite SEO

I’ve followed Three Ships for years as an example of a media HoldCo “grown up”. They had a mini Red Ventures vibe AND they were a local (to me) Raleigh based company.

This past year I was surprised to see that they kept hiring on all cylinders, despite the macro headwinds for media.

I think we now know why…

Three Ships appears to be the worker bees behind a whole slew of name brand media outfits, doing the unglamourous work of fully maximizing their latent brand equity and SEO potential.

I’ll be watching to see how this plays out for everyone involved, especially as this hits the mark for site reputation abuse.

Need Traffic? Want to Build Community?

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Other Things I Read Recently

These are some articles I enjoyed, but don’t really have anything to add to!

Other Newsletters Worth Following

Here are some other publications I subscribe to, author, or co-sign.

If you are operating a newsletter (or even just interested), this next one is one of my “must opens” every week as a newsletter operator myself:

For some of the best breakdowns of creator success stories:

If you want to go deeper with Reddit (one of my favorite creator ecosystems right now), check out my sister publication:

And don’t miss Amy’s excellent insights into wants happening in the world of content marketers.

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OK, that's it for this week...

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Ewen