S2E3 - Brett Tabke on AI, Google's Impact, and the Future of SEO Conferences

Jim Banks [00:00:00]:
We had a little bit of a hiatus. I had a bit of a facial injury. For those of watching on video, you'll see I've got a little bit of a black eye underneath. A couple of weeks ago it was a lot worse than this. So apologies for having a period of time where there was nothing going out, but I'm really delighted to come back with a bang. So I've come back with a very good friend of mine, Brett Tabke, who's the founder and CEO of Pubcon. And we've known each other for probably, what, 25 years? Brett? Guess it must be.

Brett Tabke [00:00:27]:
Yep, Yep, you're mine. 25. Met at Pubcon in London. I think about 24. It would have been 2001.

Jim Banks [00:00:33]:
Yeah. So it's, it's funny, I, I, I was on LinkedIn the other day and I saw somebody post, I think James Kean, who used to work for Espotting, he posted a picture of the City of York pub and he was saying who was there? And I'm like, yeah, I was there. I remember throwing a couple of hundred pound behind the bar and sponsoring some drinks. I think you were stood up on the piano at one point in time, given out prizes, I believe.

Brett Tabke [00:00:57]:
Yeah.

Jim Banks [00:00:57]:
So it's very, those were the early days of in person events and PubCon has been a life changing event to go to, to speak at, to network at. So why don't you tell us a little bit about the origin story of how did you get to where you ended up starting pubcon? Maybe go back pre pubcon to arriving at pubcon.

Brett Tabke [00:01:16]:
Sure. I started a little site called Search Engine World. It was a newsletter on my ISP in 19. I don't know whether it was 96 or 97. I think it was 97. And I was supporting clients with information about search engines. Everybody loved it so much they wanted to talk about it. So I started a forum underneath Search Engine World, finally moved it to its own domain.

Brett Tabke [00:01:38]:
Then I moved the forum to its own domain called Webmaster World. And on Webmaster World, boy, we got a lot of traffic in those days, man. I look back and I just, I shake my head and how much traffic we used to get there. At the peak in about 2009, we were doing 150,000 referrals a day from Google. 150,000. I can't dream of getting that today, pulling that much out of a search engine. So that's where we started then A bunch of people wanted to get together and talk about all of this because it was the early days 1999, 2000 people wanted to talk Google and what's going on with Google. And we had to share information because we couldn't do it out there in public.

Brett Tabke [00:02:17]:
Pretty hard to talk about gaming search engines in front of the search engines. Group of guys. Early moderators on Webmaster World wanted to get together and I said, fine, organize it and do it. And I couldn't go to the first one, but the first one was about 50 people sitting around the City of York Pub in London. And they said it was a conference and I said, no, it's a pub conference. And the name stuck. So that, that was the early start. And from there, oh, it was two years later, we finally actually got together in a hotel and had sessions where we had speakers and we had.

Brett Tabke [00:02:47]:
Matt Cutts from Google was the first search engine speaker we had.

Jim Banks [00:02:50]:
And since then you've had like how many pubcons have there been?

Brett Tabke [00:02:55]:
Been about two every year since 2001. So whatever that adds up to. And then a bunch of small events, get togethers and day conferences. So it's gotta be, I don't know, somewhere around 45 events.

Jim Banks [00:03:10]:
So in terms of the evolution of in person events, I think again I've worked with, obviously I've spoken at pubcon in the past. I've worked with clients who ran their own events. And so I've had the opportunity on the back end to see what goes on behind the scenes. And I've always maintained that anyone that like runs runs an in person event must be absolutely at their mind. Right, so what made you decide, apart from the fact that a couple of moderators just said, hey, we should do an in person event? Was that literally the kind of the driving force behind wanting to do in person events?

Brett Tabke [00:03:41]:
Basically, yeah. It actually goes back further than that. In the 80s I did some of these weekend trainings, personal growth trainings. It was called EST and LifeSpring and a couple. And I just, I always marveled about how these trainings were put on, how they did all the music and the chairs and they had chart packs and they had all of this material stuff that they had to put together. One one week I got the opportunity to do the setup on one of these trainings and the owner of this particular training said, you do a better job for free than the guy I'm paying to do it. Why don't you come to work for me? And I almost went to work for him because I enjoyed it so much. So I had a little bit of a background and exposure to this.

Brett Tabke [00:04:21]:
And when I saw what was happening with pubcon. I knew I wanted to make it bigger. But at the time, I was so distracted running Webmaster World and at the time Search Engine World, that I, I didn't think it was a real possibility of growing it. So we were going to do it as volunteers. Everybody get together and all the moderators will help. We'll pitch in, we'll all go out. Team effort. And it came down to doing it.

Brett Tabke [00:04:43]:
And I was the only one doing any of the work. Nobody showed up. One gal showed up, one woman from Alaska, Good old me. Box. Theresa Nezix showed up, helped out with registration at the pub, helped me get some of the back end stuff together. Nobody else wanted to do anything. I said, if nobody's going to do anything, I guess it's on me. And I just saw the potential there when I had all of these exhibitors showing up, wanting to throw money.

Brett Tabke [00:05:05]:
You want to get together in a bar and you're going to give us how much money to set at a table with your little sign, we could do this. Once I took to it, I just, okay, this is going to be awesome. But like you say, you got to be crazy because the stress levels just if one thing goes wrong, it all goes wrong.

Jim Banks [00:05:22]:
So again, I think when you look at it like a lot of the events that take place, I'll put search in inverted commas, right? So the search conferences that kind of exist today, right. A lot of them are. I think there's a lot of conferences where they have huge numbers of people, right? And the huge numbers of people are really there to almost hang out in the bars and just do meetings.

Jim Banks [00:05:44]:
Right.

Jim Banks [00:05:45]:
And the speaking, the content of the speakers is pretty poor.

Jim Banks [00:05:49]:
Right.

Jim Banks [00:05:49]:
So typically it's an exhibit hall where everyone kind of congregates. So that might be where the 5, 6, 7,000 people go, right? And people go, well, you get 7,000 people there. But the reality of it is that that may be good for the exhibit hall people on the exhibit floor.

Jim Banks [00:06:04]:
Right.

Jim Banks [00:06:05]:
But for the speakers themselves, one, there's not that many people in the sessions, and two, the quality is not very good because a lot of the sessions are old tons to somebody taking a bigger booth at the exhibit hall.

Jim Banks [00:06:17]:
Right.

Jim Banks [00:06:17]:
Type of thing. So you end up in this situation where the person that's on stage is actually pitching rather than educating.

Jim Banks [00:06:23]:
Right.

Jim Banks [00:06:24]:
And for me, pun has never been that.

Jim Banks [00:06:25]:
Right.

Jim Banks [00:06:26]:
It's never ever been a sort of a pitch fest.

Jim Banks [00:06:28]:
Right.

Jim Banks [00:06:29]:
And I'm pretty sure, I don't know if there's Like a written rule or unwritten rule, but there must be somewhere where it says, if you stand on stage and pitch, you will never come to.

Brett Tabke [00:06:39]:
We've weeded a few out, but no, we just tell people, hey, mention your product once at the start and once at the end. Tell them who you are. And then we want people to show their expertise. That's their calling card. That's their pitch, is their expertise.

Jim Banks [00:06:52]:
Yeah. It's funny, if you look at the. Like so many of the speakers I've had on before this particular episode, like so many of them, I can trace my origins of meeting them back to being at a pubcon, right? I always remember, I always take the. I always take the rise out of Dave Roth because I always say when I first met him, I was unsure about whether I liked him because he was so corporate, right? Because at the time he was working beyond, right? So he would always be in the speaker's room with his shirt and tie. He'd always be on conference calls. And I'm like, this is not cool for me. I think the whole thing I've loved about the search industry is it's been very laid back, very kind of blase and everything. And again, I think some of the early pub cons, there was definitely panels where people were satisfied, sat on stage, presenting with bottles of beer or what have you, cocktails, right? And I know it's different now, but I think back then it was probably appropriate.

Jim Banks [00:07:42]:
So in terms of all the sort of pubcons that you've had, you've had some phenomenal kind of keynote speakers on the stage, right? Who would you say if you had to go? My top two or three people. Who would you say? The top two or three people that you managed to persuade to come and speak at pubcorn, who would they be?

Brett Tabke [00:07:59]:
My favorite has got to be Guy Kawasaki. He was number four at Apple, in charge of PR forum for the Mac. He launched the Mac. He just a good guy, always brings good info. I still follow him to this day. And in fact, I talked to him, tried to get him out to Vegas, but he wasn't available that week. The other one, we've had a couple of big ones. We had Satya Nadella from Microsoft before he became CEO of Microsoft, and Tony Hsieh, rest in Peace, when he was CEO of Zappos.

Brett Tabke [00:08:29]:
And then the big author, Malcolm Gladwell of Tipping Point, we had him in Boston. So we had some good speakers, that's for sure. And of course, Nobody can forget Mr. Mad Cuts. So he's A one man show. Gosh, he was always so good for Google.

Jim Banks [00:08:44]:
It always used to make me laugh. I would always sort of party hard when we were in Vegas. You'd be in the sort of convention center, the kind of morning sessions. I didn't see that many morning keynotes because they were on early.

Brett Tabke [00:08:58]:
That was early.

Jim Banks [00:08:59]:
Wasn't really my vibe back in the day but I always made the effort to make sure that I was in the room when Matt Cutts was presenting because again he was a very good presenter, presented great content but it always made me laugh when at the end he'd finish his presentation and go off to the side and there'd be this queue of people that would want to meet him and have their photo taken and want to ask him questions. He wasn't very gracious with his time but it always amazed me how many people would talk to him about their sort of network of sites that they had and link building sites and all of a sudden the following day they're all gone. And I think there was your first mistake. Right. I'm sure he must have some sort of microphones sending back voice to Google HQ to the web spam team. Here's another one, here's another one, here's another one.

Brett Tabke [00:09:46]:
Yeah, he always loved showing up at the hotel bar after, at least after happy hour so everybody had two or three drinks because got all kinds of information at the bar so Matt never.

Jim Banks [00:09:57]:
Drank so but, but obviously as an industry we've had some great characters. We've lost a lot of friends along the way. I, again I, I don't know if it's just me looking at it in a sort of now I'm into my 60s looking at it in a more sort of fatalist way but that there's. There seems to be like in the search community we seem to have proportionately had more people in the search community who are no longer with us through either natural kind of causes of their death or their own taking their own lives than in other industries. And I was wondering if you had any thoughts around why that might be.

Brett Tabke [00:10:34]:
You look back and I think there's seven people that have committed suicide in SEO, extended SEO over the last decade. I don't know anybody else in any other part of my life ever that has committed suicide. It. I'd never heard of it before that and it really bothered me for quite a while what we could do at pubcon to try and address this. Could we get involved somehow? And I just think when you look back at these people that are now gone. All of them were very successful. Huge numbers of traffic. There was a couple, one guy, he was into some shady sites, but he had huge numbers of visitors back in the day and then he went almost broke.

Brett Tabke [00:11:19]:
And it was at that point he took his own life. Every person I look at almost the same story. They were hugely successful. The more you look at it, the more I realized that all of these small guys, they got hit hard 2000, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 in there, got hit hard by Google Updates, very hard. Lost all their traffic. I know, I was on Webmaster World. We were doing huge numbers, visitors back in 2010 even. And then Panda hit and we went from 150,000 referrals a day to 15,000 to 1500 a day.

Brett Tabke [00:11:55]:
It just killed the site. Just absolutely killed the site. And when I think about these people who have passed, I think it had a lot to do with it. I think it. Google sucked all the money out of the ecosystem. They send all the traffic to these big brand sites now because they want eat, they want trust, they want authority, they want to cover their back. So they send it all to these big brands now. So I really believe there was a huge depression that went over our industry for about the last decade over loss of traffic and the changes to the web.

Brett Tabke [00:12:25]:
And now going forward with the new search paradigm with AI and the loss of referrals. I don't know what's going to happen, Jim. I really don't know what's going to happen next.

Jim Banks [00:12:36]:
I definitely think it's a pivotal point in time for people in terms of their decision about what to do for the future of their career. Certainly here in the uk, I know a lot of agency owners are struggling with all sorts of different things, whether it's like, clients, staff, there's so many things that are up in the air. There's still a lot of businesses hugely successful, making tons of money.

Jim Banks [00:12:56]:
Right.

Jim Banks [00:12:57]:
But I don't think necessarily that just making tons of money is the way you're going to be measured in terms of your performance. Right. Again, one of the keynotes at the most recent pubcon was Will Reynolds.

Jim Banks [00:13:06]:
Right.

Jim Banks [00:13:06]:
And Will has always had a very refreshing outlook on. He's grown a very successful business. He's grown a very successful business. And he's also had a very refreshing outlook in terms of how he rewards his staff. He does it every year because it's important to it. So.

Brett Tabke [00:13:32]:
Right. There's a lot of ways you can give back. We've had the charity foundation for. Since it was 2006 it was. We were down in New Orleans six weeks before Hurricane Katrina hit down there, that massive flood. And that's when we started the annual charity giving. We need to get back to that. We didn't do it this last time, but we're going to get back to doing that to try and give back to the community in different ways.

Jim Banks [00:13:55]:
So obviously the pandemic I think changed a lot of the way in which people gathered their information. Right. So I think a lot of people switch from in person events to online stuff.

Jim Banks [00:14:08]:
Right.

Jim Banks [00:14:08]:
And again, I know that we've spoken privately about the impact that the pandemic had on pubcon. Kind of. It was brutal, I'm guessing.

Brett Tabke [00:14:18]:
Yeah, yeah. Four years without any income. We tried the virtual stuff and I've talked to so many guys, we did virtual conferences. We all got the same story. Ton of work for a tenth of the income. Doesn't even cover expenses. It was a lot of work. Yeah.

Brett Tabke [00:14:34]:
Everybody just drained their reserves, tapped into the retirement fund to make it through it. I read on one of the meeting association boards that 70% of the conferences under 500 people are no longer around post pandemic. They're just gone 70%. And when you look in the M and A right now, mergers and acquisition in the conference and trades for space, there's a lot of activity going on right now because guys are, they're jumping out of it quick. They came back and build it up a little bit. They're getting out of it, get offers every day, almost inquiries every day about conferences. So clearly major change in the entire sector segment.

Jim Banks [00:15:11]:
So what, what do you think it is that makes a kind of successful conference? A successful conference?

Brett Tabke [00:15:19]:
Number one, people enjoy it. That that's the first thing. If I had so many people come up to me in Vegas and say this was the best event they'd ever been to because it's the one we have right now. It's the one we just were at. Chris Jones come up. What a gift this was to the mental health of our industry. And he's absolutely right. And when people come to me and tell me stuff like that, which I've heard over and over again, it was a successful event.

Brett Tabke [00:15:42]:
Ingredients gotta be community. That's why we were successful in the first place. We had the webmaster world community to tap into. And once you have that, once you have that in person thing, people get a taste of that. They want to know who these friends are that they've been talking to for years online are. And then social media really also changed how Conferences interact and work because now we got to do all this social media stuff and we got to try and reach different audiences because the LinkedIn audience is completely different from the Facebook audience to the Twitter audience to elsewhere out there. Even the Reddit audience is completely different. And I try and address each one of these differently to be successful.

Brett Tabke [00:16:22]:
So it's completely changed from when we started in the pub, that's for sure. Getting together in a hotel in terms of.

Jim Banks [00:16:30]:
I know for me pubcon was really going to Vegas. It was always for me, one of the highlights for me to go there, it was a much bigger event than the one most recently. I think one of the challenges for event organizers is because everything everyone had this sort of like their slot. Right. When you look at it seems like this Q4 seems to be when all of the search conferences take place, they seem to be one after the other. And I'm thinking why? Why is it all congregated around such a small amount of space? Again, quite particular about which events I'll go to as an attendee, which ones I'll go to speak at. And I know that there's a lot of people will quite happily go and speak everywhere about everything. And again, I think one of the challenges is that they're probably not being honest with themselves.

Jim Banks [00:17:15]:
They should probably stop, take a kind of stock and go. Is this really actually adding value to anything other than maybe my waistline and my personal brand? It's not necessarily going to help financially the business that I'm working for. And I just wondered again, what the sort of process for. Again, if you're running an event, what's the process for getting people to come and speak? You say I only want people that will speak at my show and not others. Do you have a kind of like a. This criteria for kind of whether people will be accepted or not accepted?

Brett Tabke [00:17:48]:
Right. We don't do any of that game playing stuff of you speak here, not speak there. We had a couple of speakers that I've seen them speak at least at five different events in the last three weeks, including ours. They're fantastic. Different audience, different approach, different. When I'm in an audience and Jim Banks is in the audience, I'm going to give an entirely different presentation than just Joe User off the street. So no, we don't play any of those speaker games. We look for expertise and we want to try and see a deck before we approve a speaker or a video or even a TikTok.

Brett Tabke [00:18:21]:
I even watched TikTok since last time. So they need to have some kind of game before they get there. So that's where we start. Show me your expertise and we'll talk.

Jim Banks [00:18:29]:
So, yeah, because I think the days of a certain speaker putting bums on seats and everything is probably gone.

Jim Banks [00:18:34]:
Right.

Jim Banks [00:18:35]:
I think a lot of people talk about him again. He's. He's a great speaker. Gary Vaynerchuk.

Jim Banks [00:18:39]:
Right.

Jim Banks [00:18:39]:
But it's. Everyone's got. I've got a picture with Gary Vayner. Everyone's got a picture with Gary because he's. Again, I know his ultimate goal is to buy the New York Jets, Right. And it seems that's his kind of reason for speaking in conferences, is to keep putting money into the coffers to enable him to buy the Jets. But I think sometimes when, yes, his delivery style is great, but when you've seen him present once or twice, you don't need to see him present more because he may talk about something different, but it's still the same delivery and probably the same sort of theme that he's just regurgitating for a different platform. So he's always been an early adopter of a new platform and then he turns his back on it and walks away and goes off and does something else.

Brett Tabke [00:19:20]:
Yep. That's why I was so sad this time, not to have a Googler out from Google and Fabrice from Microsoft bang out. But you need somebody that brings fresh info that your audience is definitely interested in. That'll put bums in seats, as we say. But whereas Gary is entertaining. He's so energetic with his delivery. But like you say, he doesn't necessarily bring something new every time he speaks. You know, it's Gary.

Brett Tabke [00:19:48]:
You're going to get Gary on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, whatever week it is, whatever month or year it is, you're getting. Whereas the search engines, they bring fresh info about updates about crawl stats.

Jim Banks [00:19:58]:
Yeah, I was used to love the. Again, I've been a paid search guy forever.

Jim Banks [00:20:02]:
Right.

Jim Banks [00:20:02]:
But I used to love at pubcon you had the sessions, the meet the crawlers, where you'd have an individual from Microsoft, Bing or Google or Teoma, I think back in the day and you had all the different people on stage talking about the way they've handled certain sort of things. And for me it was really handy to have everyone on stage at the.

Brett Tabke [00:20:23]:
Same time talking about, yeah, our first big conference there in Boston that had actual sessions was Matt Cutts from Google, Tim Mayer from All the Web, or was he Meyer? Was he from Intune at the time? He might. No, I think he was all the web. And who was it? Paul Gardee from Tayoma, Ask Jeeves. And then somebody from Yahoo. Dan Boberg from. And those four guys went at it for two and a half hours. And everybody just loved it, hearing from everybody. We couldn't do that.

Brett Tabke [00:20:51]:
Even 10 years ago. There just wasn't enough search engines out there. It'd be all Google all the time.

Jim Banks [00:20:56]:
Why'd you think Google have done that? Why do you think they don't send anyone to an event like pubcon? Because you would have think. You would have thought again. They've, they've tried to be a lot more helpful now with some of the information that they make available, but is it just that they're too big for their own boots and they just, they just want to do everything themselves?

Brett Tabke [00:21:14]:
The last year Matt Cutts spoke for us, I believe it was 2015. Just before he spoke, the day before he spoke, we had Jason Calcanus speak and he went after Matt for.

Jim Banks [00:21:29]:
He's good at that. He's good at going after people.

Brett Tabke [00:21:31]:
Yeah, he went right at Matt and basically called Matt a bunch of names. And I think it upset Google a bit, I've heard since then. And it was six months later, Matt was gone at Google. I think their pr, when the PR department changed at Google, they decided they didn't need to put themselves out there like that anymore. They didn't need to take the risks. And they only want to communicate when they can communicate on their platform or control the platform, such as Twitter or one of the social networks where, where they can interact. So I think they just changed their opinion of pr.

Jim Banks [00:22:03]:
Yeah.

Brett Tabke [00:22:04]:
They don't have.

Jim Banks [00:22:04]:
Because I know on the paid side of things they've got Ginny Marvin, who does a great job on the sort of paid side of things.

Jim Banks [00:22:11]:
Right.

Jim Banks [00:22:11]:
But they don't seem to have anyone. I know that they had Gary Elish. I don't know if he's. I don't even. I haven't seen or heard from Gary in I don't even know how long.

Jim Banks [00:22:17]:
Right.

Jim Banks [00:22:18]:
He seemed to be like very prominent and all of a sudden he just vanished.

Jim Banks [00:22:20]:
Right.

Jim Banks [00:22:21]:
Certainly he vanished from my radar.

Brett Tabke [00:22:24]:
Yeah. He came down to Austin in March of last year when we had our first return conference and he did a great job. And then they laid all these people off, cut all the budgets and nobody's got budget anymore to do any travel. Yeah.

Jim Banks [00:22:36]:
Because I think I was helping a friend who was running an event. I was trying to get somebody from Google along and they were like, you've got to pay for my hotel, you got to pay for my flight, you got to pay for this, you got to pay for that, right? And they couldn't tell me who the person is going to be until the day before. And I'm like that's not going to work because again, they were not going to come along and talk. Candidly, it was very much going to be a sort of canned presentation, very googly googly fied. And that wasn't what I wanted. I wanted somebody to kind of be much more open and everything else. And I just said, okay, let's just not bother these big, these big companies.

Brett Tabke [00:23:08]:
They don't have to. They've got their own platform, they've got their own outlets, they can control their own message. The only thing coming in person was Matt would come and get information himself to upgrade the quality of the service. So he was doing recon research coming to Pubcon. So and it helped make his job a little easier talking to webmasters, getting everybody on the good side of Google.

Jim Banks [00:23:31]:
So in terms of one of again I had the opportunity to spend some time with Brett in Australia, a Friends conference down there and again it was an opportunity to remind me of just how good a presenter you are. And I know that a lot of the presenters presentations that you're doing more recently have been on the topic of AI. Kind of, what was it that kind of got you excited about AI?

Brett Tabke [00:23:55]:
Severe boredom to death with Google. And this is what's next. Obviously AI is what's next. You can see it's going to take over and get baked into absolutely everything and we're seeing that live out. Our first Search Search conference back was last of February, first of March last year in 2023, just after chat GTP had launched in November of 22. So it's obvious where it's headed. And now we've got Search gtps. I knew I could see the writing on the wall.

Brett Tabke [00:24:30]:
What was going to happen. They were going to bake it into search, they were going to bake it into everything from our phones to our. Now they're touting AI watches. What do we need an AI watch for? So you knew it was coming. It's what's next. It was going to take a little time to shake out. That's why I jumped in early because early movers always win. So yeah, we just jumped all in on AI and I've been continuing to stay all in on AI.

Brett Tabke [00:24:55]:
And now just this last week, OpenAI launched Search with Search the Web within Chat GTP so now Search GPT is in there. It's what's next. And I'm down with Search GTP tracking.

Jim Banks [00:25:07]:
I haven't. No, it's one of the things I, again, I've drifted in and out of paying for a premium subscription to it and not.

Jim Banks [00:25:15]:
Right.

Jim Banks [00:25:16]:
So it's one of those things. I think the thing I like about it is you can pick it up and put it down.

Jim Banks [00:25:20]:
Right.

Jim Banks [00:25:20]:
So I think it's on my list of things that I want to resurrect. But right at the moment, again, I've got some other stuff that I'm working on that's outside of the search side of things. Obviously, the podcast is a big part of that. Again, trying to focus on the AI side of the podcast production and output. For you mentioned there about social media, getting the social content out there is, again, I want to try and make it as cost effective as possible. As, I mean cheap. I just want it to be cost effective.

Jim Banks [00:25:50]:
Right?

Jim Banks [00:25:50]:
Because again, I think a lot of people don't realize just how expensive. I didn't when I set one up, I didn't realize how expensive running a podcast was.

Jim Banks [00:25:58]:
Right.

Jim Banks [00:25:58]:
Because there's so many things you need in the back end that you really don't realize you need until you need them.

Jim Banks [00:26:03]:
Right.

Jim Banks [00:26:03]:
And then you need a website. You need this. Okay? So all of a sudden I'm into a couple of hundred bucks worth of subscriptions for things that, you know.

Brett Tabke [00:26:10]:
Oh, I know.

Jim Banks [00:26:11]:
So, you know. And again, I'm trying to go, well, do I really need that? So again, I went through a phase a little while back going, drawing up a list of all the things I pay on a monthly basis. Right? Get rid of that, get rid of that, get rid of that. And one of the things I got rid of quite recently was Zoom, right. I had a paid Zoom account for probably since Zoom started. And I thought, yeah, I'm just not using Zoom now. I had a client that used to do a regular Zoom, but I think Google Meets more than good enough now. Microsoft Teams is more than good enough now.

Jim Banks [00:26:39]:
Right.

Jim Banks [00:26:40]:
There's so many other platforms that you can use to provide. I think in some respects that's probably one of the things. I think all of the AI facilities that Zoom came out with, like, really put me off here. I'm like, this is just way so much stuff that I just don't want that they just kept throwing in there. I don't want that, don't want that. They just seem to be not listening to what I wanted and give Me the ability to create what I wanted. Right.

Brett Tabke [00:27:04]:
They really took it every, everybody going back to work in the offices. They had a pretty big downturn post pandemic. So I can understand why they're throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks.

Jim Banks [00:27:16]:
Yeah. Okay. So obviously AI you think it's got a big future. I'm inclined to agree with you. I just don't really know what that future looks like from me. And certainly on the paid side of things, I think like the whole thing with this whole argument about match types and you know, phrase matches going away on Google Ads, right. You're not getting data anymore, right. You don't get keyword data anywhere near as much as you used to.

Jim Banks [00:27:40]:
And I, I know that there's so many people go, hang on, I'm paying this, this money for these advertisers. I should get my, is my data. I should get my data. And I agree to that to, to an extent. But I think so much of it now is it's multi device, multi touch point.

Jim Banks [00:27:57]:
Right.

Jim Banks [00:27:57]:
There's so many different touch points that kind of go on in there. I'm not really sure. I still haven't wrapped my head around how the AI side of things is going to impact the advertising ecosystem.

Jim Banks [00:28:08]:
Right.

Jim Banks [00:28:08]:
Because again, so at the moment the search GPT is only available for those that pay the premium subscription.

Jim Banks [00:28:15]:
Right.

Jim Banks [00:28:15]:
But I'm thinking at some point in time they're going to have to make that more relatively available because they're not going to go unless you pay $20. You're not going to get access to it at all.

Jim Banks [00:28:23]:
Right.

Jim Banks [00:28:23]:
Because I think they're going to miss out. So it will they be right. In that case we're going to go down the route of charging people by showing them ads in amongst the kind of the results that are there.

Jim Banks [00:28:34]:
Right.

Jim Banks [00:28:35]:
So I don't know, I don't know how it's going to all shake out really.

Brett Tabke [00:28:39]:
I think they will maybe eventually make it a paid version, a free version, but now it's paid. They're getting it perfected, gives them time to get it perfected, get feedback from users and really this first batch here, it's not about trying to kill Google or compete with Google. They're just trying to shut the back door because so much of the traffic that is on chat GTP exits and goes to Google. All the charts we see are that's the number one hop off point for chat GTP people go to Google. We don't know why. I know OpenAI knows why. Whether it's to do a search that wasn't fulfilled on chat GTP or just the normal course. Course of business that many people go to Google in a day and they naturally go to OpenAI and then go to Google.

Brett Tabke [00:29:24]:
But they need to be able to shut that door a little bit. And having their own search engine does shut that door. At least for the people who are going to Google to search, which you got to figure a good percentage of them are. So that's step one. Close the back door, stop leaking all that traffic to Google, keep it on site and then they'll go from there and figure out what they can do with it. The biggest problem with Search GTP is it's serviced by Bing using the Bing index, not service. The results are not identical. It's getting massaged in several different ways before it's presented to the user.

Brett Tabke [00:29:55]:
But it's so clean, it is so good, so accurate. Google looks dated. They very much look dated now when you compare it to something as clean and modern as search GTPs, that's the first step. Let's get it worked out and then they'll figure out what to do with it after that. I hope they move it to their own to a new domain. But it's pretty expensive to do that AI searching compute wise. Very expensive.

Jim Banks [00:30:18]:
Yeah. Because it's funny, I was Looking@ Notebook LM that Google have come out with, right? And for me it's scary. I took one of my old episodes and I put it into sort of Notebook LM and it gives you like a six or seven minute synopsis of an actual episode. I'll probably do the same with this episode, right? You put it in and you end up with one man, one woman talking about the topics that are discussed in that particular episode. And it is flawlessly good, right? It's so amazingly good. And I'm thinking you could probably create a very good faceless YouTube channel. You could probably create a very good just by repurposing other people's content, right? You don't even need to be your own episodes. You can go and grab an episode of somebody else's podcast, put it in there and basically turn it into a six minute, seven minute episode.

Jim Banks [00:31:04]:
That's a much shorter version of the, the kind of longer version. Again, I think the thing I like doing the kind of the conversations like we're having now, which could go however long it goes, right? But then from there people have a fairly low attention span. They may want to have bite sized pieces, which is why I decided I wanted to make sure I took everything and put it into Twitter. I wanted to put it X. I'll never call it X, I'll always call it Twitter. Put it into Twitter, put it into like Instagram, put it into Facebook, put it into TikTok YouTube shorts.

Jim Banks [00:31:38]:
Right?

Jim Banks [00:31:38]:
So many different places in which you can repurpose the content.

Jim Banks [00:31:41]:
Right.

Jim Banks [00:31:41]:
And put out the salient sound bites.

Brett Tabke [00:31:44]:
Right?

Jim Banks [00:31:44]:
Because ultimately that's what it is. It's a conversation with some sound bites in it that's wrapped up in just all the other stuff that goes with it. And I think having the ability, I think that's where GPT is really good. It can look at it, it can look at sentiment, pull out the sentiment of it and just go from there. Really.

Brett Tabke [00:32:00]:
Yeah. I'm. I just relaunched Search Engine World last week, covering news and tips and tricks and stuff. I'm taking all the articles and feeding them into Notebook LM and make a podcast out of this article and then tag it onto the bottom end of it. This whole idea of rich media is just. It's exploding right now. And the fun thing to do is take Notebook LM podcast and then feed it into something like Synth Synthesia that creates avatars. And now you can actually film yourself and create an avatar of yourself that is very photorealistic and then feed Notebook LM and we'll sit there and put your face up there.

Brett Tabke [00:32:35]:
We could be avatar. They don't know we're avatars, Jim. Imagine that people watching this right now, we're the avatars.

Jim Banks [00:32:41]:
If it's good enough for Abba and if it's good enough for KISS to store their younger selves in perpetuity, right. For people to enjoy long after they're gone, who are we to argue with that? So.

Brett Tabke [00:32:54]:
Right, right, right. Yeah. I've seen avatars pop up on TikTok already. Avatar podcast. So it's going that route real quick.

Jim Banks [00:33:02]:
Yeah. I think for me that there's only one challenge in all of this, right? It's the accuracy of what's being said. Because so like you and I, we're not avatars yet. If we were avatars, we'd have probably made much better looking versions of the two of us. I'd have had no black eyes and everything else. But I think from the point of view of if the information is being given out is inaccurate, then that can potentially be really dangerous. This is one of the things I've been hugely critical of.

Jim Banks [00:33:32]:
YouTube again.

Jim Banks [00:33:32]:
I want to become a big YouTuber, right? But I want to do it the hard way rather than the easy way, right? There are so many people that are posting stuff, hey, I'm a billionaire at 14. I'm like, where's the proof? Show me that, right? There's so much of it is. There's so much being said that is unverified, right? With screenshots that are unverified, with thumbnails that have got just bogus information in them, right? And I'm thinking, who in YouTube is actually there sanitizing any of this stuff? There's all sorts of different channels out there that exist to call out fake people, right? And they're calling out saying this person's a fake and you know, here's why they're a fake. And they make like long, almost like TV style video where they're talking about. It's all investigative journalism type stuff, right? Which calls out why people are the shams that they are, right? And I think for that reason I've been so frightened to say some of the things that I know to be true because people may go, that's not right. Because I think when you look at paid search, there's so many different ways you can arrive at ultimately maybe the same outcome, right? Because I've always said my job is to hold Google, Facebook and people like that to account for what they're recommending as being best practice for advertisers. If you can have one set of standards that all advertisers of all sizes in all disciplines, selling all things and whatever else can all kind of abide by the same standards, right? They got to have different kind of nuances within each vertical as to why something would work in E commerce that may not work in insurance or something like that.

Brett Tabke [00:35:05]:
Totally agree. Yeah. We have to always filter this information coming out of these social media outlets. Last week I got into kind of a discussion with my wife who was a university professor about nursing and some of the information that is out there on TikTok. She showed me a study by another university claiming this was all fake and bad information. I go, nobody's listening to that from my point of view. I scroll right by that stuff. But she said, what's out there though? You got to have talks about what's available and what's going on.

Brett Tabke [00:35:38]:
It's hard to filter it. It really is.

Jim Banks [00:35:40]:
Yeah.

Jim Banks [00:35:40]:
And it's at the moment there's all this sort of the election cycle. We've just gone through one here in the uk. You've got to get through one in the States. There's all this kind of again, the way in which the candidates are like courting the press and everything else. And it's just again, I look at it as a external sort of like European looking at a separate thing in America. I'm thinking, how can you possibly decide between either of these candidates? They just seem to be broken in so many different ways. Right. And we had the same thing.

Jim Banks [00:36:10]:
We had an election here quite recently and there was misinformation put out about some kids that were killed. So there was riots and we've ended up like with a thousand people ending up going to prison.

Jim Banks [00:36:22]:
Right.

Jim Banks [00:36:23]:
For basically trying to get these people who've come in illegally or not illegally, they've come in on boats across the channel, they're housed in hotels until such time as they can process their asylum application. Right. So there's a whole bunch of stuff that kind of is wrong about that.

Jim Banks [00:36:38]:
Right.

Jim Banks [00:36:39]:
But somebody said the person that killed these three young girls was one of these people that just come in on the boat. So all these people were going to hotels to basically knock down the doors to pull people out and I guess lynch them in the street. And you think, and that was completely bogus. That was not what had actually happened. The person who was responsible for doing it had been here legally for quite a number of years and everything. He's only an 18 year old kid.

Jim Banks [00:37:03]:
Right.

Jim Banks [00:37:04]:
So you look at it and you think if people are able to light the touch paper and ignite such hatred for other people, other human beings. These people that were coming on the boats were barricading the doors of the hotel because people were there, not with pickaxes, but they were trying to break the doors down, throwing things through the window.

Jim Banks [00:37:25]:
Right.

Jim Banks [00:37:25]:
And you think it cost us probably tens of millions of pounds to repair the hotels and all that sort of stuff.

Jim Banks [00:37:31]:
Right.

Jim Banks [00:37:32]:
And yeah, all because of misinformation. And I think that there's just people just need to be so careful about the way in which they get their information and kind of have the ability to do a bit of fact checking if they're able to.

Brett Tabke [00:37:45]:
Yeah. I don't take anybody posts something, somebody died, I go and look it up on Google. Did this person actually die? You know, you got to make sure because there's so much fake news out there about that.

Jim Banks [00:37:55]:
Yeah. Quite scary. So you mentioned there that you just relaunched your publication. So tell us a little bit about that.

Brett Tabke [00:38:04]:
It's the original site that I made back in the day. It was my first big site, Search Engine World. And it just seems like the right time to do it. Right now, all these changes going on from AI to search to all the changes and the search engines themselves are making it just seemed like the right time. And I didn't want to use anybody else's platform. I wanted to be able to give a platform for ours, for our industry to talk. And yeah, I jump back into it so far. Just great response from your community.

Brett Tabke [00:38:35]:
Thank you very much for everybody who's visited and come see us at Search Engine World.

Jim Banks [00:38:38]:
I used to love Search Engine World. Again, I was not prolific. I was nowhere near as prolific on Webmaster World, but I used to enjoy posting stuff on there, try and break certain things. Whenever I got told stuff by Google about what was going on with Google AdWords at the time, I would go on to Webmaster World and post about it. And yeah, really kind of quite for me it was a good source of information but also a good source of friendship. Right. There was a lot of good friends I could build up on the back of that. And again, I used to enjoy Search Engine World back in the day.

Jim Banks [00:39:12]:
Was sorry to see it go in the same way I was. I was a bit sorry to see Webmaster World go to. I am ninjas. I know that you bought it back recently, is that right? Was that what.

Brett Tabke [00:39:22]:
Say that again.

Jim Banks [00:39:23]:
Did you buy Webmaster World back or.

Brett Tabke [00:39:27]:
Oh yeah, from Jim Boykin. Yeah, that was five years ago. Yeah, yeah, I sold it to him 2012 and bought it back in 2018.

Jim Banks [00:39:35]:
19.

Brett Tabke [00:39:35]:
18, 18. So.

Jim Banks [00:39:37]:
And Webmaster, well, still exists now.

Brett Tabke [00:39:40]:
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Yep. We're just cranking away.

Jim Banks [00:39:44]:
I'm just calling myself out for not going there very often.

Brett Tabke [00:39:49]:
Compost, Jim. Compost.

Jim Banks [00:39:50]:
I will do for sure. That'll be my action point after this conversation. So yeah. So obviously. So that in terms of Search Engine World, what are you hoping to have on there moving forward now that you're resurrecting it?

Brett Tabke [00:40:04]:
We're going to cover the bigger hard news and a bunch of the Google updates. Lots of tips and tricks, but it's always going to be from the mindset of a SEO by SEOs for SEOs. I'm saying I just realized how much information out there that we read about search engines is from the search engines. It's all filtered through the search engine by their reps. So we're definitely going to come from our point of view, Jim, not. Not Google's point of view. And I think it's sorely needed in our industry right now. So that was a big impetus to start it back.

Jim Banks [00:40:35]:
And do you see again, I Think when you look at the kind of the ecosystem that a lot of the kind of the conferences in search have got, they have, they have the conference, they have the training workshops which obviously you have, they've got the publication that kind of gives them the ability to put industry content out there, which I guess it's at the point in time when you are ready to launch your next event, it gives you a good platform to get people, maybe speakers on to write posts or create again. I don't know if you're planning on creating video content on there or have you. I think a lot of people, yes, they like the kind of the written word, but I think a lot of people are now consuming more of their content on social media platforms and so on. So I think what's. What was what. I've been blown away right by the number of people because I think the first couple of TikToks I posted were like again, I think I just posted it just to see what it was like. Then I did some others where I had. I'd been out in the sun at sunburn on my face was all ruddy and horrible.

Jim Banks [00:41:35]:
But I've had so many people that came up to me at Pubcon and said they love my TikToks and everything. I'm like again, I'm not doing it for anything other than just to try and help educate myself, but also to help provide some entertainment for the people that kind of watch them if they're not necessarily going to go and watch the kind of watch or listen to the full episode of the podcast.

Brett Tabke [00:41:57]:
So yeah, you're absolutely right. Having a content play is a great platform, great outlet for the speakers to talk. Yeah, we're going to tap into some of that. It's a good synergy between a conference and a publication. Self referential. And you got to have something to do in the downtime too.

Jim Banks [00:42:13]:
So I guess putting on a show is. It's full on for a period of time and then there's like a little bit of a trough. It tends you prefer it not to be.

Brett Tabke [00:42:22]:
So you got processes in place too. There's stuff to do in the off season. Like most of the work for a conference is done three to six months out. Really everything in the last three months is supporting the attendees. Lots of support, emails.

Jim Banks [00:42:36]:
Yeah. Well Brett, this has been fantastic to have you on. I know that I spoke to you a little while before like the last PubCom was about to take place and I know that now that obviously it was done and dusted that now would be a good time to have you on. And like, obviously, I was delighted to come out and see you again in person and also present at the show. And yeah, I'll obviously leave links to all of the. What's been discussed on the episode today. So the pubcon search engine Watch Webmaster World. Is there anything else you haven't written any books or anything? Because most of the people I speak to, they've written books at some point in time.

Brett Tabke [00:43:15]:
Not yet. Not yet. I've been working on one, but nothing ready yet.

Jim Banks [00:43:20]:
I have enough trouble reading a book. It just. I don't have the attention span to read a book, so I can't even imagine I'd have the attention span to write one. Maybe get a g writer.

Brett Tabke [00:43:28]:
Right.

Jim Banks [00:43:30]:
So, yeah, it's been.

Brett Tabke [00:43:31]:
No, it's been a pleasure to have you on.

Jim Banks [00:43:33]:
And yeah, so obviously all of Brett's contact details, you know, I know that there'll be a future pubcon where people can pitch to present. If you don't know pubcon, definitely get to the pubcon website on social media. There will also be the sort of Facebook and so on. So, yeah, just Brett has been instrumental in terms of my career, and I'm sure that he'll be instrumental in your career if you give him the opportunity to do.

Brett Tabke [00:43:59]:
Thank you.

Jim Banks [00:43:59]:
Thanks a lot, Brett.

Brett Tabke [00:44:01]:
Thank you. Been a pleasure