There’s one thing the biggest websites on the internet have in common which makes them the biggest and most valuable sites on the Web.

It’s not their audiences or “niche” or the tech that’s the commonality or the secret sauce.

Instead, it’s the source and type of the content they publish.

It’s arguably the most engaging, must successful type of content of all time.

I know I like it.

Yet interestingly enough, until two weeks ago, I never bothered with it on my own sites. Not once since I started blogging and publishing in 2008.

So far I’ve published 7 such pieces. I’m doing three per week.

They’re a success but not in the way I expected.

Sure, they earn some money. They attract eyeballs. People love it.

However, where it really shines is that it inspires more of the same content.

When starting a new type of content or new column on an established publication, anything that helps fuel it further is a big win IMO.

I have big plans for this stuff and as it matures into an established column, I suspect it’ll be the foundation for some serious next level revenue-earning content potential.

Just like the biggest sites on the Web.

Can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.

Here's the Content Model I Somehow Ignored for 18 Years to My Detriment

Below I explain in detail the type of content that generates billions in revenue. I also link to examples I’ve published and explain in step-by-step detail how you can do the same (along with 53 examples).

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The worst job I ever had was chicken catching. It’s probably not a job you ever heard about, let alone had the privilege of doing.

I grew up in an agricultural town in Southwest British Columbia, founded by dairy farmers. At some point in my youth, many farmers expanded or shifted into some form of chicken farming. I guess the money was better. I don’t know.

There are several types of chicken farming. Some do it for the eggs. Some hatch them then sell as chicks. Some raise from chicks to adult. There may be more and I’m sure there are technical terms for each type but that’s what I learned on the chicken catching job.

The type of farm we mostly worked had layers. Our job was to transport them to the truck (their egg laying days were over). The entire operation was unpleasant.

Since I’m a lawyer, I can’t help but regale you with a war story, except this pertains to chicken catching, not law.

The egg-laying chickens live in cages suspended above a pit. The cages angle downward slightly like a gabled roof. Eggs when laid, roll to a collection area outside the cage. The floor we walk on to retrieve the chickens is about eight to ten feet above the lower level (the pit). We walk the long barn aisles over and over carrying four to six chickens at a time.

One night on a large farm we had a large crew. Once we had filled one side of the truck, while the truck turned around, we all congregated at the end of the barn where the large doors opened outdoors. It was a cherished break. Out came the Marlboros, weed, cocaine and flasks. I was some wide-eyed 13 year old taking it all in. They were all nice and offered me some. I declined lol.

The job sometimes went on for twelve hours or longer. Keep in mind we worked at night, starting around 6 pm and so we’d often work to 4 am or longer. It’s tough in every imaginable way.

While the truck was turning around, the elevated floor we were all standing on on collapsed. Thirty of us piled down on top of one another. Amazingly injuries were minor. I sustained a sprained ankle, which I was delighted about because I didn’t have to finish my shift.

Looking back, all I remember about that job is calculating when we’d be done. At this point you’re probably wondering why I did it if I hated it so much.

I did it for money. It paid nearly double minimum wage which was a good amount in eighth grade.

Other than the money, it was miserable. While shifts were task-based (had to finish the job no matter how long it took), I was paid hourly and I just wanted every shift to end. Looking back, that job was the worst of both worlds. Task orientation with no end in sight, and clock time pay so finishing early bought me nothing. I got the anxiety of one and the tedium of the other.

Not having enough time

I sometimes think about my nights chicken catching and other boring clock watching jobs I had in my youth whenever I get frustrated with running my business.

One frustration that’s cropped up repeatedly over the years is the feeling of NOT having enough time. Not enough hours in a day to get done what I want to get done.

It’s the opposite problem of clock watching.

I work somewhat regular hours with a self-imposed deadline (5:45 pm). It’s good I do this.

It got me thinking about work and time and how the perception of time can be so different, depending on the job or task.

I asked AI about this and whether there’s any phenomenon to explain it. I had a strong hunch there would be a library of studies and essays on the subject. I was correct.

Task Time vs. Clock Time

E.P. Thompson penned an enlightening essay on this in 1967 titled “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism.” It distinguishes task-orientation vs. clock orientation. Pre-industrial revolution, work was measure by the task. Post-industrial revolution, it was measured by the hour.

Task-orientation has no set end time, so time feels short. Clock orientation is essentially a worker selling a chunk of time, so the hours themselves are the currency a worker waits out… hence clock-watching.

Most entrepreneurs work under task time. Ironically, it’s one of the appealing factors. Not all employment situations are clock-time either. Some jobs are task time and those doing it perceive it as task time even if they’re paid a salary. When practicing law, it was definitely task time. Lawyers are well known for working long hours trying to get it all done (which they never do… at least I never did).

Time and Autonomy

Autonomy plays into this big time. I value my autonomy probably more than anything else when it comes to earning a living. It’s been a driving factor to grow my business.

When you control your time, you feel like you don’t have enough of it. When someone else controls your time, you become acutely aware of how much of it there is.

Why is this?

Autonomy results in the feeling of time-scarcity. When self-employed, there’s no externally imposed stopping point. It’s up to you and so the more ambitious you are, the more you want to get done in a day. There’s always more to do. In my case it’s publish another article, write another email, test another social media post, start another project and so on. As I pile more onto my plate, the work I hope to get done expands beyond whatever arbitrary time limit I set.

The value of a minute changes depending on who owns it.

When somebody else has purchased the next eight hours of your life, you can find yourself wishing those hours away.

When those eight hours belong to you, suddenly there aren’t nearly enough of them.

Which can lead to:

People spend years trying to get control of their time, only to discover that owning their time can make them terrified of wasting it.

Enter “Parallel Time”

So we have task time and clock time. Is there a third orientation coming into play thanks to AI?

I think so. After shifting much of my work to AI automations, I definitely have a different sense of time when working.

I’m calling this third time orientation “Parallel Time.”

Parallel time is when work is no longer sequential through you. It produces unallocated capacity. What I do with my time after that is a choice. I can CHOOSE to expand capacity or not. Going with not has little bearing on the running of my business.

The obvious objection is that this isn’t new. Business owners have delegated forever. Hire ten people and ten things happen at once.

True, but there’s a catch that nobody who’s managed people will dispute. Coordination costs time. Hiring, training, reviewing, correcting, meeting, re-explaining. Every hour of output you buy from someone else costs you a fraction of an hour supervising it. That’s why leverage historically required an organization, and why the organization consumes the founder.

Managing people is task-time work.

What’s different with AI is the coordination cost evaporates. My automations don’t need onboarding. They don’t need a meeting. Parallelism doesn’t require me.

Here’s the comparison to the other two:

• Clock time: you sell hours

• Task time: you sell outcomes, and outcomes have no ceiling

• Parallel time: outcomes stop needing your hours.

Parallel time doesn't get rid of scarcity. It relocates it. Hours stopped being my bottleneck. Now it's judgment. Knowing what's worth starting, and noticing when something running without me has gone sideways.

Here's the strange part. Clock time and task time each come with a feeling attached; sell your hours and you'll watch the clock. Own the outcome and you feel behind. Parallel time doesn't come with one. It's the first orientation where how the work is structured no longer tells you how the work feels.

My observation with how AI is changing my perception of time when working occurred to me because ever since largely automating much of what I do, I seldom have that “not enough hours in the day” feeling.

Right now, with AI and the smallest team I’ve had in years, I can get more done in a day than I could get done in a few days. More importantly, my involvement is minimal, as in a few hours each day. Some days it requires none of my time. This means the rest of the time, of which there is plenty, is up to me to do with as I please. Some days I go biking. Other days I write for Fat Stacks. Some days I’m inspired and build new things for my business.

The Strange Feeling of Having Time Again

I can’t say my days go by faster or slower than previously. Perhaps a tad slower. The biggest change is I don’t feel time-scarcity nearly as often or as acutely as I used to. Instead, I feel like I have time abundance.

That said, I’ve read plenty of people online say AI hasn’t solved this for them at all. They’re getting twice as much done and somehow still don’t have enough time.

I don’t think they’re using AI wrong. I also don’t think I’ve achieved some better level of productivity.

I think something else is happening.

AI makes starting stuff ridiculously easy.

An idea that once required enough time and effort that you might think twice about it can now be up and running before lunch. That sounds great. It mostly is great.

But there’s a catch.

The easier it becomes to start things, the more things you start.

AI clears three hours from your day and instead of going for a bike ride, you invent four new projects to fill those three hours. Pretty soon you’re right back where you started. Not enough time. Too much to do.

Except now instead of six articles you haven’t written, you have six half-built AI projects.

Parallel time doesn’t automatically give you more free time. It gives you the OPTION of more free time.

That’s a big difference.

I mentioned earlier that I work somewhat regular hours. I’ve always thought that was merely a good habit. While writing this, I realized it might be the entire reason AI has made me feel like I have so much time.

I have a stopping point.

When AI cuts four hours of work from my day, I don’t automatically replace those four hours with four more hours of work. Sometimes I do. If I’m excited about something, I’ll keep going.

But I don’t have to.

The work shrank. If I so choose, my workday doesn’t need to expand to fill the gap.

Which brings me back to the chicken barn.

I spent those nights constantly calculating when we’d be finished. Someone else decided when I started and what I did.

I’ve spent most of my working life since then trying to get as far away from that work-arrangement as possible.

The funny thing is I still need a time when work ends.

The difference is now I get to pick it.

Thanks for reading.

Jon
Fat Stacks

I’ve been building email lists and sending newsletters for over a decade across a few sites.

Email is a key aspect of my content business. It’s the best way to engage my audience any time I like, which is daily. Yes, I send a daily email for two publications (not Fat Stacks although I do operate in spurts and can blast out daily for a week at a time).

I’ve lost track of all the various 3rd party sign up forms and form copy I’ve tested. Most tests I run don’t move the needle much… until I tried something I never tried this year.

Here’s a glimpse of results from only one aspect of what I set out below. While the increase doesn’t look all that impactful, that kind of increase is sizeable without a traffic increase:

What’s shown in the screenshots above is only one aspect of the change I made. Overall, what I set out below has had the single biggest positive impact on my list-building of all time.

Here is the exact email sign up form and copy I use to get way more subscribers daily than ever before

Actually, my execution of this strategy involves several layers. I set out each below.

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Productive people ask, “How can I get this done faster?”

Lazy people ask, “Why am I doing this at all?”

I’m increasingly convinced that I need to focus more and more on the second question. Especially with AI on the scene.

I don’t mean lazy in the traditional sense. Sitting on the sofa for eleven hours watching Netflix is unlikely to produce a competitive advantage.

I’m talking about a specific kind of laziness.

An intense dislike of doing the same annoying thing twice.

Productivity culture has an enormous library of solutions for recurring work.

Create a checklist.

Time block it.

Batch it.

Put it in Notion.

Wake up at 5:00 AM and do it before your children have the opportunity to ruin your morning routine.

All perfectly reasonable.

But they assume something that lazy people don’t necessarily accept.

That the work needs to be done in the first place.

That’s a much more interesting question.

Productivity Culture Has a Work Problem

Imagine you have a report that takes three hours to prepare every Thursday.

A productive person develops a system.

Maybe they create a template. Gather the data Wednesday afternoon. Block Thursday morning on the calendar. Turn off Slack. Put the phone in another room.

Eventually they get the report down to two hours.

That’s productivity.

A lazy person looks at the exact same report and thinks:

I can’t believe I’m expected to do this every Thursday for the rest of my life.

That’s motivation.

They spend six hours figuring out how to automate it.

That six hours seems to be an absurd amount of time to work on something not needed until next week. They’ve spent six hours avoiding a three-hour job.

Week two, however, is interesting.

So is week 50.

Productivity made the work more efficient.

Laziness made the work disappear.

Those are not the same thing.

And I’m beginning to think I’ve spent far too much time pursuing the first one.

There Are Two Kinds of Lazy

Obviously, laziness can be useless.

I would divide it into two categories.

Passive laziness: I don’t want to do this, so I’m not going to do it.

Active laziness: I don’t want to do this, so I’m going to spend an unreasonable amount of effort making sure I never have to do it again.

The first variety gets you fired.

The second occasionally builds a business.

Active laziness can look suspiciously like hard work.

You might spend an entire Saturday building a system to eliminate something that takes 20 minutes.

Someone watching you would reasonably point out that this is an extremely inefficient way to be lazy.

They’re right.

Today.

The calculation changes if that 20-minute task happens three times a week for the next five years.

Lazy people are sometimes willing to endure extraordinary short-term inconvenience in pursuit of long-term inactivity.

I respect that.

The Wrong Question

Consider customer service.

One business owner becomes incredibly efficient at answering the same customer question 30 times a week.

Templates. Canned responses. Keyboard shortcuts.

The other business owner asks why customers keep asking the question and changes the product so they stop.

One optimized the answer.

The other eliminated the question.

This distinction shows up everywhere once you start looking for it.

Two executives have 11 recurring meetings.

One carefully organizes his calendar.

The other cancels seven meetings.

Two publishers prepare the same analytics report every Monday.

One builds a checklist.

The other builds software that generates it.

Two companies have a complicated approval process.

One creates a beautiful workflow.

The other asks why three people need to approve it.

We’re conditioned to admire the person who gets extraordinarily good at performing the task.

But sometimes the real breakthrough comes from the person who is sufficiently irritated by the task to question its existence.

Productivity Can Preserve Bad Work

This is the part I find most interesting.

Becoming more productive can actually make unnecessary work harder to discover.

If something is painful or annoying, you notice and question it.

If you’ve optimized it into a smooth 17-minute routine, you stop noticing it.

That’s dangerous.

You can become extremely good at doing something that shouldn’t exist.

Businesses accumulate these tasks everywhere.

Reports nobody reads.

Meetings nobody needs.

Spreadsheets feeding other spreadsheets.

Emails confirming that another email was received.

Processes created to prevent something that happened once in 2019.

Nobody remembers why the process exists.

But Christine does it every Wednesday.

And Christine is exceptionally efficient.

She’s been doing it 9 years. The person before her did it for 12 years. Nobody ever asked why.

This is how organizations end up with thousands of hours of perfectly optimized nonsense.

The productivity solution is to make Christine faster.

The lazy solution is to ask:

What happens if Christine stops doing it?

Sometimes the answer is catastrophe.

Quite often, I suspect, the answer is nothing.

We Have a Strange Relationship With Effort

There’s something else going on.

We don’t merely value results.

We value effort.

Someone tells you:

“I work 70 hours a week.”

It sounds impressive.

Someone else says:

“I’ve streamlined my business down to having to work only 15 hours a week.”

That sounds suspicious.

What exactly is he doing with the other 55 hours?

Up to no good?

But if both people produce the same economic output, why is the first person’s sacrifice admirable?

We’ve somehow attached morality to effort, which is insane when you think about it.

Hardworking is a compliment.

Lazy is an insult.

Nobody wants their child’s teacher to say:

“Sarah is exceptionally lazy.”

Yet if Sarah spends three hours building a program that automatically organizes all her class notes, deadlines and assignments for the semester, I might start to think Sarah is onto something.

We say we value productivity.

But often what we really admire is visible effort.

The executive answering emails at 11:17 PM is dedicated.

The executive who designed a company where nobody needs to send those emails at 11:17 PM is apparently taking it easy.

I know which company I’d rather own.

Hard Work Can Hide Bad Design

This applies particularly well to business.

Hard work can compensate for an astonishing number of terrible systems.

You can overcome bad processes by working longer.

You can overcome unnecessary meetings by staying later.

You can overcome repetitive work by hiring more people.

You can overcome poor software by having someone manually move information from one place to another.

And because the work keeps getting done, the underlying stupidity survives.

Sometimes effort is the duct tape holding a bad system together.

Remove the heroic employee working until 9 PM and suddenly everyone notices that the process makes no sense.

That’s good info.

Maybe one of the best questions you can ask about any business process is:

What would we do if nobody were willing to do this?

Now you’re forced to design a better solution.

This Is Why Lazy People Love Automation

I love automation for a simple reason.

I don’t want to do recurring work.

I especially don’t want to do recurring work that a computer could do.

There is something uniquely irritating about knowing that every Monday morning you will have to perform the exact same sequence of clicks you performed last Monday morning.

The computer is right there.

It doesn’t have plans.

Let it do it.

This instinct has become much more valuable with AI.

Until recently, eliminating work often required technical skill.

You needed developers.

APIs.

Custom software.

Money.

Sometimes it was cheaper to just have Christine keep updating the spreadsheet.

AI is changing that calculation.

The cost of eliminating small pieces of work is collapsing.

Which means the lazy question becomes much more powerful:

Why am I still doing this?

Not:

How can AI help me write this report faster?

Better:

Why am I writing the report?

Could AI create it?

Could software create it?

Could the underlying data simply be available when somebody needs it?

Does anyone even read the report?

That last question can save an extraordinary amount of AI development.

Productivity People Want to Do More

This is where productivity culture and productive laziness really separate.

Productivity culture is fundamentally interested in capacity.

How can I get more done?

How can I fit more into the day?

How can I manage more projects?

How can I process email faster?

How can I squeeze another useful hour out of Tuesday?

Lazy people aren’t particularly interested in increasing the capacity of any given day.

They just want more time back.

That’s a completely different objective.

The productivity equation looks something like:

100 tasks → complete 100 tasks efficiently.

The lazy equation is:

100 tasks → why are there 100 tasks?

Maybe 20 can be automated.

Maybe 15 can be delegated.

Maybe 18 can be combined.

Maybe 10 are artifacts of a process nobody remembers creating.

Maybe 12 don’t matter.

Suddenly there are 25 tasks.

Now you can become productive if you want.

Or go hiking.

Productivity Content Has Never Been More Popular

This also explains something I’ve never understood.

People who are obsessed with productivity spend an enormous amount of time consuming information about productivity.

Books.

Podcasts.

YouTube videos.

Morning routines.

Desk setups.

Task management systems.

The seven habits of this person.

The five rules of that person.

Apparently there are people who have opinions about which hour of the day is best for email.

Lazy people have better things to do.

Or, more accurately, fewer things to do.

I understand the attraction of the productivity industrial complex.

Reading about productivity feels productive.

You haven’t wasted Sunday afternoon.

You’ve optimized your workflow.

That’s considerably more respectable than watching four episodes of a mediocre crime series, even though the crime series may have produced exactly the same amount of actual work.

Perhaps less, because now you have to migrate everything into a new task management app.

The Ultimate Productivity System Might Be Subtraction

None of this means productivity is useless.

Some work needs to be done.

I still have emails.

I still write.

I still make decisions.

There are plenty of things I can’t automate, eliminate or delegate.

For those things, being productive is useful.

But I think we’ve got the order backwards.

We tend to ask:

How can I do this more efficiently?

That should probably be the fourth question.

The first three should be:

Does this need to exist?

Does it need to be done by me?

Does it need to be done by a human?

Only then should we worry about doing it efficiently.

Because there is no productivity system on earth that can compete with not having to do something.

I Don’t Want to Get Better at Work

This may be the fundamental difference.

I don’t particularly want to become better at working.

I want to become better at creating things that continue working without me.

A system.

A piece of software.

An article.

An investment.

An automation.

A business process someone else can run.

Anything that separates today’s effort from tomorrow’s output.

That’s not always possible.

But it’s worth looking for.

Because the reward for ordinary productivity is usually more capacity.

You finish your work early.

Great news.

Here’s some more work.

The reward for eliminating work is different.

There is nothing to fill.

Nothing to optimize.

Nothing to check off.

The space simply comes back.

And maybe that’s the part productivity culture gets wrong.

The goal shouldn’t necessarily be to become the kind of person capable of getting an extraordinary number of things done.

Maybe the better goal is to build a life where an extraordinary number of things don’t need doing.

Which sounds lazy.

That’s the idea.

Thanks for reading.

Jon
Fat Stacks

In 2005 I was a luddite.

In 2008 I was blogging for my law firm.

In 2012 I quit law to publish websites.

In 2023 I used ChatGPT for the first time.

In 2025 I vibe coded software that worked.

In 2026 I created an entire dashboard that runs my publishing business.

Despite all that “progress”, I still can’t write the code for an html link.

What I can do is leverage AI for my publishing business. No coding skills needed. There is no greater AI leverage right now than tapping what I call “The AI Disconnect.”

What’s the AI Disconnect?

It’s the gap between AI users and non-AI users. And I don’t mean the pro vs anti AI camps. I mean actual users.

In other words, the people who know how to use AI are currently producing things for a much larger population of people who don’t.

AI users are fascinated by what AI can do.

Non-AI users are fascinated by what AI comes up with.

The gap is enormous. It baffles me but then much in this world baffles me. It baffles me because here we have what could turn out to be the biggest tech leap in history and most people are not interested enough to use it.

I discovered this gap by accident. Here’s how it happened.

Many publishers attempt to conceal the fact they use AI.

I took the opposite approach. Early on I put a disclaimer above the fold that my content is AI-assisted. I flat out said images are AI.

Nobody cared.

Not one person emailed me saying my site sucks and I should be ashamed I’m using AI.

In fact, the opposite happened.

My dwell time nearly doubled. I can’t attribute all that to AI because I put in a lot of effort into improving dwell time. I’m certain the AI content helped (because it’s so darn good).

And then I had a really crazy thought. If nobody cares it’s AI content, what would happen if I hyped the AI angle?

It never hurts to try, right?

So that’s what I did. I added three words to my titles.

The results were astonishing. Insane response on social media. Strong dwell time. Higher programmatic RPMs. More email subscribers. I had a hit on my hands with unlimited potential.

What are those three words?

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When I was a newbie lawyer I met a successful criminal defense lawyer. He was exactly what you’d expect from a leading jury litigator - gregarious, loud, funny. He loved to hold court which bode well for me because he was generous with his time to help me out.

Aside from trial tips, one thing he told me I never forgot was “buy more house than you can afford.”

Apparently that’s exactly what he did after going out on his own. He said nothing motivated him to do well like having a big mortgage to pay.

I have a hunch most financial advisors, who lean prudent, would never give that advice. Only an entrepreneur would.

I never set out to follow that advice but did anyway for reasons beyond my control… namely insane house price appreciation in our area.

Living in an expensive region can be difficult when income is uncertain. For 14 years I’ve not been able to tell you how much I’ll make next month or this year.

I have an annoying penchant for assuming revenue will be more that it is and expenses will be less that they are. It’s the delusional optimist in me.

It’s that same optimism that probably made it possible to quit a 9 to 5 and roll the die with our financial future on the internet.

At the time, I thought the hardest part of entrepreneurship was uncertainty.

Now I believe uncertainty is half the appeal. I continue to live in total uncertainty and am good with it.

It’s my version of living on the edge.

I’m not into wingsuit flying or free solo climbing.

I prefer feeding my risk appetite from the physical safety of my desk.

And so I do. Monday to Friday.

What’s the hardest part of entrepreneurship?

I sat at said safe desk for a good while pondering this question.

Losing a huge chunk of revenue overnight.

That’s happened to me several times.

It doesn’t build character.

It sucks every time.

Starting was hard too.

I worked constantly for the first couple of years with almost nothing to show for it.

Fortunately I had an unhealthy amount of optimism and ignorance.

I genuinely believed it was going to work despite many catastrophic thoughts after midnight.

Eventually it did work.

Other than those minor details, entrepreneurship has been great.

Why is it all good given the enormous uncertainty involved?

In other words, why is predictable money boring?

Imagine two businesses.

Business A: Guaranteed $500,000 profit next year.

Business B: Somewhere between $100,000 and $1.5 million.

Same expected value, roughly.

Which one does the entrepreneur keep thinking about?

Probably B.

Why?

Because A has no mystery. You already know the ending.

Why can’t the successful entrepreneur just enjoy the successful business?

Same reason, perhaps, as the person who has successfully jumped out of an airplane 400 times asking:

What if I wore a squirrel suit and flew between those rocks at 180 miles per hour?

Or a rock climber wondering what it would be like to ditch the ropes.

Not because ordinary skydiving or climbing with ropes stopped being dangerous.

It stopped feeling uncertain.

There’s an escalation phenomenon going on.

Same applies to an entrepreneur.

First website after quitting the job. Terrifying. Feel every ounce of the risk. No clue whether it’ll work out but plow ahead anyway.

Second website. Some excitement but becomes rote because it’s essentially replicating the first effort.

Eventually you find yourself looking at buying a failing motel in Montana thinking:

There might be something here.

That’s wingsuit thinking. Insane to most people but makes perfect sense to the entrepreneur.

Why is “I don't know what's going to happen” terrifying at 3 a.m. and exciting at 9 a.m.?

You know what I’m talking about, right?

I should revise my previous answer about what is the hardest part of entrepreneurship and include this. Fortunately, it’s not every night and is rare these days but it was not uncommon during my early days.

Night person is some totally risk-averse, certainty-seeking stranger. Morning person is excited to cease the day in spite of total uncertainty.

Apparently there’s a name for this: the “Mind After Midnight” hypothesis.

Researchers argue that brains at night, especially when normally sleeping, have different thought process than day-brain.

Negative emotions become stronger. Attention tilts toward threats. Impulse control and judgment change. Rumination gets easier.

Which explains a lot.

I’ve never woken up at 3:17 a.m. and thought:

That 60% revenue haircut shouldn’t be a problem.

Nighttime Jon turns one down day into homelessness within the year.

Morning Jon makes coffee and wonders if he should buy a hotel.

If we step back further, it becomes clear that uncertainty isn't inherently pleasant or unpleasant. The story we attach to it is.

Entrepreneurs, wingsuit flyers and solo free climbers are not immune to this.

Consider:

Lottery ticket:
I don’t know what’s going to happen.
Exciting.

Biopsy:
I don’t know what’s going to happen.
Terrifying.

New business:
I don’t know what’s going to happen.
Exciting.

Existing business suddenly losing 60% of its revenue:
I don’t know what’s going to happen.
Terrifying.

Same uncertainty.

Different relationship to the possible outcomes.

The interesting part is that we don’t behave as though all uncertainty is equal.

We spend enormous amounts of time and money eliminating the uncertainty we don’t want.

Then, almost immediately, go looking for some we do.

Which raises the following:

Why do I voluntarily create uncertainty in a life I've spent enormous amounts of money trying to make more certain?

• I buy home and vehicle insurance.

• Install fire alarms.

• Wear a seatbelt and bike helmet (not always at the same time).

• Diversify investments.

• Pay accountants and lawyers to prevent costly business mistakes.

Having successfully removed a bunch of uncertainty:

I wonder if I should start another company.

Maybe we're trying to become safe enough that we can choose our danger.

Maybe that’s what success buys.

Not a life without uncertainty.

A life where you get to choose which uncertainty is interesting.

I don’t have to wonder whether a minor car accident will bankrupt me.

So I have more capacity to wonder whether I could turn around a 43-room hotel I’ve never seen in a state I’ve visited twice.

That criminal lawyer knew this forty-five years ago. He bought more house than he could afford on purpose. He wasn’t being reckless.

He was choosing his uncertainty.

Time to go look at that hotel.

Thanks for reading.

Jon
Fat Stacks

I grew up boating so when I could afford a small fishing boat, I bought one. We live five minutes from the marina so it’s an easy outing anytime.

I wish I could tell you it’s been smooth sailing since day one, but sadly it hasn’t.

Four times that sucker broke down out on the water. While we’re never far from shore, it’s not much fun bobbing around in an 18 footer with oil tankers and yachts zipping by.

Turned out water kept getting into the gas tank.

After much trial and error over several months, not to mention hefty service costs, my boat service guy figured out the problem was a defective gas cap. The vent seal broke letting rain in, of which we have no shortage in Vancouver.

He literally took the boat apart pressure testing the gas tank only for it to be a $20 part.

It’s been smooth sailing since then fortunately.

After the fourth break-down incident, the service guy asked “do you know you can sign up for a tow service? They’ll come get you and tow you to your marina. It’s $200 per year.”

I had to laugh. I had no clue. I sure would have liked to know that after the first time we broke down in tanker lane.

Needless to say I signed up two minutes after talking to him. Also needless to say, we’ve not had an incident since paying for the service.

All along there was a good solution to breaking down I didn’t know existed.

Stop not knowing by doing this

This not knowing is rife in our industry given we work with tech. Most tech out there can do fifty billion more things than we know about.

Pre-AI we had to ask Google which. This was okay. Sometimes we’d find the solution. Other times, we wouldn’t.

But now, with AI, one of the smartest things you can do from an execution standpoint is to ask AI if there’s a better way.

Not only can AI search for ready-made solutions, it will also happily tell you it can code the solution for you.

At first, I opted for ready-made. That was until I decided to give coding with AI a shot.

It only took that first vibe code experience to realize if AI can code it for me, that’s almost always the best solution.

Not only will AI code it for you, but it’ll often suggest other approaches. If it doesn’t, ask.

I’m still not the most thoughtful vibe coder. I’m the type of person that likes to see some messy prototype that half-works and then improve it from there. I need a visual version, even if it’s not very good. I can always improve it and by seeing it, I know what to fix.

That’s just me.

If you prefer to figure out every parameter you need up front, do that. Doesn’t matter how you go about it as long as you’re asking.

Just yesterday I built something (custom email signup popups controlled from ​my publishing dashboard​) for a couple of sites I should have built ten eons ago. I didn’t because I was still locked in my old way of “3rd party reliance” thinking. I had forgotten that AI is my tech genie... rub the pot and make a wish.

Another example. I needed a lengthy Google form for collecting user generated content. I was just about to start creating it one painful widget a time when I wondered if AI had a faster option.

Claude to the rescue. Claude told me “Jon, sit back and let me handle this for you.”

Sure enough, Claude cranked out some code totally foreign to me and told me exactly what to do with it in Google Cloud Console. Even gave me a link for where to drop the code.

I did as Claude commanded. Ten seconds later my two-page Google form was done.

Always ask AI first.

Don’t assume your audience knows what you know

There’s another lesson here and that is never assume your audience knows what you know. I’ve made that mistake a million times as well.

I suspect my boat service guy assumed I knew about the tow service because after all, what idiot boat owner doesn’t get a tow service? It’s boating 101.

Simple answer. Yours truly didn’t know.

I’ve been reading voraciously on Substack​. What’s interesting is I see all kinds of people having huge success pretty much saying the same thing over and over.

It’s their message.

They repeat it over and over from different angles.

It’s been distilled down to be as simple as possible.

It’s effective.

I tend to do the opposite.

Complicate things. Assume things. Overthink things.

Had I been one to simplify like others, I’d have checked the gas cap first... right after I paid the $200 tow plan.

Thanks for reading.

Jon Fat Stacks

P.S. If you’re creating online or publishing or consulting or doing anything online, consider building and running it all from ​your own custom AI dashboard​.

I started my flagship publication in 2014. Before that, I had read every “how to blog” blog I could to learn this newfangled thing called blogging. I didn’t know it at the time, but reading those “expert” bloggers was a huge mistake that cost me millions.

The problem is that the how to blog crowd had their one blog that taught how to blog. If you’ve spent any amount of time reading on Substack, you know where I’m going with this. They weren’t real publishers. And since there are plenty of affiliate options in that space, they all said affiliate marketing and selling info products is the way to go. They also said display ads for monetization are the worst and a waste of time.

I listened like an idiot. I forsook display ads and focused on affiliate offers.

I grew traffic wicked fast to my home design website. I slapped up affiliate offers everywhere. After 30 days my affiliate revenue was ZERO. 500,000 visitors and not one penny earned.

WTF? All the “experts” told me affiliate offers are where the money is at.

At least I had tons of traffic.

I had an old AdSense account. Can’t even remember why I applied for it but I did and it was approved. It was 6:30 pm in the evening. I slapped up the three AdSense ad units and shut ‘er down for the night. Oh yeah, fun fact… AdSense capped the number of ads to three per web page back then. Yeah, that didn’t last long.

Next morning I checked my AdSense account. I’ll never forget it. I had earned $176 overnight.

My new monetization strategy was born. That site is still my highest earning site to this day 12 years later… with display ads. It’s earned many millions of dollars from display ads… something all the “experts” told me was a lousy way to monetize a site.

I see the same bad advice today as I did when I started blogging in 2008.

This time it’s the one-hit ponzi-scheme creators on various platforms telling people how to build a content business.

Substack is full of these people. They scrape, scratch and claw together 1,000+ susbscribers and then teach how to succeed on Substack.

The echo chamber advice among this crowd is “build your brand” and “you’re the niche.”

It’s an enticing proposal for sure. Just be yourself, write about whatever comes to mind and million of dollars will pour in. You’re so genius that the entire world will pay dearly to read every word.

I hate to break it to you, but millions of dollars won’t pour in unless you (1) follow their monetization playbook and that is sell courses on how to get followers on social platforms. Or (2), you are truly exceptional with something to say people actually want to spend money on.

Most people end up pursuing method (1) because they realize they aren’t truly exceptional. Don’t be offended. I’m not truly exceptional either… that’s why I publish the sites I do monetized with the mighty passive display ad.

I’ve seen some take this to absurd levels. I was reading some X account. It was a really great account with fascinating posts about architecture. Huge account with lots of activity. Guess how they monetized?

You got it… they were selling a course on how to grow a big, successful account on X.

And yes, there are many exceptions.

There are legit writers here and elsewhere writing on all kinds of topics attracting paid subscribers, selling stuff etc. without going the whole “this is how to make money on Substack” route.

And many of those folks do so under their personal brand, so it can work.

I’m not saying a personal brand and “you’re the niche” can’t work. I’m saying it’s not the only way.

If you haven’t guessed by now, that site I started in 2014 is still a seven-figure per year site and is still not under my name. I don’t publish random thoughts or whatever I feel like for the day.

Nope. I stick to a topic, namely home design. It’s akin to a magazine website. People don’t visit to hear what I have to say. They visit for home design inspo. Other than Martha Stewart and Oprah, most magazines with massive online publications are not titled after some person. Their titles usually make clear what the magazine is about. Think Architectural Digest, Sports Illustrated, People, Outdoor, Vogue, etc.

And guess which publications are still the biggest on the Web earning the most money, usually from display ads? You guessed it. The very same magazines.

Your options for building a successful writing and publishing business are not restricted to branding under your name and you being the niche. There are hundreds of niches that have nothing to do with you, your name and your collection of interests. By all means inject your personality, opinions and experiences into whatever you write about but don’t believe for one second you must build a brand under your name and need to write about everything that interests you.

Most people will never make a go of it with the paid Substack subscription route. The math doesn’t add up. Besides, look at the Substacks with plenty of paid subscribers. They offer something beyond their interests and “what’s going on” info.

The simple litmus test is “would you pay for this?” where “this” is what you’re writing and selling. Be honest with yourself.

Should you turn paid Substack off? No, absolutely not. I’m just saying that putting all your eggs into one lofty monetization basket is leaving a ton of money on the table.

I understand the simple appeal of Substack but if you’re serious about building up a thriving one-person publishing business, expand your reach and your monetization. Build a blog version. Be on other relevant platforms. Experiment with every monetization option out there. Consider:

• Affiliate marketing

• Display ads (if you can drive decent traffic to your website… many big newsletters can)

• Sell info products - courses (my fave), downloads.

• Create a community - even if it’s free, the pay off is in fostering loyal readers.

• Sell sponsorships

• Syndication (i.e. Newsbreak, Facebook monetization, Yahoo, etc.)

I liken it to stacking revenue. I do it on my magazine sites selling courses, SaaS (soon), syndication revenue, affiliate offers, email sponsors etc. Despite that, display ads are still the biggest earner.

If you’re tired of waiting for 1,000 paid subscribers, stop waiting. Pick one revenue method you’re not using and fire it up this month. Then another. Stack them until you’ve maxed it out.

Email works with this really well

Since you’re on Substack, you have an email newsletter. Which means you’re primed to take advantage of, if you so choose, passive display ad revenue.

How?

Send readers to your articles. It’s that simple. I do it daily with my two bread and butter publications. I collect a couple hundred subscribers per day on each. Each day I send them an email (or two) with links to my latest content. Thousands visit my sites daily earning me revenue from display ads.

Anyone with a Substack could do the same. Whether it’s the right move for you remains to be seen. If you’re happy with all the money you’re making, then display ads are probably not for you. If, however, you’re not getting paid subscribers no matter how hard you work at it, consider the mighty display ad. Sometimes it’s your best bet for monetization.

Before you follow advice from anyone about any of this: find out what their business actually is.

If a Substacker’s only product is a course on succeeding on Substack, their business isn’t publishing. It’s you. The advice isn’t wrong because they’re dishonest, it’s wrong because it’s the only advice their business model permits them to give.

Twelve years ago I took that advice and it cost me millions. The site that eventually paid me back is one nobody knows I own, covering a topic I have no personal attachment to, monetized with the exact thing every expert told me to skip.

I shut ‘er down not because I didn’t like the niche but because it hadn’t shovelled a million bucks into my pocket by month six.

The curse of the newb is impatience.

The reason it made squat wasn’t lack of traffic but my having no clue how to monetize.

Looking back, it was a fantastic niche.

I wasn’t a hobbyist. I was an expert.

B2B audience.

Buyers with budgets.

Extremely email friendly.

Problem was I knew nothing about monetization or email. My idea of a slick email campaign was sending the same Hotmail to ten people.

Had I known then what I know now, I’d still be running that site.

If curious about the niche, it was tech for lawyers. At the time I had spent nights and weekends working with consultants to upgrade a law firm’s tech from Word Docs and folders to slick third party legal case management software.

My second blog ended up a success. But it never came close to the potential of the one I quit.

While figuring out the blogging biz, I stumbled on a book that changed how I thought about the whole thing. Sorry, can’t remember the title or author... just the message.

The book’s big idea: the money is in owning the publication, not writing for it.

I took it to heart.

Built up a team and went to town. I wrote too. Full tilt effort all day, every day, cranking out as much content as humanly possible.

That was the playbook for years. And it worked.

Now?

Don’t need a team.

Don’t need to write until the screen goes blurry.

I used to think scaling meant hiring. These days scaling means removing myself from bottlenecks.

Which leads me to what might be the worst advice:

“Just create more content.”

Not because content doesn’t matter. It does.

But because content volume is not a competitive advantage anymore.

Everyone can crank out 200 articles before lunch now. While at the gym. In a language they don’t speak.

So what replaces “just publish more”?

Two words.

Operational leverage.

Or as I’ve been calling it lately, building like an operator instead of a creator.

Here’s the difference.

A creator trades time for content. Butt in chair. Madly typing. Post. Post. Post. Repeat. Output is tied to hours.

An operator builds the system that produces the content. The system runs. The operator checks up on it. Tweaks it. Goes for a walk.

One scales. One fuels burnout.

A few things I’ve noticed about this change...

I. AI didn’t kill creators. It commoditized them.

When everyone can crank content with a one sentence prompt, content speed isn't an advantage. The advantage moves to those who have a better system producing the writing.

Quality control. Editorial review. Throat-grabbing headlines. Internal linking for pageviews. Distribution. Higher revenue per 1,000 visitors. Revenue tracking.

That’s the advantage now.

II. Creators obsess over the next article. Operators obsess over the system creating the articles/posts.

One is a job. The other is a business.

That cliché still applies, by the way. Owning the publication still beats writing for it. The only thing that changed is what “owning” looks like.

Back then, owning meant hiring a team.

Now, owning means running the operating system.

III. Improvements compound across the system, not one article at a time.

A creator improves an article. The article gets better.

An operator improves the system. Every article going forward gets better.

That’s leverage you can’t get from writing harder.

IV. Creators chase traffic. Operators chase RPMs.

Adding $2 RPM to existing traffic beats chasing another 10K visits almost every time. Creators obsess over top of funnels. Operators squeeze the entire funnel.

Display ad rates. Affiliate placements. Newsletter monetization. Email click revenue. The rev-stack matters as much as audience size.

V. The goal was never “more content.”

It was time. Freedom. A business that doesn’t need you online 16 hours a day.

Systems deliver that.

Hustle never did.

​Build the machine​, or be the machine. Those are the options now.

Thanks for reading.

Jon
Fatstacksblog.com

I watched the movie Margin Call last night.

It’s about the lead-up to the 2008 financial crisis through the lens of a “fictitious” investment bank in NYC.

FYI movie spoiler alert below.

Said bank is helmed by John Tuld, played by Jeremy Irons.

Interestingly, the CEO of Lehman Bros in 2008 was Richard “Dick” Fuld. CEO of Merrill Lynch was John Thain.

That explains the character name “John Tuld.”

Anyway, a junior analyst, formerly a rocket scientist, discovers something awry in the bank’s asset mix signalling imminent financial disaster.

He shows his boss who shows his boss who calls the CEO at 2 am.

CEO swoops in via chopper from swanky estate in the middle of the night.

Junior Analyst explains the situation to the firm’s partners and executives.

Irons’ character immediately understands the seriousness of the situation. He knows the entire model Wall St. operated on for years is broken and will collapse.

He asks the room “what do we do about it?”

Nobody has an answer.

He then says there are only three ways to succeed on Wall St.

1. Be first.

2. Be smarter.

3. Cheat.

He rules out being smarter because there’s always someone smarter. He claims he doesn’t cheat.

That leaves being first, but how?

He proposes the only way out is to be the first to start selling off all problematic assets.

Not everyone likes this because they’ll knowingly sell worthless junk which will shatter their reputations.

Doesn’t matter... CEO declares they have no choice but to liquidate so that’s what they do.

What the movie doesn’t say is that Tuld’s firm got to liquidate first because they were the ones who spotted the problem first.

Anyway, they liquidate as first movers.

As I watched I couldn’t help consider how “being first” applies to online creation.

Like Tuld, I long ago realized trying to be the smartest person in the room is a losing game because there’s always someone smarter.

Cheating isn’t my thing.

Again, that leaves being first, but how?

What does being first look like when creating content online?

There are obvious methods but not always available such as:

• Be first or an early adopter on new platforms.

• Be first to enter new niches and trends.

• Be first to come up with content angles and types.

• Be first to break a story.

That’s about as far as I got on my own. I decided to see what I missed by asking AI (ChatGPT and Claude):

AI spit out plenty (100s) of suggestions.

Here are the ten best:

1. Be first to notice a cultural shift before it becomes obvious in analytics.

2. Be first to operationalize new technology.

3. Be first to package boring data into emotionally compelling stories.

4. Be first to publish the takeaway from a major research paper, government report, or industry study the day it drops. The window is hours, not days, before everyone else has the same idea.

5. Be first to coin terminology in your space.

6. Be first to interview an expert before they’re well-known. Cheaper, more available, and they remember who showed up early.

7. Be first to publish the counter-take the moment consensus hardens. When “everyone agrees X,” the first credible “actually Y” gets outsized attention.

8. Be first to claim a category-level position by name and stick to it (aka category design).

9. Be first to publish predictions with timestamps, then revisit them publicly. Being on the record, right or wrong, is its own moat.

10. Be first to spot and answer what your audience is searching for but no one is answering yet.

​
Being first doesn’t always mean inventing something entirely new. Often it simply means noticing something important before everyone else and doing something about it before it becomes mainstream.

The first person to spot the shift doesn’t just gain information. They gain options.

And in business, options others don’t have are a huge advantage.

Thanks for reading.

Jon
Fatstacksblog.com

Creator of The S.M.A.R.T. COMMAND CENTER Course.

​

One of my first courses I sold taught keyword research.

During the SEO days, SEO drove the process.

Today, ability to get attention drives the process.

It takes time to get good at either approach. You need to learn what works for your site and respective platforms (FB, Insta, X, Pinterest, etc.). It takes time to learn the art of crafting titles regardless of your traffic strategy.

I’ve learned over the years that the title does much of the heavy lifting. You could have two titles for same topic. One gets no traffic and the other crashes your server. That is no exaggeration. Titles are that important.

Which is why I’m particular about every single word in every title.

Until last week, I’d sometimes craft thirty or more titles before settling on one. And that’s with the help of AI. I banter back and forth with AI working on nailing titles just right. It was a process.

Last week something dramatic happened.

The week before last, I had finally put the finishing touches on one of my biggest AI dashboard builds yet... my dream content tracker and title generator system.

Here it is:

This took me a few days to build because in order for it to do a better job than what I had in place, it had to do what my system could do and do it better.

It tracks every topic to avoid duplicates. It tracks by writer, date, status (idea, WIP, published), topic, site and article type.

The Smart Drop

One of my favorite tools for speed is what I called “The Smart Drop.” My writers deliver me titles and draft URLs daily. Now I can copy and paste as many titles/URLs into the Smart Drop as I want in one go. It then automatically adds them all to the database as “Drafts” with writers assigned, titles noted, draft URLs stored and it classifies the article types... all on autopilot in seconds. No more messing around with spreadsheet entries.

Instead, I paste n’ go.

Here’s what The Smart Drop looks like:

Title Generator

Once I was satisfied the content tracking was working well, it was time to test the topic and title generator.

A foundational aspect of the title generator is the AI layer built into the system. What it does is monitor the performance of every single article on my sites. I set dwell time is the main proxy for quality. In other words, articles with the longest dwell time are categorized as “winners.”

The title generator relies in part, on this performance data - harvesting ideas from the better performing articles.

Over time, the system learns what works best and it bakes that into the topic and title recommendation tools.

The first time I gave the title generator a test drive, the results were unlike anything I had ever seen before using ChatGPT or Claude. And believe me, I’ve spent hundreds of hours bantering with AI looking for new topics and angles for my sites so I know what it’s capable of.

Hoping it wasn’t a one-off, I did it again. And again. And again. Every time SOME of the titles generated were perfect. I’m talking angles and wording I never would have thought of that was exquisite. It’s amazing it does it on the first go.

What my custom AI did was not merely adhere to the parameters I had baked into it, but it started filling in the topical nook and cranny gaps with titles so clever that it was immediately clear to me that my system is officially better than me for a task I’ve been doing for 15+ years.

This is a breakthrough.

Does it mean I’ll never come up with topics or titles on my own again?

Of course not. While I’ll rely more and more on my system, I remain the final gatekeeper as to what gets published and every word/image that is published.

Does it mean my system generates only perfect titles? Nope, it also spits out duds. It’s the good ones that are truly exceptional.

Does it mean every article I publish going forward will be a success? No. I’m still the arbiter of what gets published and I will continue to choose wrong some of the time.

What does it mean then?

It means I now have a reliable AI system for uncovering topics and writing titles in ways that on average, does it much better than me. It means I can spend more time on the tasks AI can’t do as well as me.

Thanks to the baked-in self-improvement layer, it means it will get better and better.

The more I use it, the better it’ll get.

=> Learn how to build your own smart content tracker and title generator here (plus so much more) with my S.M.A.R.T. COMMAND CENTER course.

Thanks for reading.

Jon
Fat Stacks

P.S. Why do I write about this?

Two reasons.

First, yes, I sell a course on it. That alone begs the question so it fails to explain why I spend so much time writing emails and sharing what I’m doing publicly.

The bigger reason is I think there’s real value in showing concrete, visual examples of how AI can be used in an independent real business. In my case, that’s online publishing, but the concept works for so much more.

There are endless ways to use AI in business now, which makes getting started feel overwhelming for a lot of people. My approach is just one path, but it works extremely well for me. If sharing it helps a few other publishers figure things out faster, that’s a worthwhile outcome.

It explains, in part, the powerful lure of becoming an online creator or influencer.

When you think about it, there aren’t that many jobs that let you create unfettered. But there are no shortage of management and admin jobs.

While I’ve employed people over the years, I’ve mostly maintained a solopreneur style organization where I’m fairly involved in what’s going on.

Turns out there’s a good reason for that: I like being involved.

I like the creation side of online publishing.

I have to admit it’s more fun now with AI, which gives us super powers when compared to five years ago.

Because I’ve long preferred to create and write and be involved in most aspects of my publishing business, I’ve not scaled like other organizations.

It’s hard to be both creator and manager. In fact, I loathe managing. I’m not good at it. I’m not alone.

There aren’t enough natural managers to fill the management jobs that exist. So companies dangle salary and titles at people who’d rather be doing the work, drag them into management, and mint a generation of well-paid miserable people.

Hence the popularity of 9 to 5 bashing on social media.

Interestingly, those who are natural-born managers are exceptional motivators, foster loyalty among those they mange and ultimately love what they do. They often end up climbing the corporate ladder pretty fast. Folks who can motivate and foster loyalty are worth millions to any organization.

A manager I am not. I prefer to be closely involved with the day to day because I get to exercise some creativity.

That’s not to say I’ve not stepped away. I have at times over the years. It worked but every time I did, I stopped caring so much about what was going because I wasn’t in the thick of it contributing to the product.

And so over the years I balanced a desire to scale with a need to create. It’s a conflict that until recently, was difficult to reconcile.

What’s changed?

AI, of course. AI gives anyone the ability to create systems, which I enjoy doing. Yes, I equate creating systems to being a creator.

These systems function without much human involvement which means stuff gets done without having to manage.

And because I built the systems that I run, I get to remain involved and create without hiring, managing, correcting, training, firing, etc.

AI is fast-becoming the bridge between creating and scaling for online creators, solopreneurs, influencers and whatever other “titles-du-jour” people bestow upon themselves.

It fills the gap between creating and scaling which is exciting. Yes, there are limits with what one human can do with AI... but those limits are far greater than pre-AI.

Thanks for reading.

Jon
Fatstacksblog.com

​Creator of the S.M.A.R.T. Command Center

If your site averages 1.4 page views per visitor, RPMs don’t tell the full story. Since MV only reports RPMs at page level and not RPS (rev per 1,000 sessions), you don’t know the actual revenue per 1,000 visitors for individual URLs.

Interestingly, Mediavine does report both RPM and RPS for traffic sources... but that’s all articles for each source, not individual articles.

Consider the following. On the face of it a page with $37 RPM might appear more valuable than another with $30 RPM. However, if the $30 RPM page averages 2.1 page views per visitor and the other 1.1, it’s almost a certainty the $30 RPM page earns more.

As my dwell and pv/visitor numbers improve, I’m more and more curious how much each article actually earns from entire sessions, not just the first page view.

Tired of guessing, I decided to create a custom reporting dashboard that calibrates url-level revenue.

Here’s how it works:

a. Finds every session that landed on a URL

b. Traces every subsequent page that visitor viewed in that session (ordered by timestamp)

c. Looks up the actual RPM from the uploaded MV data for each specific page they visited

d. Sums those real RPMs across the full session path.

Voila... I now know revenue per 1,000 sessions for any url with traffic on my sites.

Below is a sample from my data. In some cases RPS is quite a bit higher than RPMs.

Is it 100% accurate?

No, it’s not. It assumes a second page view visit earns the same RPM as those that visit those pages upon site entry. I”m not certain RPMs are the same. It might be. It might be more. It might be less. Bottom line is it’s data based on an assumption.

That said, I believe this approach to understanding a visit’s value is more accurate than ignoring all subsequent page views.

Why does this matter?

It matters if you like making more money with existing content.

When you know how much an article actually earns, you can make better decisions on what to focus on.

For example, if you drive traffic by posting to Facebook pages, you have a limited number of links you can post in a given day. If you know article A earns twice article B, all else being equal, you can earn more by promoting article A more.

Or take your email newsletter as an example. Typically, the first link in a newsletter gets more clicks. Again, if article A out-earns B, you’re better off placing a link first for article A than B.

Same on Pinterest (can only blast so many pins per day).

Same everywhere.

Also, if you build a self-improving internal linking system, you can include RPS (revenue per 1,000 sessions) as a variable for the system to include in creating links. You might tell the system to give most weight to articles with the highest RPS. I don’t do this but you could... I put most weight on articles with the longest dwell time... which is often the same as higher RPS articles.

That’s just off the top of my head.

At the end of the day, knowing the numbers helps in every aspect of this business.

If you haven’t already, take the time to build something that properly reconciles your real revenue per 1,000 visitors so you can make better decisions and earn more money

Thanks for reading.

Jon Fatstacksblog.com

​Build your own S.M.A.R.T. Command Center dashboard​.

Around here, a bear sighting doesn’t clear the neighborhood. It does the opposite. People step outside and start filming for their next viral reel.

What’s interesting is when I travel and mention this, people are genuinely shocked. They can’t imagine casually walking around where bears live.

It made me realize something.

There are three types of people when it comes to bears:

The expert: knows bears are around and knows they’re very unlikely to cause harm. Enjoys all what the area offers.

The ignorant: has no idea bears are around. Also enjoys the outdoors and all the area has to offer.

And then there’s the dangerous middle.

The person who knows just enough to be afraid.

They hear “bear” and assume it’s game over. So they stay inside.

They have a head full of knowledge and a belly full of fear.

That’s the worst place to be.

This doesn’t just apply to wildlife. It shows up everywhere, especially in business.

Beginners who don’t overthink things often have a huge advantage. They just start. They don’t yet know all the ways things can go wrong.

Experts move forward too, but with experience. They know the risks and how to handle them.

But the “knows enough to be dangerous” crowd?

They get stuck.

They research. Then research more. Then find ten reasons why something might fail… and never start.

It’s classic analysis paralysis.

The fact is this:

You don’t think your way to expertise.
You work your way there.

If you already know you want something, you’re usually better off starting off clueless and messy than researching endlessly until you “figure it all out.”

The fastest path from clueless to competent is doing. This is particularly true these days with AI.

If you’ve been stalling with embracing AI in aiding your online endeavors, it’s not too late to start. You’ll make mistakes... possibly big ones but at least AI is darn good with “undo” prompts.

The real danger isn’t bears. It’s doing nothing.

Thanks for reading.

Jon
Fatstacksblog.com

My workday is vastly different than it was 5 years ago.

Not the output, mind you. I’m still an online publisher.

I still vet everything that goes out the door which usually involves editing.

What’s changed is my working pace. The change is for the better... thanks to AI.

First, I now take dozens of mini-breaks throughout the day while AI works. I call these breathers.

Second, overall I get more done in less time which provides for more time off (or more production). Some days I opt for more time off. Other days I go into production overdrive.

Today’s breathing space is a result of putting in months of long days building out custom systems for my publishing biz.

Custom Systems + AI Execution + Human Judgment = Scalable Quality

Publishing for me these days is more than just clicking “Publish” and letting SEO do its thing.

Clicking publish is merely the start. After that it’s distribution which requires its own content to promote the original content lol.

And that’s where finely-tuned systems come in.

Ironically, some of the articles I publish today take longer to produce than pre-AI. This is because I see AI as a way to do things better rather than doing things faster.

So, I invest the bulk of my time creating articles (especially topics, headlines and hooks) and then rely on AI and systems to distribute across the usual suspect platforms for traffic.

The multi-tasking trap

When AI is doing its thing it sure is tempting to open more tabs… spin up more tasks… run more processes. I’ve had days with more AI windows and terminals open than I could keep track of. All working at full capacity.

It got to the point where I had to actually keep notes as to what was going on.

While multi-tasking can get more done, it’s not an optimal working pace for me everyday. It’s stressful. It can get to the point that it’s impossible to keep track of all that’s going on.

It’s a trap because it’s when I make mistakes and more often than not, end up with less than optimal results.

It’s also why I focus on only two sites. When I’m scattered among too many projects, nothing is done a well as I’d like. It’s more akin to survival mode rather than excel mode.

Don’t get me wrong... when I need to get something built yesterday, I roll up my sleeves and enter multi-task mode. It does get more done but it’s hard to sustain day-in and day-out. There’s a time and a place for mad multi-tasking.

The fact is, I need slower days where I have time to step back and think about what I’m doing, where I’m going and spend meaningful time analyzing current results (I track a ton of stuff these days that help me make better decisions).

But the number one benefit of taking the slower road and resisting multi-tasking is the extra time I have to come up with better article topics and headlines.

Headlines, hooks, captions and meme text are everything now. Taking the time to craft them perfectly is what it takes. AI frees me up to do this better.

What about you?

Are you using AI to work faster, work better or both?

Thanks for reading.

Jon
Fatstacksblog.com

Not gonna lie. It’s a pretty good way to work.

The results have been unreal. I’ve replaced multiple plugins with custom-coded solutions built entirely with AI. No coder hired. No SaaS fee paid.

For example, I ditched Rank Math. Nothing against them but I was using maybe 10% of what it does. AI replaced that 10% in an afternoon. My site loads faster and my wallet noticed.

Then I built a custom internal linking machine. Replaced another plugin entirely.

That’s two. There are many, many others.

Yet many publishers are barely using this thing

I’ve been to a few industry events this past year. The number of publishers NOT taking advantage of AI coding is wild to me.

My guess? Hangovers from the early pro-AI vs. anti-AI camp wars. Some folks dug in against AI out of allegiance to days of yore and never climbed back out.

Fine for blog writing. I get why some bloggers would prefer to still write every word.

But for building free custom tools, plugins and pretty much anything that can add traffic and revenue? Can’t figure out the resistance.

Here’s what this actually looks like day-to-day

I now track every single link clicked on my sites. Internal links. Affiliate links. Outbound links. All of it in a custom chart.

If an affiliate link is getting hammered on Article A and converting, I beef up that promo. If Article B has better time-on-site than Article C, my internal linking system learns to favor it.

Small stuff. Dozens of small things.

I’m a swing-for-the-fences guy by nature but the truth is there aren’t many single moves that dramatically shift the needle. What moves it is stacking dozens of tiny improvements until they add up to something big.

AI lets me dream up and execute those tiny improvements faster than ever.

The more I build, the more I track. The more I track, the more opportunities I find.

The more opportunities I find, the more tools and software I code to take advantage.

It’s a never-ending improvement process.

Speaking of improvement... as you layer in more AI tools into your business, you can tack on an “improvement” layer so that whatever it does, it learns and improves.

My custom internal linking system is a good example. Not only does it create internal links on autopilot, but it learns which words and target URLs perform best and optimizes those results.

All thanks to the nuclear coding machine, aka AI, available 24/7 at my fingertips.

Thanks for reading.

Jon
Fatstacksblog.com

As of November 2022, Alphabet was sitting on $113 billion in cash and short-term investments.

Little did Google know at that time that this war chest would be indispensable for its survival one short month later.

In November 2022, ChatGPT was widely released to the public. As far as I could tell, it caught Google with its pants down. The Google powers-that-be were staring down the barrel of an impending MySpace or Yahoo future.

With war chest in hand, Google battened down the hatches and went to work while defending antitrust lawsuits from the DOJ.

Must have been bleak days at Google. So bad that Sergey docked the yacht, put the golf clubs away and trotted back to Google campus to help out.

While Google fought for its survival, it dealt many publishers a death blow in the form of HCU. I guess Google wanted to spread the misery. They got their wish.

I gotta hand it to Google though. While they were looking to be the next MySpace or Yahoo during the early days of AI, they’ve managed to hang in there with their own AI. I’m not a fan of Google search but I like Nano Banana Pro and NotebookLM.

Nano Banana Pro, IMO, is a considerable leap forward in AI image generation. At least for what I do.

It’s the first model where I have real control, especially when it comes to blending images and/or text.

The problem with it is twofold.

First, it’s costly, coming in at $.15 per image. Not a big deal for a one-off, but it adds up when creating many.

Second, and this is the bigger problem, and that is it can take a long time to generate images. During busy times, it can time out. Not exactly reliable during a fast-paced publishing schedule.

The silver lining is that while I wait for nano banana to work its magic, I have time to write this. Instead of dedicating a swath a time to penning this, I thought I’d try the multi-task approach and write thoughout the day as I publish for my other sites.

And it’s true in an AI world, there’s more copying and pasting going on. I can do Command + C and Command + V blindfolded via muscle memory.

If you can imagine it, you can create it.

This is my favorite part of AI. I’m no longer restrained by my very limited design skills. It’s been great fun experimenting and testing. While this does not make up for the loss of Google traffic, it is, IMO, our biggest opportunity right now.

Yes, everyone has these capabilities at their fingertips which is where your creativity comes in. Just because everyone can create pretty much anything now doesn’t mean you can’t carve out content opportunities.

You can.

You must.

That’s how it works these days.

I also know many folks have moved on from content publishing.

One common avenue, especially for folks who still salivate at making money from Google search traffic, is ecommerce.

AI can’t yet manufacture products out of thin air and sell them. Hence, ecommerce sites are still a thing. In order for people to buy, they must go to these sites.

And so it remains a good opportunity. It’s particularly potent in the hands of someone with content marketing skills who can use content to sell products.

If ecommerce appeals to you or you’re doing it and want to learn more, check out this new Skool dedicated to profitable ecommerce. It’s ecomm in a box with templates and all the details you need to fire up niche ecomm sites fast.

Whatever direction you go, I suspect AI plays a part. Maybe it’s background helping with bookkeeping, law and admin. Or maybe it’s front and center creating all the content you post online. Maybe it’s somewhere in between.

To put into perspective just how big a deal AI is these days, there are murmurs in law that at some point, lawyers could be held negligent for NOT using AI. I bring this up because law is traditionally one of the slowest industries to embrace new tech. Few industries have enjoyed the level of controversy where AI is concerned as law. Lawyers are routinely busted for filing hallucinated-filled documents with courts. Courts are losing patience. It’s become a cliché.

And yet, despite just how bad AI has worked out for some lawyers on some cases, AI is becoming so entrenched and important in the practice of law that it’s not only possible, but probable, lawyers will be negligent for failing to use AI in some capacity when helping clients.

Talk about a damned if you do and damned if you don’t situation. I’m sure lawyers aren’t the only people who feel that way.

That chart is Google’s parent-company’s stock price.

It’s flirting with a record high.

That’s remarkable given all the viable threats out there circling Google.

I don’t get the enthusiasm for Google but then I’m far from being a good stock picker.

I guess the market knows something I don’t?

Google did manage to scramble at the 11th hour and pull some AI tricks out of its hat.

I’m sure MySpace and Yahoo wished they’d taken Facebook and Google threats as seriously as Google took ChatGPT.

Thanks for reading.

Jon
Fat Stacks

I’m writing this after a five-hour power publishing session, juggling blog posts and social media. While throwing all kinds of stuff against the digital wall, the thought occurred to me, “Imagine if I were the only publisher with access to AI?”

Sure is a fun thought. I returned to reality and carried on. But seriously, imagine that.

What’s fascinating about the fantasy of being the only person with AI is it recognizes just how profound an effect it’s having in this biz (and so many others).

I digress. Let’s get down to business.

It took me nearly two years after Google Penguin to hit my stride again.

Two years.

That’s a long time to duct tape an online business together.

I remember those days. Trying things that didn’t work. Trying more things that didn’t work. Eventually, I found my way.

Fast-forward 11 years to the Helpful Content Update. Déjà vu.

This time? I didn’t put too much time into recovery.

Instead, I reinvented my B2C approach. With AI evolving faster than I can keep up with, B2C publishing is changing all the time. It’s both fun and frustrating.

I also diversified into B2B publishing, which I’d always been a fan of. My first blog was B2B (law-related). Happy to be back at it because it’s writing-centric. It’s law-related again. Less volume required in every sense… less content, less traffic, fewer subscribers and so on.

Platforms punch. Survivors pivot… or try to.

I still get annoyed when a platform changes the rules on us.

After all these years. After all the updates and algorithm shifts that came out of nowhere, I still catch myself thinking, “That’s not fair.”

I should know better.

And yet…

It’s hard to fault us for blindly trusting platforms. When they issue “publisher guidelines,” or “Content monetization” schemes or whatever they promise creators, that to me is a “let’s all make piles of money together” invitation. I fall for it every time.

In fact, many online creators are more reliant on platforms than ever before. It’s unavoidable. No barriers to entry on the one hand, but zero protection or guarantees on the other.

Here’s what I’ve learned in the last two years.

1. Using AI for online creation is controversial. You’re an idiot if you use it. An idiot if you don’t. I’ll spare you my view to avoid fierce outrage from those who disagree with me.
   

2. Learning new platforms is a drag, but necessary. Not only that, we must learn how to evolve with always-changing platforms.
   

3. The best thing I’ve done is expand connections in this business. I still spend a good chunk of time talking to other online publishers daily. Worth every minute from both business and friendship perspectives.
   

4. Some people still do very well with SEO. I tip my hat to them. This community teaches an interesting SEO approach.
   

5. I enjoy writing online to a variety of audiences above all else. That hasn’t changed.
   

6. Vibe coding is fun, can result in some wild creations, but can also be one of the biggest rabbit holes… EVER.
   

7. I seldom visit sites via Google anymore. Instead, it’s news apps, social and AI. No surprise there. I am the trend I’m writing about.
   

8. Selling info products is harder than it looks. I tried. Put in a decent effort. Maybe I bailed too early. I’ll never know. That’s the thing about pivoting. You always wonder about the road not taken.
   

9. Pure speculation, but smaller publishers aren’t the only ones who got clobbered. Based on all the paywalls I hit on legacy sites, they seem to be scrambling, too. I’m genuinely curious whether paywalls work for them. I can’t imagine they do except for NY Times-level publications. And yet there they are. Paywalls everywhere.
   

   Speaking of which, why do Google Discover and Apple News send so much traffic to paywalled sites? It’s gotten to the point where I stop clicking into many sites. Surely the bounce rate is astronomical. Sadly, if I put a paywall on my sites, I won’t enjoy the same treatment. Funny how that works.
   

10. Platform algos evolve toward user retention, not publisher success. It’s unfortunate. It’s also just another challenge we face. Add it to the pile.
    

11. I’m a generalist in every sense of the word. It’s both good and bad. It’s reflected in how I go about my publishing business. Jack of all trades, master of enough to keep the lights on.
    

12. Unless you monetize with display ads (as I still do), websites are not necessary. They’re becoming a relic of the past. Substack, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube etc. are becoming online creators’ home base. They also serve as discovery platforms. It’s one-stop shop publishing. Ironic given my discussion about platform reliance above. Regardless, that’s the reality. If you thought barriers to entry were low with WordPress, they’re even lower now.
    

13. Publishing success starts with the question: Will this succeed in an AI world?

Opportunities exist. Finding them and making them work is the challenge.

They don’t announce themselves. They don’t come with instruction manuals. You have to look. You have to test. You have to talk to people. You have to be willing to feel stupid as a clueless noob again.

Without question, they’re out there. Here are a few pieces of the current opportunity puzzle.

1. Traffic opportunity: Pinterest. I loathe the thought of putting all my eggs into the Pinterest basket, so I don’t, but it’s currently undeniably good. It must be hockey season because I’m seeing plenty of hockey stick traffic growth. PinClicks gives pinners a fast-track to hockey-stick charts. This week only, you can get the annual plan for a sizable discount. Existing PC users go here. New PC users go here with coupon code FatStacksBF50Plus. No-brainer.
   

2. For SEO aficionados, there’s a new Skool teaching rank n’ rent on roids. I’m in the Skool, and it’s wild. Launch beautiful microsites in bulk that are SEO’d to the hilt in minutes for $10 a pop. Building sites for R&R was once the bottleneck. For those who salivate over scaling lead gen, check it out here. And yes, SEO is still a thing outside content sites.
   

3. Stack that revenue with Stay22. I mentioned Stay22 a few months ago. It’s the best add-on monetization for display ad and affiliate sites that I’ve ever used. Publishers are jumping all over it in droves because seldom does a secondary revenue source come along that actually delivers noticeable revenue gains. I shouldn’t be surprised… it’s a Canadian company and, well, Canada rocks. Don’t worry, it’s not restricted to Canucks. Check it out here.

So, how to proceed?

As usual, find something that works that you don’t hate. I’m in a rebuilding phase. I got clobbered yet again by a platform a couple of months ago. I’ll spare you the details, but it was a sizable hit akin to HCU. It was yet again an eggs-in-one-basket scenario.

Lower expectations of platforms to zero. Yeah, much, much easier said than done when really the online publishing model is moving toward platform-only and away from websites.

I like to believe that I now operate differently by assuming all platforms have a shelf life. In practice, I don’t. I jump in and count on it forever. I’ll never learn.

Yet, I do ask myself, “How long do I need this to work to make it worth my time?” So, maybe I’ve learned something.

Despite that, here I am on Substack, another platform. I‘ll see how long it’s good for publishers.

Thanks for reading.

Jon

Fat Stacks