E1212: What if SEO agencies stopped buying backlinks and started buying the news sites that publish them?
David Quaid joins me to break down a business model he calls "news as a service": acquiring established news sites, local publications, and niche blogs, improving their SEO, and using them to build businesses that earn money beyond advertising.
David argues that SEO agencies spend huge amounts on link building and PR without controlling the publications they depend on. He recalls one company spending $20,000 per month on PR and getting just one press mention in six months. But would buying a publication actually make more financial sense?
I push David on the acquisition costs, operating expenses, revenue, link value, and whether this is just a more expensive private blog network. We work through examples involving an ecommerce store, a Denver local newspaper, and an SEO agency with multiple clients.
In this episode:
- Why David believes SEO agencies should consider owning news sites instead of continually paying third parties for backlinks and PR.
- How an agency could acquire a local newspaper or niche publication, grow its organic traffic, and build a business around an existing audience.
- Why a publication's value goes beyond backlinks to include referral traffic, brand exposure, and relationships with local businesses.
- How to evaluate the economics: buying the site, paying journalists, growing readership, and finding revenue that supports the operation.
- How a local publisher could expand into separate websites for community news, restaurants, business, and other topics.
- Where sponsored articles, advertorials, editorial independence, and rel="sponsored" links fit into the model.
- Why David sees a major difference between acquiring a legitimate publication and operating a traditional PBN.
- Why the strategy could also work in reverse, with publishers acquiring SEO or PR agencies and selling services to existing advertisers.
- How publishers facing fewer clicks from Google AI Overviews could use newsletters, affiliate offers, and other revenue sources.
- Why I disagree with the idea that AI Overviews have made it impossible to grow organic traffic, and what I found when investigating Windows Forum's traffic decline.
- Whether targeting a keyword with every new article counts as excessive SEO, and how quickly David recommends expanding a smaller site.
- How to review a publication's existing content, prune pages that no longer serve a purpose, and improve its technical SEO and internal linking.
- Why David questions the assumption that a backlink from a topically relevant website must be more valuable than one from a different industry.
- Whether HubSpot could have avoided some of its SEO losses by moving unrelated content onto separate, focused domains.
We also discuss the future of publishers as AI changes search, the limitations of buying individual backlinks, and the opportunity to combine SEO, PR, and publishing under one company.
This is a live exploration of the idea. David explains why he believes in it, and I challenge the details to see where the numbers and the strategy hold up.
⭐️ David Quaid on 𝕏 - https://x.com/DavidGQuaid
⭐️ David Quaid on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidquaid/
⭐️ David Quaid on YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/@DavidQuaid
⭐️ David Quaid's agency - https://primaryposition.com/
⭐️ Nik Hulewsky's episode - https://youtu.be/IyUv47A5m40
💎 Compact Keywords - My SEO Course - Get paying customers through SEO - Clear step-by-step video breakdowns - SEO templates to be copied and adapted for your products and services: https://compactkeywords.com/
00:00 News as a Service Intro
00:50 Why News Lost Value
01:27 Vertical Integration Lessons
03:55 TikTok Shop and PR SEO
05:06 GEO vs Owning Property
07:59 PR Spend Reality Check
09:51 Agency Moat via News
12:39 Monitors Niche Outlet Example
18:02 PBN vs Traffic Brands
20:45 Acquisition Economics Debate
28:21 Local Newspaper Multi Sites
31:54 Who Buys and Funding
38:42 Disclosure and Sponsored Links
45:38 Forbes Style Linking Tactics
46:41 Sponsored Link Debate
47:39 Costco Chicken Lesson
49:43 Local Newsletter Goldmine
52:18 Publishers Buy Agencies
55:08 AI Overviews And Clicks
01:01:15 Windows Forum AI Fail
01:06:32 News As A Service
01:09:03 Keyword Scaling Limits
01:12:48 Pruning And UX Fixes
01:17:00 Topical Bridges And Links
01:28:38 SEO Myths And Testing
01:31:16 Wrap Up And Goodbye
The Edward Show. Your daily search engine optimization podcast: https://edwardsturm.com/the-edward-show/
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