413: He built a movie site to 15 million visitors a month. Then he sold it and started over (with Vic Holtreman)

So did those guys like approach you or did you actively look to sell the site

at the time? No, they approached me.

I had a number of offers and

Yeah, I mean, it's so exciting.

Like I run a website myself.

It's obviously nowhere near that kind of size that you've described.

But it's interesting whenever you kind of watch something go from a blog, which was what mine was initially, and then more of an actual established website and then what you decide to do with that.

I'm sure people will be watching this or listening to this later and maybe have their own websites and be thinking, I wonder what I could do with mine.

Have you got any advice, Vic, for anyone who has their own site and maybe they want to grow into something bigger?

Right now, the landscape has changed so dramatically over the last 10 years.

I would not even attempt to launch a standalone website today.

I think places like Substack, YouTube, that's the place to be because Google, their whole purpose when they started was to be as kind of invisible as possible.

They just wanted to give you pure search results and point you to the best sites, and that's how their reputation grew.

They would serve up the best search results with the best websites.

And now their entire goal is to keep you on Google as long as possible.

So, you know, I mean, if you go, especially on your phone, if you do any search for anything, you've got to like scroll, scroll, scroll until you get to an actual website you can click through.

So, man, it's tough out there.

Unless you've got some like really unique thing you know like there was nothing like twitter when twitter you know arrived right and and the other thing with google now and i say google because you know that's how people find your your website although i'm hearing now that um seo for ai is a thing because um you know you do some research in ai and it does bring up the links so that's a whole nother thing but On Google, you need backlinks and you need site authority and site age.

And you just can't get those overnight.

It takes time to curate all that.

But I think Substack is a great, great platform.

I think that's the place to be right now.

I very much agree.

Let's talk about your Substack then.

So the redeemed second half is your publication.