OpenAI To IPO?? 📈 Shorts Surpass Long-Form For YouTube 💸 News Creators Are Winning The Attention War 🏆

If you haven’t heard, we’re growing up around here.

We’re launching a Paid Tier and a Book. Don’t worry, the FREE Friday Roundup will continue. So stick around!

Upgrade to Paid to get Tuesday Playbooks, Templates and pre-release Book Content.

Or pre-order the book, a compact guide through everything we’ve learned over 20 years of machine building.

OpenAI Lays Groundwork For Juggernaut IPO At Up To $1 trillion Valuation [3 min read]

An IPO became feasible after the company completed a major restructuring that reduced its reliance on Microsoft and transformed its governance structure, with the OpenAI Foundation now holding a 26% stake. CEO Sam Altman indicated that going public is "the most likely path" to raise the enormous capital needed to fund his ambitious plans to invest trillions in AI infrastructure, especially as the company faces mounting losses despite an expected $20 billion annual revenue run rate.

Shorts Now Make More Money For YouTube Than Long-Form [3 min read]

CEO Sundar Pichai revealed that Shorts now generates more revenue per watch hour than traditional long-form content. The company attributed its strong performance, including 16% year-over-year overall growth and 15% growth in YouTube ad revenue, to aggressively incorporating generative AI across all its products and services. Concerns remain about whether long-form creators will face continued financial challenges, as the platform has already experienced past revenue drops and industry layoffs when viewer attention shifted to short-form content.

News Creators Emerging As Winners In Battle For Attention [3 min read]

News creators are gaining ground over legacy media in attracting and retaining audiences, particularly in markets where traditional media is under pressure, with adults under 35 especially favoring creators (48%) over mainstream media (41%). A Muck Rack study found that one-third of journalists are now creator journalists publishing their own work across platforms like newsletters, websites, and social media, though most have fewer than 10,000 subscribers and 40% make no money from self-published work. As the creator economy evolves, some news creators are successfully blending entertainment with news content and building passionate niche communities, offering advertisers emerging ways to reach audiences, though brands will need to navigate issues of trust and adapt strategies for different platforms and formats.

The 7 Phases Of The Internet - A Map To Where The Web Goes Next [6 min read]

The Internet has evolved through seven additive phases—connecting computers, mobile devices, all devices/IoT, AI agents, senses, ubiquitous connectivity, and quantum communication—with each phase building on rather than replacing previous ones. We are currently entering Phase 4, the Internet of AI Agents, which represents a shift from passive devices to intelligent agents that can perceive, reason, act, and collaborate, including both digital agents like coding copilots and physical agents like autonomous vehicles that create networked intelligence across digital and physical environments. The upcoming phases will enable multisensory communication involving touch, taste, and smell, integrate terrestrial and non-terrestrial networks for global coverage, and ultimately create a Quantum Internet that uses qubits for ultra-secure communication, quantum sensing, and distributed quantum computing that augments rather than replaces the classical Internet.

Do AIs Think Differently In Different Languages? [12 min read]

Through testing ChatGPT, Claude, and DeepSeek with questions in six languages, AI chatbots maintain remarkably consistent liberal, secular values across all languages—even when asked in Chinese, Arabic, or Hindi where typical speakers might hold different views on topics like gender equality and LGBTQ+ rights. This consistency suggests the AI Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is false: unlike humans, AIs don't appear constrained by the language they're speaking, as they seem to think primarily in English before translating their responses. While this reflects an inherent bias from training on modern internet text rather than true neutrality, it helps maintain a shared reality and generally produces morally sound positions on human rights issues.

How To Do SEO For Google Maps [9 min read]

Google Maps SEO begins with claiming and verifying your Google Business Profile while ensuring your NAP (Name, Address, Phone Number) information is accurate and consistent across all platforms to establish legitimacy and credibility. Building visibility requires encouraging positive customer reviews, optimizing your website with relevant local keywords, and leveraging local citations across directories like Yelp, Yellow Pages, and industry-specific platforms to increase your business's relevance in local search results. Active engagement through Google Posts for updates and promotions, using the Q&A feature to address customer questions, and monitoring your Google Business Profile insights and analytics are essential for understanding customer behavior and refining your strategy to improve local search rankings.

How To Spot And Stop Creative Fatigue Before It Tanks Performance [6 min read]

Creative fatigue is inevitable but identifiable through data signals like declining CTR, rising CPC, and increased frequency, allowing marketers to spot problems before ads completely tank. Performance deteriorates due to four key factors: ad quality (relevance and resonance), creative lifecycle (natural expiration over time), audience saturation (overexposure to the same viewers), and platform dynamics (algorithmic penalties when systems lose confidence in an ad's ability to deliver results). Rather than waiting for ads to fail, marketers can extend ad lifespan through proactive management—strategically refreshing creatives, matching refresh rates to budget and platform, and responding quickly to algorithmic demotions, making this one area where human oversight still outperforms automation.

Only 100 Metrics Matter [8 min read]

Most businesses only need about 100 core metrics to understand 90% of what's happening, as the remaining thousands of tracked data points are useful only for special cases and don't drive daily decisions. Every business operates as a system of equations that can be broken down into specific, measurable levers—like decomposing revenue into users, engagement, ad load, and monetization—which helps teams identify what actually moves results. Standardizing these core metrics with clear definitions allows everyone to speak the same language and enables AI systems to not just report what happened, but understand why it happened and predict what comes next.

New Signals From The Consumer Economy [3 min read]

The traditional middle class is fragmenting under financial pressure, splitting consumers between value-seekers and premium holdouts, which means income alone no longer predicts behavior and marketers must focus on attitudinal and lifestyle cues instead. Rising subprime auto loan defaults, now hovering around 5%, have triggered company collapses and raised concerns about a potential domino effect in the broader financial system, echoing pre-2008 warning signs. Meanwhile, the "shadow banking" sector has ballooned since 2008 with limited transparency, and banks now have $4.5 trillion in exposure to non-bank financial institutions, raising serious concerns about systemic risk and potential financial instability.

Want To Shape Culture? Stop Jumping on Trends [3 min read]

Brands are overusing formulaic "meme + brand mention" content that creates sameness rather than differentiation, fatiguing audiences and leaving companies with no distinct identity, especially failing to resonate with Gen Z who prioritize authenticity above all else. Instead of reacting to cultural moments, successful brands should engineer culture by using their unique personality and point of view to start conversations rather than join them, shifting from participation to ownership of cultural narratives. Strong brand identity is essential for cultural influence, as brands need to understand their voice, purpose, and role in audiences' lives before they can effectively shape culture, or else they're destined to be just another company chasing memes rather than leading meaningful conversations.

AI Is Breaking The Economics Of Content [3 min read]

AI is fundamentally changing content economics by devaluing evergreen educational content, as evidenced by Wikipedia's 5% traffic decline while AI Overviews and ChatGPT answer questions directly without sending clicks. Instead, AI systems are rewarding additive content that provides new insights and conversations, with platforms like YouTube, Reddit, and LinkedIn gaining significant visibility and citation rates in LLM responses. This shift means companies need to pivot their content strategy away from traditional evergreen topics toward original research, data stories, and thought leadership to maintain value in an AI-driven landscape.

Sentiment Analysis: The process of determining whether customer feedback, social media mentions, and other content express positive, negative, or neutral opinions about your brand. It helps track how people feel about your brand over time. Sentiment analysis provides insights into customer attitudes and reactions.

Example: A hotel chain uses software to analyze reviews across multiple platforms, tracking whether guest sentiment is improving or declining after recent renovations.

Predictive Segmentation: Using AI and machine learning to automatically group customers based on likely future behaviors. It helps anticipate customer needs and actions before they occur. Predictive segmentation enables proactive marketing strategies.

Example: An ecommerce site identifies customers likely to make their next purchase within 7 days based on past shopping patterns.

We’re writing a book! A compact guide through everything we’ve learned over 20 years of machine building.

Pre-order the book here. 😊

That's it for this week! See you next week. 😎

Forwarded this email? Click here to subscribe. Don't want to miss out? Make sure to whitelist our email! 🥳😉

Something else you’d like to see here? Hit reply and let us know what you think. 🧠 Or smash a button on our feedback poll!

✌️ Team Marketing Machine

tools we use to keep our business running

Discord - find community with text, voice, and video chat. Join us!
Beehiiv - engage newsletter audiences and grow subscribers
Clickup - project management and team collaboration
WordPress - build websites and blogs
Elementor - drag-and-drop builder for WordPress
Buffer - streamline social media scheduling and analytics
ElevenLabs - convert text into realistic voiceover
Riverside - record high-quality audio and video remotely
Transistor - all-in-one podcast hosting platform
Zapier - automate tasks by connecting web apps
Claude - AI language model focused on safe and ethical text processing
Midjourney - generate images from text prompts using AI

contains affiliate links - let us know if you have any questions or recommendations!