🤖 Agencies Under Threat

Hey there 👋,

In this issue...

• 📝 Patey’s Update

• 📰 Top 5 News Stories

• 🔓 Latest Flippa Deals Unlocked

• 📣 Sponsor This Newsletter

📝 Patey’s Update

Over the past week, during my morning hikes in Somerset, UK, I’ve been brainstorming with ChatGPT on how to refine my product and service offering in marketing and AI automation/agents.

It’s a great business coach, here’s what we came up with together, I feel like we’re making progress:

📈 Learn how to leverage AI agents in business & crypto → whop.com/patey ($97)

🚀 Get a strategy call with me + AI agent roadmap → UnlockAgentic.com ($500)

📩 Want your beehiiv newsletter run for you? → LetterOperators.com ($500/m)

🎯 Fractional CMO to automate your marketing → Patey.Marketing (from $3,500/m)

The thing is, I’m continuously trying to disrupt myself before AI does.

I think marketing agencies only have a couple of years left before businesses no longer need to pay for monthly services. Brands will simply pick off-the-shelf agents and stack them together.

The opportunity right now is to build your own agentic workflows and sell them to companies, or create custom workflows for them.

Websites were super hot in 2020 during covid, and now, due to AI, the website investing asset class as we knew it is pretty much over.

Likewise, newsletter businesses were super hot in 2022 but due to oversupply fuelled by AI, CPMs have fallen up to 90% (I used to be able to charge $200 CPMs, now it’s closer to $20), and I now see newsletters as marketing channels for businesses again.

Last year, digital agencies were super hot, seen as more stable assets than the carnage going on with content sites, and have been sought-after acquisitions by companies such as Onfolio.

But just like SaaS is under attack from AI agents and ChatGPT Operator coming to their $20/m pro plan soon, I think within a year we will see a drastic change in the value and desirability of agencies.

What’s left will be human-led brands selling real products and services - ecommerce and local ‘boring’ businesses. And anything that provides community and connection.

Talking of which, hit reply and let me know your thoughts.

📰 Top 5 News Stories

⬆️ Total offers accepted dollar amount on Empire Flippers up 207% YOY - Link

👋 Authority Hacker guys are leaving Wordpress as SEO traffic gets diluted - Link

🔆 This presents an opportunity for beehiiv’s new website builder to shine - Link

💣 New AI agent called Icon to crush $600B ad industry? - Link

🤯 Max pain in the crypto market resulted in the $40M presale of $PAIN - Link

🛠️ Top 3 Tools & Solutions

🔧 STRESS-FREE WEBSITE MANAGEMENT - Innovacious handles updates, SEO, and monetization with expert precision. No contracts, no hassle—pause anytime. Use code DAI for 20% off forever. Get started today!

💪 BUY DOMAINS, NOT LINKS - Odys provides premium-aged domains to grow your business or boost your site’s authority. Guaranteed indexing or your money back, with expert help for 301 redirects. Open an account and discover your perfect domain

🐝 THE NEWSLETTER PLATFORM BUILT FOR GROWTH - Created by the early Morning Brew team and now powering the world's top newsletters, I’ve been an early user (and investor). Get 20% OFF for 3 months as a Digital Asset Investor Reader!

🔓 Latest Flippa Deals Unlocked 

Below are my thoughts on five listings, some of which were Confidential and/or First Access which I unlocked using my Flippa Premium membership. You can get 3 months of access for free using this link and bypass NDA approval.

📱 App: Phone location tracker app on the App Store, designed for real-time location sharing and family safety. Strong user base and proven monetization, ideal for investors or businesses seeking a scalable digital asset. Averaging $110K/m profit from subscriptions, $4.5M asking price - Listing URL

📺 Social: Monetized walking tour YouTube channel with 140K subs and over 160 videos generating over 40M views. Channel is averaging $10K/m from AdSense, comes with a 4.6x profit multiple for a $590K asking price. It certainly feels like YouTube channels are now able to command the types of multiples that content sites did at the top of their popularity during covid, without the existential threat of Google (albeit owned by them) - Listing URL

🛒 Ecommerce: - BOGOF Shopify stores selling digital software products to do with photography editing and video production. Cashflowing over $5K/m requiring less than 5 human hours a week to run thanks to AI automation. Not sure where traffic is coming from, doesn’t really have SEO, and couldn’t see it mentioned in the listing. It’s on a nice one word well matched TLD. Priced at $109K - Listing URL

🛒 Ecommerce: - 13-year-old eCommerce dropship Bigcommerce store on an exact match subdomain (i.e. uses sub domain and root to make the keyword). Small amount of organic traffic according to Ahrefs (< 200/m) on a domain with no link authority. Comes with Google Shopping feed automation. Again, not sure again where traffic is coming from but stated to be making $3K/m profit. A 1.4x profit multiple puts this at a $49,500 asking price - Listing URL

🌐 Content Site: 7-month-old WordPress site in the automotive niche, averaging $1,295/m profit from affiliate and display ads. DR12 with over 10K/m traffic showing in Ahrefs, ranking in position #2 for a 8K volume keyword. I ran a page through Undetectable and it came back as 100% human. It’s super impressive how this site ranks so well, boosted by an aged domain redirected to homepage. Auction listing, currently at $5,050, reserve met ($35K BIN) - Listing URL

📣 Sponsor This Newsletter

As we learned in business school, the Rule of Seven states that a prospect needs to interact with a brand at least seven times before they’re likely to take action or make a purchase. In reality, it could be as many as 23 times as Neil Patel states…

Get featured in this newsletter

That’s it for this week, until next time, buy my product and catch me in the community!

Cheers!

Richard (@richardpatey)

Disclaimer: Nothing in this email is financial advice and I am not a professional investment adviser. I send weekly updates on digital asset news and what I'm doing personally - consider it informational and for entertainment purposes only. There are native ad sponsorships from the beehiiv ad network and ones I source via Passionfroot such as Innovacious in today’s issue. Plus I often add affiliate links to software I use, website marketplace listings such as Flippa, and crypto exchanges and protocols.