Why we shut down our 7 figure business

and here I am struggling to make an earning, despite setbacks.. i have to restart again..

Wasting my money

I knew this business model was over a few months ago, but reading your course shutdown announcement made it feel much more "official". If even you couldn't find a way to make it work with today's search engines, the rest of us will certainly struggle. Let's focus on the positive, though: developing our ability to reinvent ourselves, find alternatives, and start fresh. And when it happens again in the future, we'll bounce back faster and adapt again. Or perhaps pivot to something more stable and "serious", like building a product. Thank you for being honest with your customers, for everything, and good luck!

I don’t think creating videos is very easy, especially for documentation or things that require you to show how to do something. For that, people would still choose easy way to publish blogs and people willl have to refer than to want answers.

You two are fantastic. Your energy and optimism is infectious. At a time when so much is falling apart around me (including my town, approximately half of which literally burned to the ground...) I'm embracing the positives of new beginnings. Thanks so much for your generosity and intelligent approach. I'm looking forward to taking this ride with you.
Barbara Rose

Can you suggest what I can do with my small vegan blog? I have not been keeping it current, but now that I have quit my job and become a full time entrepreneur, I would like to turn it into something good, or sell it, if I can?? What would you suggest with a small website that I;ve had for 7 years, but is not really generating much affiliate income?

This might as well be square one for me. Working full time as a home inspector after 28 years of Creative Directorship. Now I want to start an online business that's got the ability to blossum

Automate my job, please.

🔥

AI Overview incorrectly states that Vanessa Kirby is the great grand daughter of Jack Kirby, creator of the Fantastic Four comic book. Vanessa is the actress playing Sue Storm in the new movie. She is not related to Jack Kirby at all. AI is not trustworthy and searchers are very savvy and understand this limitation and inaccuracy concern. I think you guys are once again wrong about the future and where search and AI are headed in terms of the minds of audiences, users, searchers or however you label us.

“…and trust us…” - no, you’ve lost all the trust in my view. I was one of your customers. Trust is earned, you don’t deserve it.

Much respect to you guys! Thanks for sharing!

I think you guys should do an automation and marketing course for solopreneurs, cause there's a lot of people doing sidehustles and freelancing nowadays (like me, lol) and I know to do the basics of offering a service but I'm still lost on how exactly to offer my services. I know who to target and how to reach them but it's very ovewhelming and I don't know which process to focus on first. But massive respect for you guys for this video, I earned a bit from your course before so thank you and looking forward to what you guys will be offering in the near future!

Hi Gael, I want core web vitals ,it is not there in downloadable content.i purchased it. Please add that too in the downloadable content.

Had to stop listening for the first time on 2x speed because old frenchie is so hard to understand!

Love you guys for having this kind of respect for your clients money, effort and time as well as the respect and integrity you have in your own product to do this. Wishing nothing but the best!

SEO is shifting and everything changes. IMO the whole SEO affiliate business model had a good and way long run and I am happy I got my piece of pie. Looking forward to see what you are up to next.

The entire “blogging advice” industry is full of scammers and grifters.

And they wonder why Google hit us all so hard!

Psyched to see where you go with the AI automation!

Why we shut down our 7 figure business ? Because people start to asking about u! only reason make sense

A Notion episode would be mind-blowing if you ask me )

I look forward to your next course - hopefully, it's not too far off. I still have faith in the quality of your courses and wouldn't hesitate to purchase again.

I must say we really admired your decision and look after what exictes you to leave this much money on table and start new...

You guys sound like alarmists and doomsayers with all this talk about nobody reading blogs. Relax on the AI hype.

SEO is a vicious circle. It causes you to not really care about the needs of your customers, but just focus on ranking. It took me three years to understand this.

Blogging isn’t dead, only SEO based business is dead. So what. - today is about social post sharing and email marketing TO blog is the new way — e,g newsletter businesses are thriving! - but to close your entire business was a huge mistake!! Why are you not evolving authority sites to the new era of blogging? You just gave up 🤔

Best of luck!

I listened to the podcast earlier. Shutting doors in order to free up your energy for the next right thing is soooo hard to do. Hats off to you, boys! 🫡🫡

Love you guys. You always made interesting content. But ...... another automation/AI channel .... i don't know. Not saying it's a bad decision for you as a business. Most likely a lot firms are gonna need someone to do it since even banks still write stuff on paper by hand / excel (talking from experience). Plus there is a lot of new stuff to make videos about. But i wonder what percent of people in the comments really have something to automate except their toilet flushing automatically.

It was a channel who helped to create businesses and now it's a channel who tells you how to automate what you already have. The only problem is that you need to have something.

And even those huge automations they show on channels is nothing really new, they still use APIs. If you wanted you kind of could have done it even before AI (except for writing posts, generating images). And lets say you make a simple automation of writing some post, generating thumbnails and posting it somewhere. You still need to check it, most likely rewrite which takes time unless you are okay posting AI sloppy content. And if you need to do that, then automation again becomes just a fraction of a time, not really that important. It's a cherry on a cake.

And i used to come here to find a recepe for a cake.
Not sure if i was able to adequately explain my point. I will still watch you. You guys make amazing content. Thank you for all the years. I do think it is right decision for you, especially if you are so excited about it. Just not sure i am so excited as a viewer. But i may be wrong.
Good luck.

You guys are really cool. You create great content, and your perspectives are fresh and interesting to listen to. Congrats on this big (and hard) decision! I'm sure there's even more great stuff ahead. I'm looking forward to the next episode.

I understand that AI is taking up a good market share, but where will it get the new information in the future if people stop putting it out there?

As long as you guys are sticking together and keep on creating content im happy - thank you for all the long journeys, park runs and cooking sessions you've kept me company and also inspired 😄 i know good things are coming your way!

The writing was on the wall so no surprises there. But the great news is if you're willing to be social and pay for traffic, then the opportunities are as great as ever.

What’s next boys?

As Craig would say, the industry got fockin' roasted.

It was the right decision in the end, glad to see you made the right call for yourselves and the community. Happy to hear most of the other team members have landed new opportunites as well.

Looking forward to the next chapter.

Hey guys ; let me be a case study

You guys mentioned a few other platforms like Matt Diggity who stopped selling the outdated courses, basically. How about Wealthy Affiliate - do you have any opinion about them as well?
Cheers
Mike :)

So glad I was part of AH since 2016. Sad to see it shut down but totally understand the need to do so. It’s been a great ride and look forward to what’s coming next!

Count me in boys. AI automation is something I'm interested in anyway.

Thanks for not going down the road with "INSANE TYPE/HYPE" videos or how I made 999999434434$ last month! Altough you had some, but please don't follow that trend 😀

Funny to see the entire SEO industry pivoting to AI Automation :))) Sorry guys, don't want to be throwing shade it's just the reality. Wishing you best of luck in your new journey! Though times for all content creators. Please don't end up like the 99% of shitty AI Automation channels (the ones teaching people to post 1k articles a day and share their affiliate links directly on Pinterest 30 times a day!! :)))) Good luck! Still loving your content and hands down for sharing with us this decision.

Fair play! Thanks for all your information over the years and good luck! One thing though, this episode in iTunes the volume is very low. I had to crank my AirPods to full but still couldn’t hear whilst walking outside in traffic. All your other podcasts the volume levels are perfect 👍

I’m all for iteration but this just feels like someone using their established following to jump on the next big fad and sell something. I hope I’m wrong because I love this channel.

Huge respect guys! We've learned so much from you two over the last 7 years and you inspired us both to create our own successful affiliate businesses (and we've since built an AI automation brand). You won't regret your decision... and you should definitely keep the Authority Hacker brand name! It's class

What resources would you recommend to learn AI Automation?

Good job guys! Looking forward to the next phase of your business, and seeing how it can help me grow my business.

Same decision I made 6 years ago (albeit not with your revenue or team responsibilities). Proud of you guys, follow your Heart and much greater things shall come to you 🙏🏻 Dom