Zak Ali came up through a news startup and into Finder’s growth seat, which means he has watched the same audience get progressively more expensive to reach for a decade. On the Unscripted SEO podcast he compressed that into one sentence that is worth putting in front of whoever signs off your budget.
The Line That Should Reset Your Budget
“The traffic you have today is as cheap as it’s going to be.”
Zak Ali, Finder
“It’s only going to get more expensive.”
Zak Ali
Read as a budgeting instruction rather than a lament, that reframes the whole planning conversation. Every visitor you can acquire and keep this year is bought at a historic discount. Every one you defer costs more.
Why Every Discoverable Surface Costs More Next Year
The mechanism is the same everywhere and it is not mysterious. A surface opens, early entrants get cheap distribution, the surface monetises, supply of content rises, and the cost per unit of attention climbs. Google, YouTube, Reddit, TikTok, and now the answer engines have all run some version of this curve.
Ali’s read of the current shift is that it is not purely value-destructive:
“It’s actually forcing companies to deliver more, and so the customer actually wins now more than they were previously, where it was just about, ‘look, if I can get into that P1 spot, I have more or less a monopoly on the traffic for that head word.’”
Zak Ali
The monopoly-on-a-head-term era is what got repriced. What replaces it costs more and rewards more.
Cultivating An Audience As A Hedge
Ali’s own framing for the far end of the funnel:
“So you want to convert them and you want to retain them — it’s like audience cultivation.”
Zak Ali
Practitioner guidance. The hedge against rising acquisition cost is a set of people you can reach again without paying the toll a second time — an email list, a podcast audience, a community. The economics are simple: acquisition cost is paid once, and every subsequent contact is close to free.
Which makes conversion-to-subscriber the metric worth optimising this year, ahead of raw sessions. See distribution as a moat for the structural argument.
Where To Spend The Cheap Traffic You Still Have
Three places, in priority order.
Capture. Put a genuine reason to subscribe on the pages that already get traffic. Not a newsletter box in the footer — something worth an email address, on the page that earned the visit.
Assets with a long half-life. Tools, calculators, data sets and reference pages keep earning after the surface reprices. Thin listicles do not.
Relationships. Interviews, contributor relationships and partnerships that produce durable references. These get harder to buy later, not easier.
Ali’s full episode is written up in search everywhere optimisation, and the budgeting frame sits alongside revenue-first SEO strategy.