11 niche ideas for 2022 & Site Traffic Report

Here are my favorite content niches for 2022 (and a quick report on the sites)

Launching a new site is always exciting, whether you’re new to web publishing or a veteran.

One of the first things you have to determine is what niche to cover. The decision is even more daunting if this is your first site. After all, you’re likely to be investing all of your resources into this project for quite a while.

I currently have more than 20 sites in my portfolio, and I aim at creating new sites at the pace of one per month. Possibly more, as we keep growing our team. Choosing the niches can still be somewhat challenging, but it has become easier over the years.

I thought that sharing my considerations for choosing a new niche, as well as a list of niche ideas, might be an interesting topic for a Yeys post, so here goes (hopefully not nothing!)

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If you’re here for the monthly report, you can use this table of contents to jump right to the report section.

Table of Contents

What makes a niche Suitable for a content site

The way to choose a niche depends on your goals and strategy.

If you’re starting out and writing your content, for example, choosing a niche that you know and love makes a lot of sense.

I outsource all of our content writing and creation, so I focus on the following considerations –

  1. An overall high level of interest in the topic.
  2. An abundance of underserved long-tail low-competition queries.
  3. Good revenue potential.
  4. Content that’s relatively easy to produce.
  5. If possible – evergreen content.

In the following list, I will provide my own insights based on these criteria.

How focused Should your site be?

This list offers broad niches. That doesn’t necessarily mean that a successful site has to cover the entire niche. Far from it.

Your strategy will influence the size of the site you should be shooting for. For example, if you want to produce one huge site, then, by all means, go with a domain name that reflects the entire niche. However, if you plan to build several small to mid-size sites (which I am doing in 2022), then it would make sense to choose a sub-niche within the niche.

You may also want to read my post about how to choose the right size of a niche.

I tend to stay away from hyper-focused niches, though. For me, a site should have the potential for at least 300-500 posts, giving it room for growth in the future. You don’t have to decide on that right away, but it is good to keep it in the back of your mind when choosing your domain name.

Ok, let’s move on to the list itself.

Content Sites Niche Ideas for 2022

#1 DIY

Level of Interest: High

DIY is a huge pastime in the US. People seem to enjoy fixing stuff around the home, and they turn to the Internet for information.

Competition: Medium

There are tons of DIY projects out there, and many sites target this niche. However, I think there are still plenty of underserved areas.

Revenue Potential: High

The DIY niche is easy to monetize with Amazon affiliate links for materials and tools.

RPMs are also typically good. Depending on the specific topics covered, I would expect a range of $25-$35.

Content Production Difficulty Score: Medium

If you – or your writers – can produce some How-To tutorials with your own pictures, that would be fantastic. I don’t consider this to be cheap or easy.

You could mix the tutorials with other types of content that are easier to produce, such as specific longtail questions about materials and tools.

Evergreen content score: Low to Medium

Depending on the specific topics you’re going to cover, this can be a reasonably evergreen niche. If you focus on high-end DIY equipment, you will probably need to review and update some content every year or two.

#2 Pets

Level of Interest: Low to High

While you could say that the level of interest in pets overall is high, readers are spread across multiple species.

A site about dogs, cats, or pets, in general, can target a large audience. However, if you drill down and create a site about bearded dragons, you’re looking at smaller numbers.

Competition: High

If you want to create a site about a popular pet, get ready to spend a long while looking for juicy queries.

I think that this niche appeals to new web publishers because it’s so “cute.” People who write their own content tend to look for topics they like. Dogs and other pets are high up there on the list of “likable” topics for obvious reasons.

The result? Who knows how many new website owners are implementing the same longtail techniques, drilling down on every dog and cat breed out there…

I’m not saying it’s impossible – but be prepared to spend some time looking for good topics to write about.

Revenue Potential: Medium

The pet care industry is enormous, and people spend a lot of money on pet-related products and services. However, it’s not that easy to earn affiliate commissions on the bulk of that spending.

Things like pet food and cat litter may generate a lot of revenue for sellers, but people tend to stick with the same brands, and even if you can talk them into buying through your link, you’ll likely only make a small commission on a single purchase.

RPM for display ads, in my experience, hovers around $15-$25 (depending on the pet and specific topics).

Overall, I would give the pets niche a “medium” for revenue potential unless you focus on lucrative items.

Content Production Difficulty Score: Easy

See above. Yes, you or your writers will have to do some online research. But trust me, people are happy to do that when it comes to a favorite pet.

Evergreen content score: High

Whether or not you can feed avocado to Pomeranians isn’t likely to change over the next few years. Except for some topics, this is generally an evergreen niche.

#3 Apparel & Fashion

Level of Interest: Medium

Not everyone is into fashion, so I would say “medium” here. If you hit a good sub-niche, you could strike gold with a dedicated following for some aspect of fashion and apparel. For example, denim. Or maybe boots.

Competition: High

There are many established sites out there that are related to print publication. They have access to designers and fashion shows, and competing with them can be challenging.

Revenue Potential: Medium

It should be easy to monetize your articles with affiliate links, but commissions are often not very high. RPM rates for display ads are decent at the $25-$35 range.

Content Production Difficulty Score: Medium

For many, this is an easy niche to write about. However, there is the issue of stock photos. Fashion is a very visual niche, and if you want to cover general trends – and not just longtail apparel questions – you’ll have to fork out a good amount of money on the right kind of stock photos.

Evergreen content score: Low to Medium

Not the best niche for evergreen content. While you can certainly focus on evergreen questions, prepare to keep updating and adjusting your content if you want to cover fashion trends.

Additional notes: This is an excellent niche for social traffic. If you know how to get it.

#4 Beauty and Makeup

Level of Interest: Medium

Just like with fashion, some people are into beauty and makeup. Others are not. And I hope I’m not showing some out-of-place gender bias, but this is probably a niche that appeals to women more than men.

There’s been a decline in some areas of this niche due to covid. When you wear a mask, you don’t care that much about your lipstick color. And if your work meetings are on zoom, you don’t need makeup – just filters.

Having said all that – this is a vital industry, and it gets stronger every year as new technologies and improved products hit the market. Not to mention the ever-changing trends.

Competition: Medium

There is a lot of competition from visual mediums. Established influencers produce relevant video content on YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest, and TicToc. You can actually leverage that to help your site, incorporating their content into your posts.

Revenue Potential: Low to Medium

This niche is easy enough to monetize. The items are small and easy to ship. And in many cases, customers feel comfortable buying them online (compared to clothes where you may prefer to try them on first).

It’s a spectrum of affiliate commissions, most of them on the lower side. Commissions are likely to be better if you focus on high-end products, including beauty gadgets.

RPMs vary based on your specific focus, but I would generally put them at $15-$25.

Content Production Difficulty Score: Easy to Medium

With most aspects of this industry, the information is easy to find on YouTube, and it’s easy enough to find writers who are more than happy to spend time researching and writing about these topics.

Evergreen content score: Medium

The beauty industry is dynamic. Trend-related content, such as “most popular lipstick color for 2021,” will need constant updating. However, there are plenty of longtail queries that are evergreen in nature.

Additional Notes: This niche can also do exceptionally well on social media.

#5 Travel

Level of Interest: Medium

I wasn’t sure whether to put Low, Medium, or High, to be honest. Pre-covid, I would say high. These days, who knows.

I think that even during covid, people still enjoy travel content but probably consume less of it, judging by my stats. It’s picking up again, especially for domestic travel. While some people travel overseas now, travel restrictions in many areas slowed down traffic for that aspect of travel.

Competition: High

There are many travel blogs out there. Travelers love to share their experiences, and many full-time travelers become digital nomads and create a travel blog to supplement their income. Finding underserved destinations can be challenging – but not impossible.

Revenue Potential: High

Travel is one area where you can monetize quite well with affiliate programs other than Amazon. Hotels.com, booking.com, car rental agencies, and flights – they all have good affiliate programs with juicy commissions.

There’s a caveat here, though. In my experience, getting accepted to some of these programs can be challenging. You will likely need at least 100,000K monthly visitors to take advantage of some of these. I’ve seen programs requiring over a million monthly visitors.

RPM rates are typically reasonable, though. At the $30-$35 range, depending on the time of year.

Content Production Difficulty Score: Easy to Medium

There’s a lot to write about when it comes to travel. And it can be easy to do if you’re familiar with the destination or find a writer who is.

Evergreen content score: Low to Medium

Depending on the type of content, you’ll likely need to rewrite some posts from time to time to keep them fresh and accurate.

Additional Notes: This is a highly seasonal niche. Traffic begins to pick up during spring, as people plan their summer vacations, and then slows down in August. Unless you have some decent winter travel content, the site will suffer during that time of year.

#6 Automotive

Level of Interest: Medium

Pretty much every household in the US has at least one vehicle. Many have two and even three. That doesn’t make everyone look for information on the topic daily, though. Most people look up information when they buy or lease a new car or when something goes wrong with their existing one.

There are fans of specific car makes and types, for sure. A niche site around those could tap into that smaller – yet more engaged – audience.

Competition: Medium to High

Several large auto sites are out there, often supported by YouTube channels and access to test drives. There’s still room in some sub-niches, though.

Revenue Potential: High

Cars are expensive, and advertisers spend a lot of money on display ads to promote their stock. RPM rates in this niche are typically high – at around $35-$40.

You can also monetize your site with affiliate links to automotive-related products such as seat covers, engine oil, etc.

Content Production Difficulty Score: High

A lot of the content in this niche is technical. You would need to know a thing or two about vehicles or find writers who do. Images can also be challenging to find if you’re looking for fresh ones.

Evergreen content score: Low

Most of the content in the niche is hardly evergreen. With new models coming out every year, this is a fast-changing industry, and your content will need to reflect that.

#7 Gardening

Level of Interest: High

It surprised me to see just how popular this topic was. I don’t just mean avid hobbyists. Even people who don’t garden regularly seem to have some level of interest in keeping house plants or an attractive garden (if they have the space for one).

Competition: Medium to High

Several prominent players in this niche tend to go after longtail queries. Fortunately, there is also an infinite number of plants and gardening issues to deal with, so if you do your keyword research well, you can find good queries.

Revenue Potential: Medium to High

You can monetize this niche with affiliate links, and Amazon carries many garden-related items. Display RPM rates are typically in the $25-$30 range.

Content Production Difficulty Score: Easy to Medium

You (or your writers) can invest in detailed tutorials to attract links and readers. Or you could stick to more accessible research-based informational content.

Evergreen content score: High

Unless you go after high-end gardening tools such as expensive lawnmowers, this type of content is very evergreen. Even if you’re writing about deciduous trees. (Sorry! I couldn’t resist!)

#8 General Knowledge niches

I am bundling all kinds of general knowledge niches here, such as wildlife, astronomy, botany, history, etc. I wouldn’t start a site around “general knowledge” as a topic unless you know you can build it up to thousands of quality pages.

These would be sites based on those non-practical questions people look up simply because they are curious.

Level of Interest: Medium to High

Depending on the topic, there are probably many people looking for information about it. As always, you’ll have to choose your topics wisely and make sure the search volume is out there.

Competition: Low

Generally speaking, there is such an abundance of underserved longtail queries in these niches it’s easy to find good queries that will bring in the traffic.

Revenue Potential: Low

And there’s your reason for the low competition. These queries have clear informational intent, with zero buying intent, making them very difficult to monetize. Affiliate commissions are likely to be very low, and display ad rates are typically $10-$15.

[I want to qualify the above information by saying that I don’t have entire sites based on this type of content. My RPM information is based on certain pages on my sites.]

Content Production Difficulty Score: Low

Some basic research typically brings up your answers to the questions. All you need to do is find reliable sources and create a helpful synthesis for your reader.

Evergreen content score: High

While some areas of science keep advancing, in many cases, the information is evergreen.

Additional notes: Since this is primarily idle browsing traffic, you should encourage your readers to keep browsing related questions. Crafty intriguing titles are a must, and I would blend those with “related posts” and automatic page scrolling elements.

#9 Crafts

Level of Interest: Low to Medium

Most people are interested in at least one or two types of crafts. Assuming your site will be dedicated to a specific craft, interest levels are likely to vary.

Competition: Medium

Yes, there are numerous YouTube channels dedicated to every craft and hobby you can imagine (and many that you can’t). However, there are many underserved longtail queries out there when it comes to written content.

Revenue Potential: Low to Medium

Most crafts require materials and tools, so there’s plenty of room for affiliate links. Check the price range, though. Many popular crafts, such as crochet or embroidery, require inexpensive materials, and the commissions are low.

Display ad rates are also low to average, at around $15-$20, depending on the specific craft.

Content Production Difficulty Score: Medium

For most crafts, you should have a basic understanding of the craft if you’re going to write about it and answer questions for people. With some crafts, it’s easy enough to find writers who are hobbyists themselves.

Detailed tutorials could be a good way to attract traffic and links but are more expensive to produce.

Evergreen content score: High

While there are trends in crafts and arts, most of the information is typically evergreen.

Additional notes: This is an excellent niche for Pinterest traffic.

#10 Food & Cooking

Level of Interest: High

Almost everyone deals with food preparation to some extent, and they turn to the Internet when they have questions. My experience lies with informational topics here. I’ve never owned a recipe blog, so I can’t say much about those.

Competition: High

Food is one of those niches that attract new bloggers looking to write about their passion. And they come up with great content, attracting links and building pretty awesome “foodie” sites.

It’s not just food bloggers, though. There’s a lot of competition over informational questions about various types of food and cooking practices. Not impossible to find good queries, but it’s not easy either.

Revenue Potential: Medium

You can monetize a cooking blog with Amazon affiliate links. There are other affiliate programs for meal services that could work well (I don’t have any experience with them, though).

RPM rates are ok, at around $20-$25.

Content Production Difficulty Score: Low

I’m talking about informational posts about food and food preparation. I know that many web publishers have success with recipe posts too. Those are typically more expensive to produce.

Evergreen content score: High

While you should keep up with food trends when creating new content, there’s rarely any need to adjust old content to keep it up to date.

#11 Fitness & Sports

Level of Interest: Medium to High

Depending on the type of sub-niche you choose, interest levels may vary. For many people, their chosen sport becomes a passion, and they spend a lot of time learning about it to improve their performance.

Competition: Medium

Again, this would depend on the sport. In my experience, some popular lines of sports are very saturated. Running comes to mind. Fishing is even worse, as it happens to be a popular niche for new web publishers.

It’s always a good idea to look for topics before launching your site. Even more so in the sports and fitness niche.

Revenue Potential: Low to Medium

In my experience, display ad RPMs tend to be a bit low. As in the $10-$20 range.

Depending on your topics, you may be able to monetize using affiliate links. Some fitness aspects can be highly profitable if you know how to monetize the supplements market.

Content Production Difficulty Score: Medium

With most types of sports and fitness, you need to have some background to write about it. Or prepare for a learning curve. Fortunately, finding writers who know the niche shouldn’t be too hard.

Evergreen content score: High

New fitness routines keep popping up, but this content is generally evergreen, unless you focus on spectators’ sports news.

Some caveats

The above insights are based on my experience so far. Please always keep in mind that

YMMV – Your Mileage May Vary

If you own a site in one of those niches, I’d love to hear your insights. Are you seeing more or less competition? Are your RPMs higher or lower? Have you come up with ways to produce content more easily? Whatever you can share – I’m all ears!

One note about those RPM rates listed above (because I have a feeling someone is going to ask). They reflect rates from various ad networks. I use both Adthrive and Mediavine these days. Have used Ezoic and Monumetric in the past too.

If you’re looking to increase your RPM rates, this post might help: How to increase RPM rates

And now, it’s time for those reports!

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The January 2022 Traffic Report

Time to look at the sites that I’m tracking in Yeys reports in 2022. I launched these reports last month by sharing how they did in 2021, and more specifically, in December 2021.

You can read that report here. That post also includes more information about who I am and what I do as a web publisher. It also includes an FAQ, so please check it out first if you have any questions.

My system in a nutshell

It’s not very complicated.

  1. Find suitable topics.
  2. Create good content.
  3. Scale by outsourcing, using a good workflow.
  4. Rinse, repeat.

I blogged here about my workflow.

If you want to learn how to find suitable topics and produce the right content, check out the courses on my resources page.

Also, I added an estimate about how much these sites should be worth in about a year. Some fascinating comments came in about those evaluations.

I LOVED these comments!

Thank you to those who made them – whether you thought my estimates were too low, too high, or spot on, your input was very helpful!

I see no point in repeating these estimates every month. Unless I feel some major changes are going on, I won’t address the sites’ worth moving forward. At least for a while.

By the same token, I won’t repeat each site’s story – only the basic stats. Please refer to the initial report if you want to learn more about a site.

Site #1

  • Niche: General (the site does have a unifying theme)
  • First post published on April 2, 2021
  • Current number of published posts: 210
  • Projected number of published posts: 210 (for now – this might change in the future)
  • Monetization: Display ads + Amazon

December 2021 Traffic: 49,788 pageviews

January 2022 Traffic: 68,936 pageviews

The site’s traffic keeps on growing, as expected. Even a bit faster than expected, with an increase in traffic of more than 30%.

December 2021 Revenue: $1639.30

January 2022 Revenue: $1,546.57

Yes. Traffic is up by 30%, yet revenue is about the same. Slightly down, actually. That’s January for you. We had an RPM of $23.4, compared to $35 in December. That’s the first month of the year for you. Since the traffic is growing, I’m not worried. I’m sure this site will do very well as soon as the RPM rates go up again.

Site #2

  • Niche: Home & DIY
  • First post published on June 11, 2021
  • Current number of published posts: 227
  • Projected number of published posts: 228 (just one more post in the content plan…)
  • Monetization: Amazon & display ads

Traffic in December 2021: 12,548 pageviews

January 2022 Traffic: 24,789 pageviews

Yup, traffic just about doubled. That’s typical for a site of this age and size. I’m pleased with the progress.

Revenue in December 2021: $77.48

Revenue in January 2022: $379.69

We added display ads to this site in January, which explains the increase in revenue. The site made around $112 of the $380 from Amazon. The rest was display ads (for half a month).

Site #3

  • Niche: Pets
  • First post published on May 18, 2021
  • Current number of published posts: 119
  • Projected number of published posts: 119
  • Monetization: Amazon

Traffic in December 2021: 6,208 pageviews

Traffic in January 2022: 11,997 pageviews

Steady as she goes. And more slowly than the other sites because the site has fewer posts.

Revenue in December 2021: $11.66

Revenue in January 2022: $45.95

Site #4

  • Niche: Home & DIY
  • First post published on August 23, 2021
  • Current number of published posts: 206
  • Projected number of published posts: 216
  • Monetization: Amazon

Traffic in December 2021: 2,044 pageviews

Traffic in January 2022: 2,736 pageviews

The site is still deep in the sandbox. We added 70 posts in January, and I expect we’ll start seeing the growth soon. We plan on publishing an additional ten posts to this site.

No revenue yet.

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As always, please let me know what you think. I’m super interested in hearing what others think about my list of niches.

What are your favorite niches for 2022, and why? I’d love to find new areas and learn about how others are doing with them. Leave me a comment, and let’s engage in discussion!

15 Comments

  1. Great update, Anne! Nice to see that you’re keeping things fresh by adding new sites to your portfolio. It’ll be interesting to follow along and see which sites really pop in terms of their success. I’d imagine most or all of them will do very well because you more or less have this all down to an art at this stage.

    • Thanks, Keith! I don’t like to get complacent though. You just never know what can happen, but yeah, I’m optimistic about these new sites.

  2. I love articles about updates. I would be interesting to see a graph per month for traffic and content, to get an idea about how much posts has a site before it starts growing and the maturity of the content.
    I am curious about what to expect when you start writing in a new site.

    • Hi Martin,
      That would be an interesting chart to look at. I think it’s too early to see the trends two months into the year, but it’s something I’ll try and create at some point. Maybe am mid-year chart, or one for the end of the year.

  3. Hi Anne
    (love your blog and am so glad you are posting more regularly again).

    As someone who targets so many different keywords a month with your ever-expanding monthly output, what are your criteria for keyword selection and what methods do you use to assess competitiveness and potential search volume?

    For example:
    Do you use tools (paid or free, e.g ahrefs or google trends)?
    Do you manually search every primary keyword phrase for a post in Google and analyse it?
    Do you look for a certain number of minimum user-generated posts (forums, Reddit etc).
    What other criteria make a post one to go with or one to leave?

    Do you ever select a niche because you see another site doing well and want to compete in that space or do you always look for niches and keywords that no one else, in particular, is currently targeting?

    (Hope that’s not too many questions).

    • Hi Adam,

      Keyword selection is a huge topic. Huge. It’s probably the most important thing you can go wrong with too. I won’t reveal all of my techniques – I doubt anyone does. But I can share these insights –
      1. I rarely use tools. Have tried them all and while they’re not necessarily bad, they weren’t any better than my regular tool-less approach. That approach is basically the alphabet soup. It’s described in most courses, including the Fat Stacks course and the Passive Income Geek. Both of which I’ve tried and am happy to recommend.
      2. I think experience does teach you a lot. It provides you with intuition about what may work and what won’t. It’s far from perfect, but you can improve over time.
      3. You won’t win all of your queries. Most of the topics I choose end up being anywhere between “meh” and total duds. It’s a numbers game, and you just need to accept that. It can still be very profitable. I hope this helps, sorry for not going into more detail. I think for that kind of level of detail, buying a course might be the right approach.

      For your last question, no. I have never selected a niche by looking at other sites. I don’t trust the numbers shown by the public tools enough, and I don’t really see the point in doing anything based on a single site that may be different in many ways anyway.

  4. Hi Anne,
    Thanks for all the great info and inspiration.
    Quick question:
    What hosting do you use for all your websites?
    I’m currently with Bluehost, but I’m looking into other options.

    Thanks for your time

    • Hi JC,
      I currently host on Digital Ocean. They’re very cheap, robust and fast, but they require the ability to admin a server. They don’t even offer Cpanel, let alone support for anything that isn’t a malfunction on their end. That’s why I also hire a server admin.
      The server costs me about $150 a month, and that’s really cheap for serving more than two million pageviews a month. The server admin costs an additional $600 a month. I also pay another $150 for backups, managed by the same server admin.

  5. Hi Anne,
    Thanks for the reply. I have purchased the Fat Stacks bundle (I purposely paid via your link from a new browser, I hope it counted for commission although it knew from my email I had previously looked at his free course).
    I wondered if you did things a little different considering you do at such a scale and have your sights set even higher for more monthly posts. It’s amazing to me how you manage it and just wondered how you made your decisions to target a post or not so quickly.
    Thanks again.

    • Thanks for using my link, Adam! Much appreciated (though I think I didn’t get the credit, probably because Teachable recognized you from that email – fair enough!)
      I do have my sights set even higher. We are striving to get to 1200 posts per month by the end of 2022. The way I see it, it’s a numbers game. At some point, I have to use my intuition, and wasting too much time on these decisions ends up costing more than making mistakes. Not all posts will succeed – we just need enough of them to do well.

  6. Hi Anne,
    Great post as always! I’m curious since you’re outsourcing all your content, how do you find writers that can actually do a good job at their original research? For example, they don’t just look at other blogs or YouTube videos and just rewrite them in their own words, but actually aggregate data or contact businesses/ experts for the post. I figured that might be too much to ask for a writer, but if it’s possible what’s the best way to find those writers?

    • Thank you, Jimmy! I don’t think our writers contact experts for the post. We do ask them to reference the claims made in a post and teach them to use authoritative sources and not yet another blog post. And our editors follow up on the links to make sure that they did that. So, no need to find any special writers – just to instruct them in what we need. I hope that helps!

  7. Thanks for the reply, Anne! Just wondering, is site 1 from your report in the general knowledge niche you mentioned in this post? If so, according to the report, the site in this niche has a much higher ad rate than the $10-$15 RPM suggested in the list. How did you get it to $23~$35 RPM?

    • Hi Jimmy,
      That’s a fantastic question. There is a theme to the site, and within that theme, I try to focus on topics that are “useful” and are more than just “curiosity”. For example, if the topic were aviation (it’s not), the topics would be more in line of “do american airlines flight credits expire” rather than “can an airplane fly over mount everest”. That’s why the RPM is higher. The first type of topics gets the higher RPM.

  8. Hi Anne,

    Thank you for sharing these insights.

    I’m curious what your thoughts are on language learning websites. As someone who is learning French, I’ve been highly immersed in content and curious about how it does as a niche site.

    A concern I have is finding multilingual writers who could teach components of the language. However, just doing a quick search on Fiverr, I have noticed there are many out there.

    Thanks again!

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