Astrophsx

Before he sold out? I remember reading an interview somewhere with Brian Kelly that his whole plan was to build the blog like a start up and sell it. When he came into the game it was due to a business opprotunity and not because of his passion of miles and points. He saw an untapped market.

I would say that I miss what Frugal Travel Guy offered more than anything. Five or six years ago he was one of the first that would daily post and sometimes post more than once. Each post usually had something very useful, but that was a different time. I suggested the idea of faces of flyertalk where he interviewed the familiar names you'd always see active on flyertalk. It was an entirely different community.

Even if Brian Kelly wanted to have a blog similar to how it was 5 years ago he couldn't. A majority of great tips and tricks that remain are somewhat sketchy and some may say not ethical. He'd lose his deals with Chase and Starwood. Not to mention kill deals quickly because the amount of traffic he receives.

It's too bad there aren't better trip reports for people who live off of normal budgets. TPG is the type of website that could offer these. When he details each city it is pretty much a copy and paste job of what is available. No creativity put into it.

bthotugigem05

Agree with Astrophsx above, I don't think Brian has ever shied away from his goal being an eventual acquisition.

Miles and points bloggers are a dime a dozen now but there's still a little money to be made. If we all started back when the titans first got going it would've been a heck of a lot easier though, way more to write about back then and card issuers were much more lax with referral links (not to minimize the sheer amount of work they put in). But if a crap blog like mine can get the viewership it does then almost anyone can do it. Pretty much no barrier to entry and small bits of internet fame are tantalizing for many people.

I started my blog to tell the story of a trip to Israel because I got frustrated when I got back and people would ask in passing "Hey how was the trip?" and I'd say "it was good" out of habit. I wanted to tell the full story so people could feel what it was like.

The thing is, though, you tend to run out of those types of trip reports pretty quickly unless you do it full-time, which I don't. So that's where a lot of blogs fail: what do you do when you're done with your good trip reports and your mega redemptions? Honestly I still don't think I've done a good job of answering that question but for some reason I've kept writing. Four years in and I've learned a lot about what not to do and have a long list of improvements I want to make.

Ultimately though I want to get back to writing like I used to. Writing for a blog is different than writing for a newspaper, you're encouraged to use more colloquial language that's easier to read and do things like 2-3 sentence paragraphs to keep people moving through your page. Long-form trip report writing is more difficult and it's hard to find the motivation to do it when those kinds of posts aren't viewed as much as the short sweet ones.

Basically it's tough to resist the urge to write for what you know will get the most hits instead of what you want to write.

Canarsie

There is no need for self-deprecation, as your weblog is one of the better ones out there.

84fiero

Some folks are good at finding a niche, figuring out how to bring it to the point of being a good buyout prospect, and then selling for a nice sum. Sometimes wish I had that skill You're right better trip reports would serve the site well compared to the phone-it-in posts they use now.

I agree about the old FTG site years ago. I was a regular daily reader and gained a lot from it. Rick was active here as well at the time and seemed to put a lot of care and feeding with the blog too. It wasn't slick or polished but it worked well for me at the time. The post-IB-buyout FTG totally went off the rails.

+1

bthotugigem05

Thanks, yall are very kind.

gpapadop

For the record, TPG sold out years ago and never disclosed it until it was dug up by some sharp hobbyists years later.

I think Andy makes some great observations about blogging in general.

sbm12

No commentary on the TPG holiday party? I'm surprised.

gpapadop

I have made a comment about TPG's party in the last two days in my blog...

It was inspiring to think how many chase credit cards were sold to pay for it

CMK10

3 of you last 4 articles about are about Chase so aren't you calling the kettle black a little bit?

84fiero

For my list to Santa, I'm asking for him to score me an invite to next year's TPG holiday party

gpapadop

My site curates the Buzz in this space so it is ALMOST never about a single topic. My point was that I DID make a reference to the TPG party as I keep seeing on Facebook and Twitter many giving thanks to him for inviting them to it.

I also hope to get a cc click away from him so someone can claim silver about that this month so I can keep them...because, you know, Amazon has dried up, thanks JetBlue

Raffles

"Our clean new logo replaces the airplane icon with an arrow, which suggests forward motion — and indicates we’re a travel lifestyle brand that goes beyond aviation."

So there!

Can't knock the numbers though:

"we now get 3.3 million unique visitors a month. And in the past 12 months, there have been 100 million visits, and 25 million unique visitors have come to the site."

That makes it 15x bigger than me in terms of monthly uniques and 12x bigger in terms of annual uniques.

ingy

I appreciate the support and comments of Astrophx and 84Fiero. Although I had hoped initially to monetize the blog, (I was thinking the equivalent of maybe another Social Security check per month) it was about the passion for the hobby.

When I brought cc links to the travel hacking hobby (DansDeals did them first in his more general blog) I was stunned at the support and income generated. It was way beyond my wildest imagination and I don't blame anyone for jumping on that bandwagon that had the courage to do so.

Monetary successes range from those that can't reach 10 applications per month and lose their creditcards.com links to Brian's huge success story.

And on the content side we've lost most of our good deals and now have way too many bloggers covering way too little news. I'm saddened to see blog posts about earning 5 extra stars at Starbucks as a headline. But I still hit the card signups as hard as possible. That has always been where the big scores are.

kokonutz

With all the throttling going on that's about as hard a feather these days...

But it sure was fun strip-mining the land until it was all gone!

gpapadop

Yawn