Note to Mods: Please don't move this thread into the "What is the most useful FF blog" thread as this thread has nothing to do with that, in fact it's quite the opposite.

Recently it seems that the bloggers have been really ruining deals for us FTers. Tricks/deals that some of us may have known about and kept on the downlow (sometimes for years) somehow get on the radar of a blogger who then disects it and spoonfeeds it to their blog readers step by step. It then gets hat-tipped to death by about 5-10 other copycat bloggers and all of a sudden the deal/trick/loophole dies very quickly due to overexposure. There are numerous examples of this such as Amex Bump The Bonus, free VS Gold status upgrade, Brazil fuel surcharge loophole, TYPs, certain creative award routing tricks, Amex prepaid 5% off everything (dying soon at an Office Depot near you), credit card churning, Citi bank acct funding, SpaFinder certs, FTD 1500 fixed miles + 30 miles/$ spent, and plenty of others (including the Presidential Coins deal by some idiot who supposedly posted every singe step in the process, documented it with pictures, then got kicks by being interviewed about it by several large newspapers). Not to mention the Discover America promo. It used to be fairly easy to get most of those auctions. Now that bloggers highlight every single decent deal on there (which again then gets hat-tipped to death by 5 other bloggers), it is almost impossible to get in on any of the decent deals. In years past the Choice and Hertz deals would be available for days if not weeks. This year they are gone instantly, thanks in a large part by all the bloggers pumping them IMHO. And worse, for the most part the bloggers mostly just mine all their info from FT then post it in a concise easy to (ab)use format. All this does is take away from us oldtime FTers who have spent considerable time reading, learning, sharing tips/tricks, etc over the past decade. The bloggers ruin it by spoonfeeding all of our hardearned info to lazy people who can't be bothered to take the time to browse through FT on their own to find deals. Now I'm sure there will be plenty of FTers with under 100 posts who will come out to flame me and defend these bloggers as doing a "needed service". However for the rest of us who are mad about losing out on deals to the lazy blog leeches, maybe we should try to do something about it, preferably hitting bloggers where it hurts (ie, credit card referral signup links).

We FTers are a smart group of people, can't we collectively figure out a way to stop the CC referral money from going into the bloggers pockets, and instead go back into our own pockets? Say the average CC referral kickback is $100 per card. I'm sure with all the CC pumping the bloggers do and all the quarterly App-O-Ramas FTers are doing these days, that collectively the bloggers are easily referring over 10k FTers a year. That's $1M+ that these bloggers are getting annually. There must be a way to cut them out of the affiliate referral kickback loop, and keep this money for ourselves. Maybe somebody could start a business that is a shell blog that people sign up for CC's thru. They could kick back maybe 50-75% of the referral proceeds (after taxes & expenses of course). If direct cash kickbacks aren't allowed, maybe that person could kickback some type of cash equivalent like Amex pts or Chase UR pts or miles, etc. Any thoughts? And more importantly than getting our CC referral money back, it would hopefully stop this huge proliferation of bloggers that have no discretion regarding what they post, nor any cares about what deals they will ruin. It currently seems like one giant race to the bottom and all the bloggers seem to care about is lining their pockets. It started with MMS exposing anything and everything he could, and it seems like he has dragged all the other bloggers down to his level which has forced them (?) to expose deals too in order to keep/gain readers (and all those reader's CC applications). I don't like the direction these blogs are going, and if anybody here has any ideas regarding how to salvage it, please post your ideas here.