Originally Posted by
skunker
You sure about that?
Chase Sapphire Preferred and Chase Miles Plus Explorer are all over Boarding Area. Just look at the wiki of this thread:
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/exter...rd-offers.html
And the Hyatt card may not have affiliate links now but when it came out, everyone and their mother was pushing it.
Chase is smart. Why would they need affiliate links for the small-fry bloggers? They know that if they hit a couple of the leading bloggers, the rest will follow. FTG, The Points Guy, OMaaT, GTL have large and loyal followings, and I suspect that those four blogs (maybe along with MMS) get the vast majority of income off affiliate links. A lot of the other blogs will end up giving free publicity to Chase and other cards as a result of a "me-too" philosophy.
Think about it for a moment. What's the received wisdom on the best hotel chains? SPG and Hyatt. Marriott, IHG, Hilton all get clobbered, just as DL and Southwest do for flights. Just as some at FT like to accuse the leading bloggers of just lifting stuff off FT (maybe true some, not true to the extent alleged), the smaller bloggers are likely to parrot the received wisdom.
Thus, Chase and other travel companies that want to advertise are smart enough to figure out which blogs they need to seed. The rest, with some exceptions, such as
sbm12, will follow.
As a consumer of Seth's work, I think he writes about what he wants to--and he mostly doesn't find credit card stuff interesting enough to write about. Because he has an interesting, inquiring mind, a lot of what he wants to write about is interesting to lots of folks. On the other hand, a lot of other blogs, written by folks who jumped into the pool long after the initial pioneers, write about credit cards because that's what the leading blogs are writing about--in other words, they really don't bring an interesting, unique perspective to the work. And the leading blogs are writing about credit cards because the banks make it well worth their while to do so.
The irony is that I suspect, for a significant subset of readers,
sbm12's opinion about the best credit cards would carry a lot of weight--mostly because his blog is almost totally not about such things and because, even if you don't always agree with his analysis, he brings some form of independent analysis to his work. For similar reasons, I think Ric at Loyalty Traveler has a good following, though not as big as the most popular blogs, because he doesn't ignore the outlying hotel programs, like Choice, Best Western, and Wyndham.