Bloggers need content, that’s the unfortunate bottom line. If Gary only posts “ten reasons I love the AA platinum card” posts, nobody would read. He needs content to go in between them, and the game has changed. Actual helpful content gets more and more rare. Back when you could walk into an Office Depot and buy $5k in vanilla reloads, it was pretty easy to be a blogger. Now, a free $100 at SoFi is the deal of the year. Maybe you get lucky and Iberia gives away 90,000 avios and you get five posts about it. But it is lean these days.

Gary got not one but two posts from revealing the WN trick. First, the reveal itself and then a blog about people being pissed.

He’s good at stuff like that. But unless the economy declines and loyalty programs need to prime the pump again, points and travel blogs are going to continue the slow gradual decline of click bait appeals to political angst, stories with race angles that get people worked up, and fluff. They will intersperse it with credit card offers and trick reveals, and then inflame passions to cannibalize their comments for more content, waiting in hope for another Dr. Dao incident, so they can relax for a few weeks and let the blog basically write itself with low hanging fruit.

VTW is not alone in this game. He is just fairly good at it.