ma91pmh

I am not a big fan of referal credits period. I am fairly certain that some of these bloggers pull in six figures in promotional credits and you can't expect rationale advice from anyone in that situation

But it is kind of hard to take criticism seriously from someone who's every post on here includes a referal link for THEIR BigCrumbs and MrRebates accounts. I think that is the most blatantly two-faced thing I have ever seen.

ma91pmh

Seth I am very glad that you plan to stay away from this game. Your blog has crept up towards the top of my list because it is actually interesting information about interesting trips and insightful commentary on the airline business.

I know exactly what you mean about others going over a cliff. I guess Gary Leff needs the money as his once excellent blog has gone down the pan since he started taking cc money. The worst was a recent blog post which simply listed all the blog posts he had made about credit cards in the past month or two. How insightful!!! A pimp blog post to summarise other pimp posts. Really very sad for someone who had such a high standard previously

sbm12

I'd say that this observation is accurate, though I am definitely not one of them.

I can understand doing the "travel blogging" thing as a business and when doing that, well, you have to make money. At some point the readers have to decide if they like that style or not. That said, there is a lot of traffic to the blogs (and especially the CC referral posts) that doesn't come from loyal readers but rather through search engines. The SEO skills of the folks big into the CC referrals have also improved significantly of late, so it is clear they recognize this and are working towards getting higher on those search results.

For me, the "business" I'm running has a publicity arm which is the blog. I see it more as a cost center than a profit center. I do make a couple bucks every month off the ads placed on it by the folks at Boarding Area but I'm nowhere close to quitting my day job (as much as I really have one) yet.

jcmitchell21

I know which one you are referring. I opened his blog, looked for three seconds, then closed it back out.

mnscout

Honestly, I don't see how making a few bucks from sponsors and advertisers make bloggers bad guys. They provide free but extremely valuable service to their readers investing a lot of time and expertise into that "hobby". Also, with an abundance of travel blogs competing with each other, I would say it's pretty hard to consistently pull a fast one without risking to lose considerable part of your readership - in which case your value for advertisers will significantly decrease. I enjoy reading blogs, and I feel that smart bloggers make sure to keep a fair balance between taking care of their audience and taking care of the needs of advertisers. I think that market itself will weed out the bloggers who don't.

A point about credit cards. Come on, every travel blogger if they are worth anything at all must talk about credit card bonuses. It's the single most lucrative way to get a bunch of miles and points for next to nothing! Now, my position about it is simple - placing CC banners on your sites is a fair game, even if they are not the best offers available. Personally promoting those mediocre offers in your blogs (when you know there is a better offer available) is dishonest, and yes there are guys out there like this. But as a grownup, I can make a choice either not to patronize their "establishments" or take whatever they're preaching with a grain of salt. And like I said, market will take care of them sooner or later, anyway.

Anyhow, I'm not very original and my 5 favorite blogs that I read daily are (in no particular order):

The View from the Wings
Frugal Travel Guy
The Points Guy
Online Travel Review
Loyalty Traveler

I also enjoy Million Mile Secrets, Noob Traveler and One Mile at a Time. I recently discovered the Man of Thousand Places blog and really liked the lowdown and updates on his recent App-O-Rama and spreadsheet templates for keeping tracks on things. Very useful!

FWIW.

dbh1

I wish I was one of them I would agree, there is a huge range as to what bloggers earn and to what specific cards pay. Some may earn six figures (not me, unfortunately) and others may just cover their costs. I make a small profit (and small by a middle class, not Mitt Romney's, definition) but certainly not enough to become my full time job. Like many other travel bloggers that have primary careers, our reputation for integrity is orders of magnitude more important than anything we could earn from our websites. I like to think that my peers are rationale and consider the big picture when it comes to ones reputation, though some may not.

As to card payouts, they actually vary widely. The high may be around a few hundred dollars (though each site cuts their own deal). The "mode" is certainly $0, and on my site, the median may be $0 as well (though I am not sure about that). My test for honesty is looking for recommendations of cards that pay $0 or offers that pay $0 to the blogger. Some hints (to the best of my knowledge):
- The 50k (formerly 75k) Citi AAdvantage offers currently don't pay. Seeing a recommendation for a 30k AAdvantage offer would be a sign to run.
- The 50k Chase Southwest offers don't seem to pay right now, but used to. A 25k Southwest offer is probably a bad sign (though I do still tell my readers about it in an alternative methodology).
- The 80k Chase Hyatt Priority Club doesn't seem to pay
- The 35k Hawaiian Cards won't pay most bloggers (including me), but maybe some sites have cut a deal with BofA

Also look for sites that look like they are just cutting and pasting fake reviews from the credit card companies. They may simply be inserting the issuer's javascript advertisement onto their page. After you have seen a few of these, they start looking very familiar. Personally, I'll get lazy and use the issuer's javascript since I know they will keep it updated, but I always include it under a header that reads something like "details and links from the issuer". For example, if you go on my homepage and click "More Info" next to the Chase Sapphire Card (my favorite bonus), you will see a shaded area under my writing. That area is written by the issuer's agent. If you hit the "More Details" button, you can actually see their biased review, but I hope I have hit my readers over the head enough by that point that they realize that isn't my writing. Even some of the blogs that posters in this thread love the most use a lot of these javascript placements (and often don't make it clear who is writing them). @mnscout: unfortunately, the market isn't perfect.

As to @Astrophsx comment about why the credit card companies pay for seemingly non-profitable customers? That is a great question and I don't know the answer, but I hope they keep doing it. Actually, my guess is that even though they probably lose money on those readers that follow our directions, they get a lot of additional exposure by having our sites. We also talk about certain cards that are interesting to our readers that they don't lose them money. For example, when I don't have any minimum spends to hit and the purchase won't generate a category bonus on another card, I default back to my Starwood Amex for good old fashion 1x point value). They may also count on some of our readers not following our directions properly. For example, when interest rates were high (well before I had a blog), I was leveraging 0% offers and investing them into treasuries. If I was doing that today, I would tell people how to do it, but some moron would probably double margin Greek Bonds or buy a new wardrobe and the credit card company would be making megabucks on them for years.

Oh, and before the crowd picks apart my blog too harshly (constructive criticism is very welcome), please note that experience FTers are not my target audience. My goal is to parse all of this great knowledge available on the internet for novice and time-limited people that would like to stretch their travel budgets (to some of your chagrins, I assume).

hobo13

Here's a thought:

Rather than discuss each of these blogs in this mega-thread where it is impossible to find anything, I'd propose that FT create a discussion thread for each blog. Sort of like the FT blog companion.

This would do a couple of things:

1. Allow us to comment FREELY AND WITHOUT MODERATION on all the popular blogs
2. Keep eyeballs on FT, rather than let the viewership drift to the blogs

Sounds like a win-win for the FT community and Internet Brands, and it might actually force some accountability onto the bloggers.

Paging kokunutz! (This seems like just the type of radical proposal he would get behind!)

dracs

is it possible that bloggers can be partner in crime with credit card companies?

I always find amazing when bloggers post every year/6 months churn cycles openly and do it on regular basis. Why these credit card companies allow them to continue? Companies can easily found who they are.

Common people gets blocked from companies but never heard bloggers blacklisted from some card companies?

Is that because they are tied with these card companies through some affiliate programs and are luring people towards the credit cards so credit card companies want these guys to promote this sort of stuff

So some may churn and many may become slaves of cards?

Any body from banking or worldly knowledge has insight?

Dracs

jblankoh

Hi - I write Online Travel Review (I VERY much appreciate the couple of mentions I've gotten in this thread - thanks to all...) and I just thought I'd weigh in a bit on the comments about affiliate links.

Those of us who have been writing blogs for a while (OTR has been around for 8+ years, View from the Wing has been around a similar amount, One Mile at a Time for a bunch, etc) know how much work it is to write 4-5 times a week (or more). We do it because we love the topic, and because the feedback we get from readers (both positive and negative - I post all non-spam comments on my site) is fantastic. But let's be honest -- there are lots of mornings where I get up at 615 to do some writing where I wish I could crawl back into bed (well, I certainly could crawl back into bed, I just choose not to) -- but I feel like I've developed a relationship with my readers, and I try to offer something on the site just about every day.

It takes a while to find your voice when you write every day. I used to write a lot more about arcane airline stuff, and goofy airline stories. I think there used to be more goofy airline stories (my all-time favorite: Farts Lead to Flight Diversion), and Brett at Crankyflier has done an amazing job writing about airline operations so I've ceded some of that stuff to him.

I've written more about credit cards in the past year because it's a major change in how people earn frequent flyer miles (at least outside of the hardcore churn community, who was getting 300,000 bonus miles each year from cards?). With all the credit card bonuses out there, you can essentially print frequent flyer miles for yourself. It's really insane. You need 50,000 miles for a trip to Europe? No sweat - 1 card, 1 month of spend. Boom. That's nuts when you think about it. And if you write about airlines (as I do), it's hard to ignore that piece of it.

Yes, I earn affiliate bounties on some signups. But I've spent 8 years building readership and I would be insane to jeopardize that for a credit card bounty (it shouldn't be a secret -- card bounties range from $30 or so on the low end to upwards of $300 on the high end. I don't see any reason for people not to know that). I've tried to write every time about what cards I get paid for and which I don't, but to be honest, it feels clunky and weird to write it every single time. In short: I get paid for some Chase and Amex cards, I don't get paid for anything else.

But I know I have focused on writing about cards I don't get paid for -- I've written a ton about the Hawaiian Airlines cards recently; I wrote this week about the Ritz Carlton credit card; I've written about the AA cards a bunch and about the 70k mile Marriott card, as well as the 50k Southwest card, all in the past couple of weeks. I don't get paid for any of that, but they're all great deals. Why wouldn't I mention them?

I've alluded on OTR to other bloggers writing incessantly about the Sapphire card. We're well-compensated for that card, but about 4 months ago I decided I'd written all I could write about it, and I've since stopped (well, I'll mention it in posts where it makes sense, but I'm not doing any of the "hey, look at how great the Sapphire card" is stuff.)

I've spoken with a few fellow bloggers, and I know they're thinking about the balance between credit card posts and non-credit card posts. Money aside, I think the reason we're seeing more credit card writing is because people want to know about it. We see very, very little about frequent flyer tricks anymore, likely because people have learned so much about it. The credit card world is still new to many, many people. I think (legit) bloggers are writing about it because their readers want it. Trust me, all of us check out visitors stats (yes, I'm vain), and I think most of us have seen an increase in visitation since we've written more about credit cards.

That said, I hear what several of you are saying, and I'm not going to disagree that for some, the allure of the cards is strong (ie, if blogging is your full-time job you may have some incentive to try to get paid). But I also know that the readers will come if you write good advice with an interesting voice. It's up to the readers to decide if a blogger has that.

I also understand the frustration with some bloggers who post lesser deals (or at least ads pushing lesser deals) even though there are better offers out there. My response: stop reading them. If you can't trust their judgment on pushing ads for cards that do not include the best offers, then don't read them - that's what I've done.

But those of us who have read the good blogs for a while know that we've learned a ton from them, and have certainly benefited from the offers they've posted. If you feel that any of us have written something that feels compromised because of an affiliate payout, let us know (or certainly let me know - PM me here or email me at jared (at) onlinetravelreview.com.)

If you guys have questions about how the affiliate thing works, I'm happy to answer (again, email, PM or just respond to this thread) -- this shouldn't be a mystery.

Thanks for reading

mnscout

Well, I might have "worldly" insight: that suggestion is plain silly (to avoid even more unpleasant words).

dracs

Hmmm...

On thoughtful note: What is the charm for credit card company? Don't give me..." may be he will spend more sometime..."

Dracs

mnscout

Well, since corporations are not really people (no matter what they tell you) we don't always know their motivation. A few things come to mind, however.

1. Banks compete viciously with each other.
2. They don't normally micromanage. Of, course, they try to target different markets in different ways, that's why you almost never see their best sign-up offers on TV.
3. They might need to get some boost in order to look good to shareholders at certain times of the year. That means attracting more clients even if getting them costs an arm and a leg.
4. They DO hope you'll spend more. Most people are not like us. Also most people never cancel their cards just before that annual fee hits.

Those are just some reasons I can think of. I might be close or completely off, but what I do know for a fact is that you don't have to be a blogger - and most people are not - in order to be able to churn like crazy.

ChaseTheMiles

I received an email from The Frugal Travel Guy that his site has been purchased by the Internet Brands. Congrats to him. However, I also immediately unsubscribed ftom his site.

I don't recall how I became his subscriber other than once I paid the guy to reserve for one of those DOs. I ended up not going but he started including me on his email list. It's an okay site and as long as it was his personal blog, I did not mind receiving an occasional email. Now that it's purchased by a big outfit, I prefer not to have my personal info being leaked out more.

runfit

You realize Internet Brands owns Flyertalk, right?

hobo13

And arguably has done nothing to improve it since they acquired it.