oliver2002

A travel blog I used to follow just gave up: https://thetravelhack.com/blog/im-qu...avel-blogging/

Interesting quote:

Raffles

Perhaps more interesting is that the article has zero comments so far. It makes you wonder about what sort of real audience she had and why brands were paying her so much to go on press trips that 'she was making £10,000 per month in a bad month, working two days per week' to quote an article from a couple of years ago.

oliver2002

The Travel Hack was a pretty professional outfit, I recall posting her media kit some years ago to illustrate what earnings there are by just travel blogging (with out CC shilling). I think she was also a part of a pyramid scheme convincing people to blog about travel and taking a cut of their earnings...

gpapadop

I remember looking at this blog to see if it is worthy following in my Feedly blogs. Maybe the word "Hack" attracted me to it in the first place. I took a look, I saw the "endless stream of press trips" and never looked back at it. I actually never heard of it until you brought it up.

Raffles

Here's a quick numbers summary - https://thetravelhack.com/media-pack/ - 250,000 page views per month. So about 15% of what we do and to a far lower income demographic.

Still ZERO comments and it is almost 5 hours since my original post mentioning this. If a tree falls in the forest etc .....

Raffles

Finally, here's a job title which doesn't sugar coat the reality of working for a commercialised points blog!

You too can spend all day writing content which virtually nobody is going to read, but will simply exist in a database to lure in people searching for certain Google phrases.

oliver2002

Curious to see how the high interest rate environment will pan out in the CC shilling business. Also Amex seems to have lost interest in the affiliate marketing. One data point: the 150k platinum offer is absent from the blogs but is pushed thru direct marketing instead.

GUWonder

The US bank card issuers seem to be pushing a lot of 0% APR and other reduced rate promotional offers, but those are being done more than usual so as to try to better lock in existing customers. And selling more products to existing customers is part of the strategy for the big card issuers.

Amex, for example, seems to be of the mind that there will be no major recession hit to its US card business. Perhaps that is part of why it also seems to be of the mind that it can increasingly have its products sold without as much reliance on commercial party referrals in the US market and just let the SUBs sell themselves and to further cross-sell to its existing Amex base without as much external marketing need.

GUWonder

That’s revenue not income, right?

Headforpoints pulls in under or over £5M per year?

Your site has more value to me. But I’m not in the market to buy.

Raffles

Under :-)

But our cost base is teeny tiny ....!

GUWonder

It would be fascinating to have a window into how the operating costs per revenue unit vary between the sites. TPG seems much more expense-laden than OMAAT, VFTW, HfP, Dansdeals, FrequentMiler and LoyaltyLobby. But having a profligate founder can have consequences for quite some time and then some, so not surprised if TPG would turn out to have worse margins despite the massive revenue for the space.

If the US gets into regulating down transaction fees on credit/charge cards like was done for US debit card transactions, the income off the US sites in the space are going to drop. OMAAT and the other US ones should probably look to HfP and LL for how the future may work or not work for them when the bank card referral money is no longer what they’ve gotten used to getting from the bank card relationships.

gpapadop

I can fully disclose that my site has earned WAY under $5 Million since 2012...combined. Many times over actually!

Anyway, typing this from the Berlin Waldorf Astoria...very underwhelming stay here, maybe my expectations were too high.

Oh, if the landscape in the US of the banks paying bloggers to sell plastic ever changes, 99% of all the blogs in the miles & points world will cease existing. But mine won't, fwiw

oliver2002

The attempt to regulate transaction fees in the US is set to crash and burn. Elliott wrote a nice 'what if' article some time ago:

The miles & points blogs all live off the fact that there is affiliate revenue and card referrals. The ad revenue perhaps pays the bills... some titans have cashed out (TPG) or invested the earnings into nice real estate (VFTW). Others don't seem to have done that.

GUWonder

I think I mentioned elsewhere that the chances of this happening under the President of/from Delaware with the US Congress situation was wishful thinking. It’s also a conveniently raised scarecrow for VFTW.

Adam1222

Elliott regularly professes expertise about laws that he does not understand.
No one with actual knowledge of the CFPB or even a passing familiarity of the regulatory process would ever profess to be "certain" of any future regulation.
The irony is that in his self-anointed role as consumer advocate and defender, some of his posts can be misleading to consumers in their "certainty".