Checked back in... Nothing has improved....

Back to ignoring BA again....

SAD!
FAKE NEWS!

What a refreshing change of pace!

So far, I'm impressed.

http://pointmetotheplane.boardingare...193.1473288486

Indeed! I liked these two tidbits:

I think his comment on people that can't spell and those that use too many exclamation marks.

Wonderful!

I agree it sounds refreshing, it just means that we probably won't hear from that writer that often. Unless you're Ben you probably don't travel enough to focus exclusively on trip reports (believe me I've tried) and will need to supplement viewership with deal posts and/or credit card posts. I don't post about cards on my blog but I do throw out a deal post when I find great deals and I've found those posts do much better than the trip reports which take hours to edit photos for and write.

We gotta face that the points and miles blog communities primarily pay on pageviews/sessions if you don't want to get into credit card affiliate links. Eventually you'll most likely start chasing pageviews simply from an effort standpoint, especially when there's blood in the water like the recent United and AA fiascos.

Not saying it's right, just saying it's the way it is. I know that's not as romantic as "I just love helping people find out how to be travel hackers and don't care about the money" but when I have to shell out $600 for legal fees to protect my site that money needs to come from somewhere. I don't get rich from my blog by any means (I'd make much much more money shilling credit cards) but it feels good writing good content or a post about a deal that gets thousands of hits and sends a few shekels my way to make up for the hours I spend (after working 50-60 hours/week at my regular job).

I know it sucks seeing low effort posts (or, as I call them "extended tweets") but sometimes you're at the end of your content rope and just need to get something out there to remind your readers that you're still around.

I'm a fan already. He earned a bookmark on my PC with that introduction, so hopefully he keeps true to his words.

I'm perfectly happy not hearing from a blogger that often if they only write when there's something of true interest/value. Quality over quantity. Anyway it appears Stephen is just a contributor so I'm guessing they don't necessarily intend for him to be the main force driving the blog's posts.

it's a bit hard to get excited about one occasional contributor to a blog who criticised the model of the blog and the entire group of blogs in one post. I'd be surprised if we see meaningful criticism of the deceptive posts on other parts of the blog moving forward.

Garbage posts only remind readers not to waste time reading posts from a "low effort" blogger

Given that most of the garbage posts come from bloggers who post 5-7 times a day, that is insane.

Not talking about the 5-7x/day bloggers, the other 95% who are mostly single-author points and miles blogs.

Are those the ones making tons of money off affiliate links? Who else needs a lot of pages and page views?

I don't buy that "putting out crappy content" is better than not putting out content at all. There are many blogs I've deleted from my RSS feed reader for putting out a lot of garbage. I haven't deleted any that may have a few days or weeks (or even a few months) between posts.

Consistently good quality posts is a good way to "remind readers you exist."

Fully agree with this.

Something resembling pure revulsion means I simply refuse to ever open the pages of the vast majority of these guys.

By the way, is it just me? Or does there seem to be a huge amount of non-english content all of the sudden? I remember there used to be some, but it looks like there's lots more now.

And I'm certainly not complaining! In fact, I'm a big supporter of ANYTHING that is different, and since my non-english language skills encompass Spanish and any of the Arabic words the Army taught me, I can't read these and will just assume they have excellent content! (I'm an optimist!)

I'm curious what the advantage is of having blogs in multiple languages together on the same front page like that. Sure there are plenty of bi-/multi-lingual people but it's become a somewhat eclectic and random mix that shows up on the BA front page...seems hard to imagine the cross-over population would be that large, reliable, or predictable to be of much utility to anyone the way it currently shows up.

Well I think it's just additional revenue for Randy.

We're well past the point where we've figured out Randy is 100% Quantity over Quality