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My guess is many readers, or those who happen to find this post and are new readers, are going to find this post to be an eye opener and education of what is happening in the blogosphere and it is not good. Not just not good but at a crises point and only you, our readers, can save your favorite travel blogs from going away and going away soon! Let me explain for those not yet in the know with some history and what is happening now.
Not so long ago the COVID-19 pandemic all but shut down travel blogs. After all, who wants to read about travel when you cannot, safely, travel? These years were really hard for this and many other travel blogs and some just quit. Eye of the Flyer did not and I will say we not just survived but came out the other side of the pandemic with more views than ever in history. Then something else happened.
Google, one of the biggest drivers of viewers to the blog, made massive changes in September shortly after the COVID-19 recovery to their search engine, all but destroying links to so many travel (and other) blogs. It was brutal. Some dropped as much as 90% in viewership. I ask you, could you survive if you had a 90% pay cut and just keep working full time? You see the problem.
Well many of us, like after the pandemic, pulled up our boot strings and got to work again trying to rebuild the pageview numbers we once had and I can proudly say that at least this blog made it most of the way back. Then again something changed and it has been beyond a bloodbath. It was:
AI
Now when you go to Google and do a search you no long see a long list of blogs yielding the answer you are looking for but instead at the very top of the page you see an AI summary of what it thinks the right answer is to your question. It sometimes links to the blogs it has scraped the information from to produce what it thinks is the right answer, but I can tell you most folks just take this display of the info as the right answer to their query.
Here is the thing…
Much of the time the information AI belches out is somewhat right or often times just wrong. But either way readers do not search further i.e. looking at links well below the AI info to read for themselves if the AI summary is correct or what they need to know.
So what? Why does this matter?
The immediate effect, that we have seen first hand, is that a MASSIVE amount of traffic to the blog that would have landed on the blog by readers to find their answer is bypassed and thus we, the blog, get no eyeballs or viewers and no ad or card revenue to keep us alive. But there is more than short turn pain.
If AI keeps doing this and giving nothing back for long enough then a bulk of your favorite travel blogs will simply die and go away. I ask you, when enough time goes by, just what will be left for AI to harvest their data from to produce quality current data to try to produce something somewhat accurate, relevant and up to date.
You can see that we really are at a tipping point and while this blog, year over year, is up about 40% in views we are seeing disturbing viewership trends that if they continue will result in incredibly hard choices.
So what can you do to help?
Step one is fight back. Please subscribe to your favorite travel blogs news letter (like this one). Then each day READ the blog posts. Truly this is one of the best things you can do that will keep your blog of choice alive. Step two is use their affiliate links. With ad revenue drying up (thanks again, Google) this is one of THE ways to keep your blog you love going for the long term. Step three is going “old school” that is share your favorite blog and blog posts on every social media site you use – this too can save them from extinction.
Please understand how bad things are and are becoming and the time to act is now. I started blogging as “Delta Points” a very long time ago now and have been so privileged to still have your trust in my posts as well as the simply amazing content Chris and our other authors provide. If you want to continue to see more over the coming years it is up to you to make this happen because the old way will soon be dead thanks to AI! – René
Advertiser Disclosure: Eye of the Flyer, a division of Chatterbox Entertainment, Inc., is part of an affiliate sales network and receives compensation for sending traffic to partner sites, such as CreditCards.com. Some or all of the card offers that appear on the website are from advertisers. Compensation may impact how and where card products appear on the site. This site does not include all card companies or all available card offers. Opinions, reviews, analyses & recommendations are the author’s alone, and have not been reviewed, endorsed, or approved by any of these entities. Some of the links on this page are affiliate or referral links. We may receive a commission or referral bonus for purchases or successful applications made during shopping sessions or signups initiated from clicking those links.
Responses are not provided or commissioned by the bank advertiser. Responses have not been reviewed, approved or otherwise endorsed by the bank advertiser. It is not the bank advertiser's responsibility to ensure all posts and/or questions are answered.
Honestly, I don’t visit here near as much because the full rss feed does not open in my reader. So I just don’t get motivated enough to click through to the article ever any more because I know that I will be bombarded by ads as soon as I open the web page which just further makes me immediately click off to a different site. Please provide the full feed to the rss readers.
@Lisa – Thanks for feedback. It is catch 22. Less views and we need more ads. More ads and some, like you, visit less. Then we need more ads. Then will less views less use of our affiliate links and we get less favorable affiliate terms and again need more ads. We will works with our tech team on the RSS!
Thanks for the info on the RSS. I emailed our tech folks. As for the ads: what would you pay per month for a version of the blog with no ads?
I ended up here today because of my RSS Builder Feedly sends me updates from sites I want to see.
Thanks, GTTP!
I have this blog bookmarked and included in my Daily P&M (Points and Miles) folder, so I come directly here each day.
I can tell this post wasn’t written by AI because of the punctuation errors, grammar errors, and a couple of weird turns-of-phrase.
Awhile back, I went to the trouble to research how to turn off that annoying AI summary that appears at the top of Google searches but somehow somewhere along the line Google turned it back on. Have been fiddling with DuckDuckGo and Opera because sometimes Google makes life (I mean keeping ublock script blocker alive and well in the Chrome browser) so hard.
And yes, that AI summary is frequently wrong, sometimes with egregious errors that would really lead the reader astray if they didn’t have the sense to skip it; I guess that’s to be expected when there’s a disclaimer below the summary that says it could be wrong. Google should probably change “could” to “most likely” – truth in advertising and all that rot.
@GJD – I do have a dyslexic flair I know 😉
Thanks for your support, Jack.
Yes, I do know what and how paragraphs are supposed to work but this template apparently does not.
Thank you for your blog! It’s one of my favorites. My just acquired Hilton AE was acquired via one of your links (which I wouldn’t have known about otherwise). The AI default is quite annoying. Frequently I do share your articles. Guess I better share your links a little more often
You made my day, Dora. Thanks!!
@Dora – Made my day too! Thank you 100x
I find the large ad that takes over my screen-and stays there till I X it away is bothersome for trying to read the article!!
What would you pay for a no-ad subscription model?
I use Newsblur for RSS feeds. Almost everything I read (and even podcasts I listen to) are via RSS.
Interesting — thanks!
I love this blog and read it daily, and have learned so much from it. I hope it doesn’t go away.
Thanks, Kristina!
Thanks for the post and description of what is going on. We need you and keep it up!
I agree completely with the basic premise and intensely loathe AI. Has Boarding Area finally stopped using AI blog entries?
Not sure about the answer to your BA question. We use the occasional AI-generated photos (that actually involve some creative writing in the prompts!) but this blog is pretty traditional for publishing content.
There was a virtual blogger on BA for a while this year with an entirely separate blog like yours or LALF. Now that I think about it the blog stopped posting a few weeks ago or so. If I understand correctly some other BA bloggers were involved behind the scenes. I wasn’t a fan and mentioned the shortcomings I saw but was ignored so I just studiously avoided that blog afterwards.