Nov 10
11

Who has the biggest “circulation” now?

Who has the biggest “circulation” now? Who really reaches the most readers?

One lone writer, Tim Ferris, has more monthly readers than GQ magazine with its huge staff and overhead.

One lone travel blogger, Gary Arndt, has more monthly readers than AFAR, Wend, and Outpost magazines combined.

BootsnAll and TransitionsAbroad both get more monthly visitors than Budget Travel online—with a fraction of the staff.

Ever heard of HoboTraveler.com? More people visit Andy’s one-man site each month than that of RoughGuides.com.

My Cheapest Destinations Blog has more visitors than the slick sites of MensJournal.com or Islands.com, despite all the marketing muscle of those two pubs as compared to my part-time staff of one (me).

I like all these print magazines at least a little bit and I think Afar and Wend are truly great, so don’t take this as a slam on their content. The point is, they’re being upstaged by low-overhead operations that don’t have a huge staff or even an office. (BootsnAll used to have a physical office, but eventually figured out they didn’t need it.) Half the time the site with the larger readership is a one-man (or woman) operation with a virtual assistant or two.

Staff editors who went to journalism school are not real thrilled about this change in the power structure. Neither are freelancers who rode the print gravy train for years when the getting was good.

The question for you, aspiring writer, is where are your eyes focused? In the rear view mirror, or on the road in front of you? Unless you’re already a successful print writer continuing to pull in fat commissions from magazines that are still pulling in plenty of big ads, the only reason to look back is to watch for cops. Otherwise, race ahead.

Nobody will pull you over and give you a ticket on this highway anyway. You don’t need permission from anyone anymore. What you do need is vision, a clear position in the market, and the ability to build an audience of readers and followers.

Step it Up

Want to really learn how to do that with your blog instead of relying on trial and error? The best bet is Problogger Darren Rowse’s e-book, 31 Days to Build a Better Blog. If you order it this month, I’ve got a coupon code here that will give you a 25% discount. Just enter november25 after you follow this link: Click here for success.

Tags: BootsnAll, Cheapest Destinations Blog, Everything Everywhere, magazines, online publishing, travel bloggers

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Posted in Travel Writing 2.0 book bloggers new media by Tim 46 Comments

Gary Arndt says:

November 11, 2010 at 5:10 pm

I’m really glad you wrote this.

There is a massive disconnect with advertisers right now. Because blogs are small operations, they don’t have a staff of people to go and drum up business. Ad agencies have no incentive to sell ads to blogs because they don’t want to lose the big commissions they get for selling ads to magazines. There is a large infrastructure in place which is designed to keep making money off the status quo for as long as possible.

No one is there to pitch bloggers or tell their story, so companies keep throwing money at print.

I understand why Matador decided to start a print magazine. When the see the enormous disparity between print and online advertising, they have to be lusting to get some of that money. I can’t blame them.

Just to give you an idea of the economics involved, 1 full page ad on 1 page of 1 issue of 1 magazine (Conde Nast Traveler) could pay for all my travels and expenses for a year. The annual unique visits and pageviews I will get over the course of 1 year will easily be larger than the number of people that actually pay attention to single ad in a single issue of a single magazine…..which is full of ads.

I wont even go into the efficiencies of Facebook and Google advertising.

Years ago when I ran my consulting firm one of my biggest clients was a magazine. The thing which scared them the most (and they were a controlled circulation magazine) was that they knew the metrics that magazines and newspapers were based on were lies. The number of people who actually read, let alone acted on an ad, were astonishingly small, and they knew it. So long as the advertisers had no other choice, and all their competitors sold the same illusions, they could get away with it.

On the internet, you know exactly how successful an ad buy is. You have more options available (pay per click, pay per action, endorsements, etc).

Julie says:

November 12, 2010 at 10:20 am
Interesting post- though I think it contains some logical fallacies and overlooks some important arguments. For one thing- what’s the conversion rate of each type of platform (and I don’t think there’s one generalized answer, by the way)? In other words, when a reader of a blog or print mag reads our work, how many of them actually book a flight and hit the road? That’s what PR people want to know. I’m not sure if it’s entirely possible to measure this, but I do think it’s an important consideration.

Personally, I’m kind of tired of comparing print vs. online. Each has its own strengths and limitations and one doesn’t have to exist to the exclusion of (or competition with) the other.

And Gary, Matador isn’t starting BETA because we’re lusting after ad dollars. If anything, BETA’s a huge financial risk for us. We’re starting BETA because we want a platform to be able to publish longer narrative work.
- Tim says:
  
  November 12, 2010 at 10:34 am
  Julie,
  
  Agreed, but we act as if “conversion” is some magic thing that happens immediately, which is a fallacy for any big spending decision. Do I buy a certain car because I saw one ad on one TV show? Or purchase an iPad because of one review I read somewhere? Of course not, and we don’t do that with travel either. If I’m going to take a trip to Patzcuaro it’s because of multiple factors that have influenced my decision: advertising, print stories, online stories, a friend’s recommendation, a photo I saw in a coffee table book, and more. (And yes, this is a real example from my upcoming plans—all of those things made a difference.) PR and ad people obsessed with measuring the measurable impact of any single story or ad are deluding themselves. Occasionally one article is enough to make someone immediately book a ticket and take off, but it’s not how most people make vacation plans—or plan where to stop on an around-the-world journey. Multiple points of contact influence that decision: most online, I would argue, but other media is powerful too, especially as the target audience skews older.
- Gary Arndt says:
  
  November 12, 2010 at 1:12 pm
  You can publish work of any length online. That can’t be the reason.
  
  You are paying 10x more for articles, paying for printing and mailing.
  
  The only possible reason to take on that added expense would be because of the ad revenue.
- Gary Arndt says:
  
  November 12, 2010 at 1:25 pm
  I apologize for the use of the word “lust”. I didn’t mean to imply that anyone at Matador was greedy or is guilty of any of the seven deadly sins.
  
  I do stand by my statement, however, that this is a business decision.
  
  Matador is probably in a much better position than Afar to make something work in print.
- Stuart says:
  
  November 12, 2010 at 4:56 pm
  You can’t publish longer narrative pieces online? Really? Why not?
- Jeremy Head says:
  
  November 15, 2010 at 4:47 am
  Hi Julie
  I’m really interested by your comment about the reason for starting a print mag: “to be able to publish longer narrative work”. Why can’t you publish stuff like that on-line?
  Jeremy

Sean says:

November 11, 2010 at 5:13 pm

Interesting thoughts and thanks for bringing this up Tim. I’m not sure what the answer is. We’ve been talking more internally at BootsnAll how to measure audiences across so many distribution channels. Unique visitors, Newsletter Subscribers, RSS subscribers, Twitter Followers, Facebook Fans, and more. Each type of Fan/Unique/Reader could be valued differently IMO.

My thoughts are that it depends on how you value a visitor/reader/subscriber and what is the reach. Folks that subscribe to and pay at a magazine may have a different value than some of the New Media Metrics. Depends on your perspective.

November 11, 2010 at 5:37 pm

All things aside, what Tim points out is the issue. Costs and overhead.

In the end, readers are readers regardless if they are in print or online. Even if you accept that a print reader is 2, 3, 5 or even 10x more valuable than an online reader, you’d still be orders of magnitude off of what the difference is between print and online in terms of ad buys. ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE! Most online advertising doesn’t go to any of the sites which Tim listed, they go to big mega sites like Yahoo and Trip Advisor.

Everyone knows they are about as likely to act on a print ad as they are to act on an online ad: not very likely.

What justifies the difference in price isn’t demographics or the effectiveness of the ad. What justifies the difference is the fact that you have to pay for offices in midtown Manhattan somehow.

The New York Times online has about the same amount of traffic as the Huffington Post. The NYT employees 1,800 people and the Huffington Post employs about 40.

This is all paid for by companies paying inflated rates for advertising.

If I worked for a travel company with a significant advertising budget, I’d hire a person just to find places to advertise online. Why? Because the cost of an ad buyer would be more than covered by the cost savings of not advertising in print. Look at how successful Scottevest has been by just covering the internet with ads. They have done some limited print advertising, but by far their biggest expense is online.

Daniel P says:

November 11, 2010 at 5:39 pm

Sorry, but these numbers aren’t correct. You aren’t taking into account print subscribers, newsstand sales and the syndicated content that these magazines produce.

To take Budget Travel as an example, it has tens of thousands of subscribers who get the magazine in their actual mailboxes, as well as thousands of people who buy the magazine at newsstands. In addition, its content is syndicated to MSN, MSNBC and a number of other websites (I’ve seen it in a number of places). The same can be said of the other publications mentioned.

There’s also a difference between real journalism and marketing that’s masquerading as journalism. Gary Arndt seems only to write about places where he gets press trips. He’s now on the staff of a tour operator (GAP). AFAR magazine pays for the travels of its writers so they can write impartially about the places they cover. The same could be said of the other magazines and guidebooks you site.

Debbie Ferm says:

November 11, 2010 at 5:57 pm

Ha Ha! I know Gary does not need me to defend him, but this makes me laugh. Gary has been traveling press trip free for a few years and is an amazing photographer. I look forward to his photos being tweeted everyday.

You can say lots of things about Gary, but he’s not a shill for anyone.

Stuart says:

November 11, 2010 at 6:02 pm

Interesting read, though think it’s a little problematic to treat web readers and magazine readers with the same ruler. The use of the two mediums is quite different.

A magazine gets purchased. It lays around the house and is probably looked at by more than one person. Stories get read haphazardly – or more than once. It gets passed on to friends (really I didn’t buy all those “Hello!” mags that litter our place). All that more or less equates to one reader.

A website is read for free. Many sites have a bounce rate well north of 50%, yet every one of those readers counts as a unique. Recently had a site talk to me about their “non-bouncing uniques” I almost fell off my chair, but thinking about it, that’s much more relevant, especially for advertisers looking for engaged readers, than flat uniques.

I do agree though with the premise indicated above, that advertisers should be downsizing their Manhattan offices and looking to advertise more effectively on the web. It’s happening slowly and even as that trend accelerates, it needn’t be an either or — the world needs “Hello!”

Amanda Castleman says:

November 11, 2010 at 6:06 pm

Great examples, Tim. I’m speaking tonight on a Seattle Writergrrrls panel and plan to point folks towards this great post.

November 11, 2010 at 6:28 pm

Daniel (whoever the hell you are),

1) I’ve taken a whopping 4 press trips in my life. The other 80 countries I’ve visited I did on my own with my own money. I’ve spent over $100,000 of my own money traveling over the last four years. How many travel writers do you know that have spent that much of their own money traveling in the last four years? The average travel writer who is paid by their publication doesn’t have to pay for anything, I’d say my experience is far closer to that of my readers that than of a paid travel writer. I’m a traveler first and a content producer second.

2) I am not on the staff of Gap adventures. I am not an employee or a freelancer. Get your facts straight. Also, I have disclosed my affiliation. I have no idea what your affiliations are Daniel P (seriously, if you are going to throw stones, have the stones to make your identity public)

3) Advertisements on Budget Travel don’t get displayed on content that is syndicated. That revenue has nothing to do with the circulation numbers they give to advertisers. Its just double dipping from content which was created. I don’t blame them for doing it, but it isn’t party of any circulation that matters for advertising.

4) How is taking money from advertisers and using that money for travel impartial? All you are doing is taking money from the right hand and and giving it to the left hand to give the illusion of impartiality. If anything, I think there is far more honesty and transparency in what I do. Can you show me an example where a hotel continued to advertise in a magazine that savaged it? In the travel magazines that I read, I seldom see any negative reviews of anything. If taking a press trip is prima facia evidence of bias, then shouldn’t getting a paycheck be prima facia evidence of protecting of the interests of a publication?

5) My only asset is my relationship with my readers. For writers, what matters is their relationship with their editor. Losing my readers isn’t worth the value of a hotel room, especially when I’ve paid for over 1,000 nights on the road out of my own pocket. If you think I’m a shill for someone, please give me the URL where I’ve done it. Don’t talk in vague generalities and hide your name.

Do I take press trips? Hell yes I take press trips. It massively reduces my costs. If I paid for my travel via advertising you’d still accuse me of bias because I don’t have a separate advertising department. Either I take cash or I take a trip. Damned if I do and damned if I don’t. It is no different than a magazine, except I don’t have an advertising department to launder the money.

November 11, 2010 at 6:36 pm

@stuart The problem with bounce rate is that a loyal blog reader who visits every day to get the latest news will have a 100% bounce rate. That’s why I my ultimate metric is subscribers, not traffic. Traffic, for me, is a means to get subscribers. However, I realize that this wouldn’t work for everyone, including sites like yours.

Also, for every person who passes around a magazine, there are probably just as many who never pick it up or throw it away. I can’t recall ever giving a magazine to another person or getting a magazine from someone else. The fact is, we don’t really know and there is no way to really know how magazines are used. Magazines can hide behind the ambiguity in their stats. Internet data can be know with far more precision.

tempo dulu says:

November 11, 2010 at 6:49 pm

Yes, but you are looking at the top of the pyramid. There are many travel blogs with a minimal readership base. Like mine. Hahaha!

November 11, 2010 at 6:54 pm

…but I started at the bottom, just like everyone else. Trust me, my site didn’t suddenly appear fully grown. I’ve spent 4 years building my audience.

Tim Leffel says:

November 11, 2010 at 8:39 pm

Of course I agree with pretty much everything Gary says and as I said in the Travel Writing 2.0 book, any guise of “truth in travel” or whatever b.s. slogans the magazines through out is just marketing. When’s the last time you read a negative hotel review in Travel & Leisure? Half the time they’re writing about places nobody has even set foot in yet because their lead time is months before the actual opening. But the hotel chain is an advertiser so…

Anyway, I’m not saying the metrics are equal, but as Gary points out, circulation stats put out by magazines are more art than science, with lots of ambiguous math and questionable assumptions. And just because someone flipped through one while on a treadmill doesn’t mean they actually read any given story or saw any given ad. You can argue that web metrics involve a bit of guesswork too, but far less. Advertisers and PR companies can see every clickthrough, for one thing, which doesn’t exist offline. The low numbers they’re seeing from poorly placed “eyeball” CPM banner ads have probably been there all along in print too, but nobody had a way to measure it.

Is a magazine reader more valuable than a web reader? It’s an open question, but certainly not a given. I can’t count the stacks of magazines I’ve thrown in the recycling bin without even cracking open and who knows how many I’ve flipped through without finding anything I wanted to read just because I was in a doctor’s office or at the gym and was bored. Meanwhile, there are some blogs where I read EVERY single post.

Andy Graham says:

November 12, 2010 at 3:31 am

Tim,
Thank you for mentioning HoboTraveler.com.

This is Andy Graham of HoboTraveler.com, now in Togo, West Africa. I believe we trade energy for money, there are effective ways, and their are efficient ways to make the exchange. My goal is to work 2-4 hours per day doing only the work I enjoy. I am 100 percent aware it is possible earn more money, however I am not willing to exchange “unhappy” work for the money.

HoboTraveler.com soon will make a move to utilize Books as part of our circulation. I feel magazine travel articles are complicated ways of advertising, and lack authenticity. Twitter and Facebook is sort of a “glad hand” way of promoting the site and questionable if the readers are truly engaged.

I believe a person reading a book is the most engaged, while readers on the Internet poke or skim. I enjoy travel writing the most when I feel the readers are engaged at a deeper intuitive level.

It is fun to pontificate on Travel Writing, however, at the end of the day, Traveling in Togo is — Travel.

November 12, 2010 at 7:25 am

You are right Andy that people pay more attention to a book when reading than other forms of media and I will continue to be a book author for that reason—even if the effort is not all that lucrative. Having a book pays off in other ways, especially in credibility with the media.

People do skim and poke on the internet more (witness all the top-10 and “best of” forgettable articles). But then again, they skim and poke with magazines too (the original home of all those top-10 and “best of” forgettable articles).

Traci Suppa says:

November 12, 2010 at 8:04 am

While this news is impressive and inspirational, what worries me is whether travel blogs really have the power of conversion. This World Travel Market study suggests that they don’t. http://www.tnooz.com/2010/11/08/news/stats-how-travellers-use-social-media-or-not/

To heavily paraphrase: 64% of the poll sample didn’t use any social media at all when planning a trip. Chat rooms and forums attracted around 28% of the social media users, while travel blogs accounted for just 9%.

My blog isn’t monetized, as yet, but eventually I hope to offer paid advertising. These stats are disheartening, however.

Tim Leffel says:

November 12, 2010 at 9:04 am
Traci,

The problem with any survey like this is, most people are hazy about which sites they looked at when planning a trip, especially after landing on something from a Google search. Was it a website, a blog, a “social media” platform? (Who even talks about “social media” expect people on the inside?) Also, people hate to admit they’ve been influenced by ANYTHING when making their plans. You’d get similar low responses about people changing their mind if you asked about print media too. Most of us don’t want to admit our plans were screwy before someone set us straight.

Last, I ask a lot of people in my travels why they came to that particular destination and the answers can be very complicated and emotion-ridden. It’s seldom just one factor. That’s why destinations that spend the most generally get the most visitors. They’re in the media the most, more people come, and it becomes a self-feeding cycle from word of mouth. A third of the tourists I question can’t really put their finger on why they’re there. “I’ve just always wanted to come to _____.” The influence of marketing and media has burrowed into their subconscious.
- Krystallynn says:
  
  March 13, 2012 at 12:35 am
  That’s a well-thought-out anewsr to a challenging question

Carlo Alcos says:

November 12, 2010 at 10:23 am

“I understand why Matador decided to start a print magazine. When the see the enormous disparity between print and online advertising, they have to be lusting to get some of that money. I can’t blame them.”

Gary, you have no idea what Matador is about or what the people who work there are about, so please don’t make statements like this.

Gary Arndt says:

November 12, 2010 at 1:21 pm
Matador is a business. I don’t fault them for wanting to make money. I’m not saying its a bad thing and I honestly wish them success.

But lets face facts:

Launching a new print magazine in a market where print advertising is shriveling up will strike most people as an odd decision. Especially when you are willing to pay 10x what you are paying online for content.

The only possible reason why anyone would pay more for something, enter a shrinking market and take on additional expenses is because they hope they can make money from it.

The last time I checked, Afar had a book rate of $15,000 for a single full page ad. You are looking at least $100,000 per issue if you can sell it out. You can’t get that kind of money easily selling ads on a website.

Matador has some serious advantages over Afar: they have an alternative source of revenue, they can utilize resources which are also used online, and they have a brand name and audience they have built outside of the print magazine.

I’m not sure what was derogatory about my statement. Matador is a business, not a charity. You don’t undertake a risky venture like this unless you thought you could make money doing it.
- Carlo Alcos says:
  
  November 12, 2010 at 5:44 pm
  What’s derogatory about your statement is that you presume to know the motivation for Matador going into print. You state it like a fact. Just look at the wording of your comments, you use “the only possible reason” over again, like you couldn’t fathom anything else being true.
  
  What your comments are suggesting, is that Matador is simply in it for the money, and this is where you are wrong. Now, you’ll go on thinking whatever you want to think, so I will just leave it at that.
  
  And what I believe Julie is talking about in regards to longer narrative essays…we all know that online readers generally don’t have the patience to read a 3000 word article on their computer. This is why online posts are as short (and effective) as they are.
  - Stuart says:
    
    November 12, 2010 at 9:49 pm
    Probably slipping off the point of the initial post, but, like Gary, I’d disagree with the idea that people don’t have the patience to read a longer piece online. In my own experience, one of the most popular stories on Travelfish is 6,000 words long — over 12,000 words if you include comments. Look at sites like the NewYorker that regularly run very long, in depth pieces — they wouldn’t be doing so if people didn’t read them.
    
    Perhaps due to the perceived pressure to post very regularly, it may be more true of the “blog/blog network” genre which I guess Matador sort of falls under, but certainly not the web as a whole.
    
    Personally, I love reading long, in depth articles online — they’re always a welcome distraction from, well, work.

November 12, 2010 at 6:41 pm

Carlo, you are flat out wrong.

Longer articles get more traffic than shorter ones. Conventional wisdom about internet users attention spans is just wrong.

Also, it isn’t as if there aren’t plenty of outlets in print for travel writing already. Why not just distribute a pdf? Why bother paying 10x the online amount for a story? Why not pay the same amount for an online story as a print story? Why not just distribute the longer articles as Kindle Singles?

Those are all business decisions.

Travel writing is not, and has never been, a charity.

I’m not saying Matador wont put out a good product. In fact I think they will. But come on. Magazines are run to make a profit, and if you think otherwise, you are naive.

I think the folks at Matador love travel, they love travel writing, and they might even love longer forms of travel writing. All that being said, the decision to jump into this game is a business one. I’m sure they looked at all the pluses and minuses, analyzed the risks and made the decision to go into print because they thought they could make money at it.

There is nothing wrong with trying to make money at something you love. I have a lot of respect for what they are trying to do and I’m very interested to see how things go for them…..but this is a business decision.

Carlo Alcos says:

November 12, 2010 at 10:58 pm
OK. I know this is probably going to fall on deaf ears, but sometimes I just can’t help myself. I am not claiming that business isn’t a part of the decision. Of course it is. What I am taking issue at is your presumption that Matador’s (by the way, I am an editor there, so I know what happens behind the scenes) sole (or main) motivation is money.

As for the conventional wisdom about attention spans, fine. I don’t mind conceding that or being “flat out wrong” about it. I don’t doubt you know much more about that than I do. It still doesn’t change the reasons behind the decision.

Have you read this? http://matadornetwork.com/pulse/8-reasons-matador-is-launching-a-print-mag/
- Carla says:
  
  November 12, 2010 at 11:15 pm
  The fact they had to make their reasons for putting out a print mag another one of those “list posts” with a number in the title does not give me much faith in what’s going to come out of this decision either way.
- Gary Arndt says:
  
  November 13, 2010 at 12:22 pm
  I never said their sole motivation was money. Anyone who is involved in travel media has to be motivated by something else other than money. There are far easier ways to make money than this.

Linda says:

November 13, 2010 at 11:58 pm

I love reading magazines and I love reading blogs. For me the real difference is in how I react to them. Magazine stories are for dreaming and fantasizing. What I read on the web is for when I’m serious about going somewhere. You can’t click on a magazine article and have your whole vacation planned in 10 minutes.

Johann Thorsson says:

November 15, 2010 at 4:15 am

Hi,

I work for Dohop.com (just to make that perfectly clear)

We have debated the print vs online ads many a times here at the office and more often than not go for the online ads, due to:
a) Price. Online ads are almost always cheaper than their print counterparts
b) Metrics. It is easy to measure the impact in clicks.
c) It is where we are. It is a simple as that. Our world is online.

Now than… tell us Gary, how can we get a Dohop as onto your great site?

Johann Thorsson says:

November 15, 2010 at 4:24 am
And that of should course say “how can we get a Dohop AD onto your great site?”

(The proximity of the s and the d getting me in trouble again.)

Jeremy Head says:

November 15, 2010 at 4:52 am

@ Tim
RE: “freelancers who rode the print gravy train for years” Blimey. You have no idea how hard it is to make money as a freelance travel writer! One thing it is not is a gravy train! (Fat commissions… hmmm yeah right).

November 15, 2010 at 9:24 am

Jeremy, I’m no youngster and have been at this for close to two decades now. Many print pubs (especially newspapers) paid more when I started—in real dollars not inflation-adjusted ones—than they do now. As for the gravy train, plenty did ride it hard, as in…
http://perceptivetravel.com/blog/2010/10/19/did-ann-patchett-kill-gourmet/

And I don’t want to get in a pissing contest, but at least read the book before telling me I don’t know “how to make money as a freelance travel writer.” Or just buy me a beer and I’ll show you my bank statement.

November 15, 2010 at 11:59 am

Wow. I hadn’t seen that article before Tim.

There is a lot in there which sort of encapsulates the differences in business models.

1) The writer was totally divorced from the business side of the magazine. She had no incentive to do anything other than milk it for all she could. She had no P/L responsibilities and no real incentive to see the magazine survive other than to keep milking it for trips and money.

2) Her audience was her editor. So long as the editor was pleased, she could do what she wanted.

3) Eventually advertisers have to realize that they are paying for this sort of extravagance (on top of the midtown manhattan offices). I’ve spoken to several DMO’s who are starting to realize that dropping 5,6 or even 7 figures on ad deals for glossy print magazines is not the best use of their money.

4) I don’t think any trips killed Gourmet Magazine. That is an expense which could easily be cut if necessary. What killed them was the same thing that has been killing everything else in print: reductions in advertising.

All that being said, I don’t think there are any more than a tiny handful of advertisers who buy ads in major magazines who would consider doing an ad buy on a blog. Blogs just aren’t on the radar of most companies or ad agencies. They are too small and too disjointed at this time to seriously consider.

Robin Esrock says:

November 15, 2010 at 7:08 pm

Clearly a very touchy subject. Swing it round another way. Four years ago, we were seeking tourism board support to film my TV show Word Travels. They measure press trips based on ROI (return on investment), ie how much promo they’ll get for the expense of support. At the time, I was freelancing for newspapers, writing my blog, and also a column for an online portal where my average story was getting a whopping 900,000 page views. That’s way more than any newspaper article I could think of, with metrics to back it up. Well most tourism boards back then couldn’t see the value. They wanted newspapers, print, hard copy numbers. But a website? I often felt I had to re-educate them about the value of online media, and often ran up against old school folks who just didn’t want to know about it. Not quite a gravy train, but there’s plenty people out there who don’t want to rock the boat. Magazines, TV stations, newspapers, ad agencies…

Fast forward to the present. I was at a media event a couple months ago, and bloggers were all the rage. Suddenly I’m getting press invites as a blogger, not just a newspaper columnist. Say “social media” and tourism boards get all excited, although as the WTM report suggests, nobody quite knows over what just yet.

If you think the ad industry is off embracing the power of blogs, you don’t even want to look into television. 1000 people wearing ankle bracelets somehow decide what the entire nation is watching. As TV switches online, the metrics will be very clear, and I expect very scary for some of the larger advertising companies and the brands that support them.

In the meantime, we’ll keep on trucking and writing about what we do and see. I don’t believe it’s in anyone’s interest to viciously rip apart a country, tour operator, restaurant or hotel. Travel is personal, and your own experience could be totally different. So why should I ruin somebody’s business because I was having a bad day? However, what I choose to leave out of an article is perhaps a more forgiving form of criticism. Meanwhile, my recent report about Burning Man, all 2000 words of it, got 30,000 unique visitors in just two days. Purely online, purely because it got picked up on social networks. I pitched a couple publications. Nobody wanted to go near it.

Safe travels guys,
Robin

Christine Gilbert says:

November 15, 2010 at 9:58 pm

Tim, I really respect your work, but I think you’re wrong headed on the way you’re evaluating “circulation”.

You’re comparing an online version of a print publisher against an online publication. It’s not the same thing. Let’s take an example from another niche… movies.

The Harry Potter Warner Bros site http://harrypotter.warnerbros.com gets significantly less traffic than the Harry Potter fan site http://www.mugglenet.com/

Does this mean that mugglenet is more popular than the actual Harry Potter movie? Obviously not. Does it mean it has more influence? Nope. Does it mean that mugglenet is beating WB in the online game and WB is missing an opportunity? Not really. WB is in the business of making movies. They aren’t an online publisher. Just because they don’t dominant the online domain for HP, doesn’t mean they are losing money, doing it wrong or messing up.

Listen, it would really behoove me, personally, as a blogger, to confirm what you’re saying. I have more subscribers than many of the online versions of print travel magazines. But I think it’s disingenuous to imply that my influence is similar to Travel and Leisure or Budget Travel. Even without metrics, we can quickly do a gut check… ask 100 people if they know Conde Nast, then ask them if they know Gadling. We know the result.

That being said, I do think the influence of a travel bloggers is under-represented in the media mix. However, I don’t think it helps us to overstate our importance either.

Tim says:

November 16, 2010 at 12:31 am
Christine, I love your work too, so I really appreciate you adding to the discussion.

I don’t think this is a reasonable analogy though because you’re taking an example where a site is mooching off an established multi-billion dollar brand. Mugglenet wouldn’t exist without the movie and book it has latched onto. Travel is different because nobody owns it. There’s no intellectual property beyond the strength of the name itself, whether that’s National Geographic or Gadling. FlyerTalk gets more visitors than most message boards run by guidebooks because that’s where the tribe has gathered.

I do agree you have to add print and online circulation together in the case of a pub like Budget Travel, but my point is that even when you do that, they still reach fewer readers than many independent content sites that don’t have the big brand, the big staff, and the ad agency. The tide has turned, whether the advertisers, government tourism bureaus, and orgs like SATW have figured it out or not.
- Christine Gilbert says:
  
  November 16, 2010 at 2:37 am
  Maybe my analogy wasn’t the best because it confuses the issue, but I was trying to highlight the difference between an online marketing tool (WB) vs. online content (mugglenet). You could attempt to make comparisons about their popularity based on their online numbers, but you’d come to incorrect conclusions.
  
  I think there is some danger of this when you’re comparing print vs online.
  
  Anyway, there was one other thing I wanted to add– I don’t think 1 visitor to a website = 1 reader of a magazine. I think that magazine circulation can be misleading, but so can a website. If a website is getting 100,000 visitors/mo but 90% is stumbleupon/digg/reddit and the average time on site is under 1 minute, then I’d consider that website’s true readership to be about 10,000 visitors/mo.
  
  For me, I have 8,000 subscribed readers. I can tell you that I don’t instantly get 8,000 views every time I publish a new post.
  
  Anyway, it all seems too murky to me for us to make these kinds of distinctions, since it’s impossible to quantify “value”. It’s interesting to look at the numbers, but let’s not put too much faith in it. It doesn’t seem logical to me that one lone writer can outpace a team of trained writers with a budget. Maybe there is some magic we’re doing, but I don’t feel that magical. Who knows? Maybe I am! But the simplest explanation seems to be that it’s like comparing apples and oranges.
  
  Re advertising, what I’ve found is that most travel bloggers are budget travelers… which means that $1200/night villa in Aruba that has $50,000 to spend on ads will be forced to go to print, not because they aren’t savvy, but because of demographics. There is a lot of money out there that I can take because of the focus of my site.
  
  Interesting stuff! I could talk about this all day. Okay back to work

Juanita says:

November 16, 2010 at 1:26 am

Just because everyone has heard of something doesn’t mean they’re actually reading it. Or in the case of TV, watching it. I’ve heard of Jerry Springer and Judge Judy, but that doesn’t mean I tune in. And we all hate lots of famous brands with terrible service, like the U.S. airlines, banks, and cell phone companies. Name recognition is worthless if it doesn’t result in positive attention.

Christine Gilbert says:

November 16, 2010 at 2:41 am
Juanita,

I didn’t say it meant everyone was reading it. I think the fact that you have heard of Jerry Springer and Judge Judy is not because you specifically are watching, but because a lot of people are. It takes a big force for something to get mass attention. The reason why Jerry Springer is a household name is because millions and millions of people have watched it and talked about it.

So I just wanted to give an example of how we can know whether something has broad popularity without getting too mired in metrics… just ask a friend.

Ben Colclough says:

November 16, 2010 at 4:25 am

Fantastic Debate. Whilst I am truly wowed by the comparison of circulation figures, it seems that only a rarefied handful of travel bloggers actually manage to earn a reasonable rate of return on their efforts (excluding the networking benefit for picking up writing work) despite the enormous audiences.

Coming from the perspective of a potential advertiser, I think there are a couple of important things to remember.

1. It is comparatively easy to get traffic on the web, it is bloody hard work to get traffic that has any considerable value. Attracting visitors to your site that are anywhere near making a purchase is tough. Organic search results are super competitive and once you cut your legion of subscribers down to those at the right stage of the buying cycle (who might be motivated by your content to make a purchase) those figures won’t look so huge. Put simply a niche blog with first hand reviews of luxury resorts and just 5000 monthly visitors might be far more valuable as a going concern than a budget travel blog with 100000 monthly visitors.

2. Yes the offline publications have big offices to sustain, but it is easy to forget that making widgets/ producing content etc. is usually only a small portion of the investment required to create value. You have to invest in sales and marketing to deliver value for your customers (and your bank balance). So to ignore the big HQs as pure waste is ignorant of the fact that at least a portion of that cost is used to create value for those advertisers from the basic content. Be that in building an aspirational brand which advertisers can tap into, capturing a well defined audience segment or simply in creating sales teams which are effective at communicating the advertising opportunities to otherwise unaware advertisers.

3. Having said that, clearly offline advertising rates are well over priced in comparison to online. In order to address that, bloggers and online publications need to invest time and money into finding innovative ways to create an attractive proposition to their advertisers. This is, it seems to me, is the big unknown!

Anon says:

December 18, 2010 at 12:13 am

Really nobody cares about this except the editors sweating about their about-to-disappear jobs and the PR people who are completely clueless as to how to measure who matters and who doesn’t. The readers have already voted.

Brian B. says:

April 11, 2011 at 12:33 pm

Wow, just found this and great discussion here. After filling out three press trip forms in a row that asked me for “monthly circulation” and “full-page ad rate” for publications that only exist in digital form, I feel like we still have a long way to go. Many destinations still haven’t figured out where all their visitors are coming from. A lot seem to be a few decades behind.

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