She Loves London writes:
“it’s rare you see a blog improved…”

Well we certainly fell foul of this.

We found a passionate, very individual travel writer and asked him if he would want to try out our new place discovery app (free), and if he liked it, to write about it. For which, of course, we would pay. We didn’t want to compromise the integrity of his writers’ voice, and we only wanted genuine advocates to write about us. This way we felt we weren’t advertising, but collaborating, and we were paying because it was only fair to exchange talent for money..

The writer downloaded our app and used it on an upcoming road trip (we could see his activity). He said he (more than) liked it and the piece went ahead.

But oh! It was quite unlike anything else on his website and it just jarred. We couldn’t stand to see it there. We fed back to the writer and were offered the chance to edit it ourselves, so we did and we of course made it worse.

So did the writer really like the app, or did he like or simply need the money offered in exchange for his ‘vote of confidence’ in it. While there’s nothing wrong with that, his blog was tarnished by our piece.

So we asked him to take it down with no hard feelings (fee still paid) and we learned that there is no substitute for genuine, spontaneous voices of approval and we went back to spreading the word, slowly.

We actually don’t sell anything to consumers. All we do is free of charge to people like us, who travel and max their leisure. We earn from supplying our content to businesses. So for us it was a shame we couldn’t figure out how to work with this writer, and have since shied away from other travel and location writers who we enjoy reading and admire for their talent, passion and truth.

I guess these are commodities you can’t buy! We should probably be thankful.

Were we right to ask for the blog to be taken down? Would you have done the same as a company? How would you have reacted if you were the writer accepting sponsored posts?

Thanks,

Sarah

I’m on both sides of the coin, really – on the one hand, for the last couple of years I’ve been working for a company which (when I first started) relied on bloggers to do sponsored posts in order to help our clients.

Ironically I got hired because of my passion for blogging, and perhaps I was naive as to what the job entailed. It ended up revealing to me just how incredibly monetised the world of travel blogging was and made me question who they were all writing for, as someone above said, the audience rarely seemed to be Joe Public looking for holiday advice.

When all that sponsored post stuff had to stop last year, no one was happier than me. It was my job to read and find blogs, and what I like doing anyway – but it was hard to find one I actually ended up following on a day to day basis away from work because I liked the content / personality behind it.

On the other hand, I’m a blogger. It’s what I love doing. I’ve blogged since 2007 and haven’t ever really been interested in monetising any of them. I accept the occasional freebie if I think it’ll make a good story / angle, if I can make it funny, if it’s something that makes me go “yes” – but never taken money for content.

I love reading blogs, love the community around them, love the opportunities and writing practice they afford. But I completely agree that it’s getting more and more difficult to find really good blogs to read that aren’t full of sponsored posts in certain niches – one being travel.

It’s rare you see a blog improved by sponsorship and money – unless the person at the helm is a really excellent, honest writer, or has an interesting story to tell.

There’s nothing wrong with earning a living from blogging – like Pam said, we all want to be the big deal one day – but for me, not if it means compromising the content that 100 readers who might come to my blog regularly like, in favour of getting 10,000 passing “hits” from a brand Twitter account who don’t ever come back again.

Nothing wrong with those who do – they’ll find an audience too. It just won’t be me.

I don’t read as many travel blogs as I’d like – but there are only so many hours and so many stories one can create. I’m happy to have found the tribe that matches my passion for exploring the world and will keep working to get my head above water as opportunities open with attention to resonance (personal and outer,) and a nod to SEO. As a creative, I struggle with the business side of writing but juggling keeps one nimble!

There’s no one way to do it ‘right,’ only narrower paths to doing it well. Keep moving and hopefully, forward.

Now obviously you have to please the client in advertising, you can’t write what you honestly feel about a brand or service or product. ‘Don’t buy this, it’s crap, ‘isn’t a career move.

But I, and the talented, creative people I was lucky enough to work with, survived writing ‘lies’. We never felt people would die as a result, we did our best to create interesting, amusing TV and press ads that people might actually enjoy enough to at least give our client’s product a chance, If they tried it and didn’t like it then we had done our best, ‘you can lead a horse to water etc’

So what I am laboriously getting around to is that I commodified my ability to write. I could perhaps have tried my hand at writing novels and remained pure but I didn’t.

Like so many copywriters after ten years or more, I branched out into food and travel writing and restaurant criticism ( all those lunches and shoots in foreign countries had given me a taste for food and travel).

If I go on a press trip, and I only go on ones that interest me, I write about what I see and experience honestly. Negatives as well as positives. That is partly a result of my copywriting training.

Compared to copywriting I have a free hand in what I write, with the obvious caveat that if I slate something unfairly or with malice and spitefulness I know I wont be contacted by that PR company again. So I don’t unless they really, really really deserve it.

If people want to run ads etc on their blogs to make money they are only doing what magazines have always done. It is not the road to moral ruin, it’s normal.

All one has to do is apply one’s own limits and standards and stop worrying about other people’s.

But, as I’ve said in response other posts like this in the past, you could replace the word “Blogging” in the title with “Indie Filmmaking” or “Hip-Hop” or “Art” and find historical evidence that this same sort of discussion has probably been going on as long as mankind has engaged in creative endeavors.

What we’re really talking about here is the commercialization and commodification of creativity, and the notion of “selling out.” The schism happening in the world of travel blogging right now ALWAYS happens when something goes from being a largely underground to mainstream phenomenon. Blogging isn’t special, it’s just the New Kid on the Creative Block.

Think about when Nirvana came along and blew the lid off the burgeoning alt-rock movement. Cobain shot himself because he couldn’t deal, Grohl formed Foo Fighters, a million Candlebox and Seven Mary Three-like knockoffs got signed, and the entire culture was turned into one big f@#$ing cliché. Did that kill alternative culture? No, but it transformed it inexorably. There are some great alt-rock bands that became huge, and also some really crappy ones. A lot of the best, most pure, anti-sellout bands labored in DIY obscurity for years, only to eventually go the way of the dodo.

The same thing will happen to travel blogging. We’re no different, and we’re not special. We’re just creating stuff– some of us because we’re truly passionate about it, some because we want to see the world, and some simply because we think we can make some easy money. There are as many reasons for blogging as there bloggers. And I see that as a good that.

I do think it’s pretty sad and shitty that so many bloggers (including some in this thread) want to crap on other bloggers for being more successful. If they spent more time focused on their own business and craftsmanship and less time worried about what everyone else is doing, perhaps they wouldn’t be one of those doomed to toil in obscurity….

Regardless, thanks for the thought-provoking post, Andy.

I’m not sure if blogging lost its soul though, or if people who started out with good intentions just got too tempted along the way, and you haven’t edited your twitter feed lately.

I started my current blog about a year ago, and since then I’ve seen a number of people I thought were “blogging with soul” change direction into PR and marketing. It always gives me a sinking feeling, them I have to edit my reader and find some new folks.

And I agree that I don’t edit the reader automatically – some people write in such a way they’re able to get away with it, and have the best of all possible worlds. Mostly not, though.