How big is the travel blogging niche?
Posted by Caitlin on 24 May 2008 at 12:39 pm | Tagged as: Blogging, Trends
You might recall when the finalists for the 2008 Bloggies came out, I drew attention to the fact that there was not a single travel site nominated. There was no travel blog category and travel blogs had not made the cut in any of the general categories. By contrast there were 11 food blogs among the 180 finalists. Food had a category of its own but food blogs were also well represented in the general categories.
The exclusion of travel from the Bloggies prompted outrage from the travel writing community - there was heated debate on the Travelwriters.com forum and other blogs. My feeling at the time was that travel bloggers had not created enough of a community compared with other niches such as food bloggers. I’m grateful for initiatives such as the Carnival of Cities (thanks to Nerd’s Eye View for hosting this week), but I still believe there is more that can be done to raise the profile of travel blogging.
However, I’m also beginning to suspect that travel is not as big a niche as we might think.
As well as Roaming Tales, I also run a food blog called The Gooseberry Fool. Both blogs have been running for about nine months so I feel that I am in a position to comment on my experiences so far. I have put the same amount of effort into developing both blogs and I have written roughly the same amount of content for both blogs (actually I have written more content for the travel one). I have also put the same effort into networking my blogs (entering carnivals, including both URLs in my email signature etc) and they have both benefited from a few pick-ups by social media (one of my biggest referrals for Roaming Tales is StumbleUpon for my post on the TARDIS-style police boxes throughout the UK).
Yet, the food blog is getting many more readers than the travel blog. Until about February this year the traffic was roughly even for both, but since then the food blog has pulled away considerably. In the last month it has had 2.5 times the number of both unique visitors and page impressions as the travel blog. The biggest difference seems to be Google referrals. People come to my food site because they are searching for ‘rhubarb’ or ‘beetroot’. They don’t come to the travel blog when searching for ‘Nicaragua’ or ‘Bruges’ (or at least not as much).
The other thing I’m noticing is that I get food ads on my food blog but I only occasionally get travel ads on my travel blog, but also get more general ads such as personal finance and dating. I’m not sure why that is.
As I see it, there are a few possible explanations for the relative success of the food blog, but I’m not sure which one is correct.
- Travel content online is a more crowded field and it is less likely that someone searching for travel information will land on my blog, compared with another blog, a newspaper travel section online, or a commercial travel site. The counter argument is that food is also a crowded field.
- My food writing is better than my travel writing. I’m not convinced about this, especially since my travel site benefits from having my travel articles as well as ordinary blog posts. However, it is possible that I have been lucky with my choice of topics on the food blog.
- People are simply not as interested in reading about travel on the web as they are about food. This is no doubt controversial suggestion for travel writers and it would mean that the Bloggies was reflective of the wider public. But it could be true. People eat more than they travel, after all.
What do you guys think? Is there something unique about my blogs or is this more indicative of a general trend. Why do you think this is?
[...] I shared my own experience in running this site and my food blog, The Gooseberry Fool, and asked how big the travel blogging niche actually is. The difference in traffic between the two [...]
[...] beginning to suspect the former - if you want to know why, please visit Roaming Tales to read about my blogging experience, and my analysis of the UK magazine [...]
It’s possible that food is a more universal experience - everyone is making dinner, but not everyone is off for three weeks in Thailand.
I’ve been wondering what makes people interested in travel narrative myself - successful sites seem to offer cheap flight, hotels and advice for travelers rather than narrative…but I’m also feeling like travel is gaining more critical mass. I’m not sure why I feel that way, but I’ve seen a lot more travel blog community activity since joining Twitter.
On the other side, it’s worth noting that I was peripherally involved in the submission of two travel blogging panels, one at SxSW and one at BlogHer. The result? No panel.
Food for thought. Pun not intended, but I’m going to leave it.
Thanks for your comment - it’s really interesting to hear about your experience with Twitter on the one hand and the blogging panels on the other. How have you found Twitter more generally by the way? Also did you see the more recent post about magazine circulation? - Caitlin
The problem is simple, that travel bloggers simply don’t want to be part of a community, and those that have tried to create a community, are doing it for commercial reasons only.
You have US travel blogs promoting only US blogs, and there’s a worryingly lack of UK travel bloggers.
I’ve often thought about creating a travel blogging community, but I know it’ll be dead before it gets off the ground — why?
1) when it comes down to it, successful travel bloggers, who get great traffic, don’t want to share their ideas, thoughts and experience of travel blogging.
2) travel blogging has probably become too commercial. Look at what has happened to poor Gridskipper as a very good example.
I’m afraid Jaunted, Hotel Chatter will follow the same way because it’ll be used as a marketing tool for Conde Nast.
As for awards, travel bloggers need to say somethign if the travel category is not included, it’s too late after.
The Peformancing Awards too place early this year, and no travel category was introduced, I emailed the organisers and ask them to include travel - and they did.
Travolution are the only media company who has introduced a blogging awards, and hopefully more will follow.
I wonder at the blogging conferences you hear about how many travel bloggers were there - probably loads but I bet you didn’t getting any groups meeting up and talking together.
End of rant for now.
Thanks for your comment. I think I’m a little more optimistic. I have found travel bloggers, even US ones, generally willing to network and connect. I’m keen to see more of that. I think there will always be a commercial end of travel blogging, as there is with other sectors, but it would be a shame if that were allowed to dominate. I find some of the bigger travel sites a little overwhelming in their volume. As for the awards, the guy who runs the Bloggies has said that he regularly receives requests to have a travel category and he is considering introducing it. It didn’t make the cut this year but someone else has started up an initiative called the Travvies, which is a welcome development. - Caitlin.
Maybe I have been blogging for too long so that’s why I am skeptical. This years Travvies seems to have died a death though, with no mention of the awards I think since late March.
I’m flabbergasted by this, truly. I guess it really is as simple as the fact that everyone likes to eat, but not everyone likes to travel. I was curious about whether the Food Network’s ratings are better than the Travel Channel’s, too, so I just did a little snooping on Google. According to March 2008 Nielsen stats (U.S. of course), the Food Network has a higher viewership (95M+ to the Travel Channel’s 91M+). Wow. Go figure.
Thanks for your comment. That’s really interesting about the Food Network v the Travel Channel, although to be fair it is not a huge difference. Did you check out my post about the UK magazine stats, by the way?
Stumbled on this post via twitter and I have to say it’s been one of the more interesting reads I’ve come across regarding travel blogging. I’d lean towards a combination of 1 and 3 (surely not 2! :)). Travel as a niche has some pretty huge players competing for all kinds of rankings. Even on really niche terms there’s going to be big sites competing. Food, although competitive, is not quite as bad. If the primary difference in traffic you are seeing is based on Google referrals, then I’d say for 90% sure this is the reason. You could do a few quick tests to compare though, like taking your top ten referral keywords from Google for both sites and seeing how many results Google gives for both. If the travel ones have far less competition (ie. less total results), then that is an indication that you are ranking well there, but just for word combinations that aren’t searched for that much. You could also try one of the online keyword ‘measurers’ to see how often each of the top ten words gets searched for in search engines. Both of these methods aren’t perfect at all, but they’ll go a long way to showing a big difference.
It’d be interesting to learn more about the results.
Hi, thanks for the comment. I expect you are probably right. My impression is that food blogging is just as popular if not more popular than travel blogging, but travel also has a lot of big corporate players with user-generated content, such as Lonely Planet with the ThornTree forums. I’ll do some keyword testing as you suggest and report back at some point. - Caitlin.
A few additional things: I don’t agree with Darren (sorry, D.) - I’m more than willing to share knowledge and have had nothing but positive experiences when seeking good info from other in this space. Also, I think there’s loads of UK bloggers, you just have to look for them. But I do wonder if the independent nature of most travelers isn’t the reason community doesn’t grow as quickly in this space as in others. When I talk to other bloggers, they’re interested in travel, but organizations like BlogHer and SxSW don’t seem to see travel as worthy (yet) of their clout, I really can’t say why. I don’t know what happened with the Travvies, but I recall seeing something on the site that they were going to take some downtime - I’m thinking something personal came up.
A sidenote on Twitter - I was finding it not very useful until I stopped following so many people. Now I use it mostly for travel focused people and I enjoy it a lot more.
I think one reason travel bloggers find it harder to develop communities is that we’re off doing what we do… travelling! I’ve found it impossible to post for a week now (let alone read up on my favorites) simply because I’m on the road and too busy working. The food bloggers spend most of their time at home in their kitchens - and on the web!