The Dumb Economics of Travel Blogging • Indie Traveller

Today I wanted to give a bit of insight into how a blog like mine works behind the scenes — and share with you some of the motivations that (sometimes) drive what I write about.

I think there might be some mystery around how travel blogs like mine often decide what topics to cover. Sometimes, travel blogs will focus on topics that may seem unoriginal or unexciting to a veteran traveler — but there may be good reasons for covering them anyway.

What made me want to write about this is a comment I got a while ago to a post I published about Chiang Mai. (This also happened to be one of my first commissioned pieces written by an outside contributor.) You can see the comment here; but basically, it was a complaint about how blogs sometimes cover similar topics in a very similar way, like… listing some of the top things to do in Chiang Mai (ugh… another one of those?).

I completely understand the reaction. Chiang Mai is one of those places that pretty much every traveler and their…