We never really blog anymore
Hi everyone,
Welcome to Windbag Mails, the mailing list edition of my blog, Windbag Miles. I suppose a reasonable place to start would be with an explanation of why I don’t just post this on my blog. A reasonable answer would be to quote Homer Simpson: “It’s because they’re stupid that’s why. That’s why everybody does everything.”
To go into slightly more detail: I was never super on-board with the blog format. I need to clarify up front that all the reservations about blog-writing are self-imposed, so I’m not trying to offer up a comment about blogs in general. However, I always felt pulled in two directions, one of which was to only write posts when I felt like I had a good idea worth writing about, and the other one was to grow my audience by at least appearing to create new content on a semi-regular schedule. At its heyday in 2018, my blog was still a very tiny sprout in a lush forest of quality points-and-miles blogs, but the fact that I grew it from nothing to a site with 5000-10,000 readers a month is incredibly crazy to me. So of course, having achieved a minuscule level of success, I stopped doing it.
The reason I stopped was simply that I didn’t feel like writing anymore. I decided to take a little break in early 2019, but when I came back to write some new posts, it just felt painful. It happens -- I tend to jump from hobby to hobby, and for whatever reason, writing about points and miles didn’t feel interesting to me anymore.
To be a little more accurate, writing about points and miles in the way I was used to doing so on my blog stopped being interesting. A blog is like any social media account, in that you have all these feedback mechanisms (comments, blog stats, incoming links) that give you little dopamine hits as your content starts to penetrate the internet and people read and react to it. I liked seeing my stats spike on days when Doctor of Credit linked to me, and it pushed me to try to think of angles that would help me grow my audience even further. The first day I got 1000 views on the blog was cool, but the feeling was more “okay now how do I get 2000” than one of satisfaction.
One of the things people responded to was writing reviews, which I realized I hate doing. It’s not just writing the review, it’s the format of it, and -- ugggghhhhh -- the pictures. But reviews are popular. Aside from the posts I wrote about the Amex Platinums Morgan Stanley and Charles Schwab, reviews were the most popular thing I published. I don’t know why anyone needs to read a 17th review about KLM’s business class on the 787, but judging from the stats on that post, it was vitally, vitally necessary.
But in a more general sense, the blog was always sitting there, and I didn’t like feeling like I was neglecting it, or that I “owed” it a new post, or that I should try to come up with some ideas to write about. It’s still online, since I’m proud enough of what I wrote that it’s worth $99/year to me to keep it from vanishing and/or being smudged to shit with the ads Wordpress makes you host on their free plan, but I’ve basically stopped caring about it except as a record of what I think was some pretty good writing about a pretty dry subject.
Someone did offer to buy the blog recently, but since I never hosted ads on it and didn’t have any revenue to speak of, he said the most he could offer was $300. For $300 I could take thousands and thousands of written words, days and days of my time spent writing those words, tens and tens of my dollars in hosting fees, and bundle it up and sell it to this guy so he could strip out all the profanity and criticism of travel brands and stuff it full of ads. I didn’t end up doing it.
Which brings us to the newsletter format. I subscribe to a few newsletters from writers I like, and recently to Joe Cheung’s “As the Joe Flies” newsletter. Reading Joe’s newsletter made me think… I could do a newsletter too! Changing format from a blog that (for better or worse) has all these expectations about building an audience, monetizing, providing regular content, and so on to a newsletter that I can send to a few dozen people (if that) whenever I feel like I have a particularly red-hot take seems like the right move.
A quick word of caution before you agree to let me into your inbox whenever I damn well feel like it -- I’m not planning to make this only about points and miles. (That should be evident from this post, which isn’t about points and miles at all.) I’d like to make it more freeform than that, especially since there still are millions of points and miles blogs where you can get the latest info and hot tips. So if you only liked my blog for the reviews and credit card strategy posts, you may be bored to tears by whatever this turns into, assuming you aren’t already.
Thanks for reading and see you in the next mail,
Jordan