The annual TravelBlogCamp took place in London this week as a fringe event to the World Travel Market exhibition.
The event, now in its third year, is organised by Travel Rants editor Darren Cronian. Tnooz is a media partner and helps out on the night.
There are already number of good summaries from the event kicking around on the web, most notably by two of the speakers that participated in the evening.
- Andy Jarosz of 501Places discusses The Business of Blogging.
- David Whitley of GrumpyTraveller on What Journalists, Bloggers and Marketers Can Learn From Each Other, What Blogging and Tweeting Has Done for Me and Models for Monetising Blogs.
- NB: Will add as more emerge.
Over the years the topics have changed but the spirit of the event remains – journalists, bloggers and PRs getting together for a few hours to discuss, debate and network.
In some reasons the event has followed the trends of the day – in year one there was much discussion about the role of bloggers, differences between them and journalists, legal issues.
In 2009, newer channels such as Facebook and Twitter captured the attention, as well as a now infamous and impassioned defence of the agent model and evolution by business travel agent Murray Harold.
But, interestingly, this year kind of saw a return to basics:
Reasons for blogging in the first place; how to build communities around a blog with engaging copy and interaction; the reality of blogging as a business; why quality should hopefully lord over the ordinary; and, inevitably given the presence of two from the UK’s Times travel team as speakers, paying for content.
Steven Keenan and Ginny Light, from the Sunday Times and The Times respectively, took a fair amount of heat from the audience after the News Corp-owned titles created a paywall around its online content earlier this year.
While there are many reasons for such ire (trying to entice writers to contribute for the the travel sections without currently paying them, being one example), the paywall concept itself appears to bring many writers (be they bloggers or journalists) to bouts of public anger.
First of all, it would have been interesting to see if the reaction had been the same if the Guardian had spearheaded the paywall drive, given that News Corp’s initiative (also at the Wall Street Journal) is believed to be very much a personal ambition by controversial proprietor Rupert Murdoch.
But, secondly, there is actually a certain level of irony around the paywall idea, as one of the last comments from the floor (from Mark Hodson of 101Holidays) indicated.
For much of the evening, there was healthy discussion around earning money from blogging (VelvetEscape’s Keith Jenkins was the only person among the 140-odd in the room who earned £1,000 or more from online advertising).
Hodson, himself a former freelance travel writer who worked for The Times, noted that perhaps the Times was simply implementing (admittedly on a wider and more complex scale) the idea that if content is good enough then people may well be moved enough to pay for it.
And, perhaps, this is what many, many travel bloggers eventually want?
Food for thought…
NB: Pic – Tnooz t-shirt winner @travelwithamate and two other attendees.
NB2: HappyHotelier has a vast collection of wonderful photographs from the event.
NB3: This author (and moderator for the night) introduced the evening with a bitesize summary of perhaps where the blogging community is right now, and issues in the wider industry. Repeated here, after a couple of requests…
TravelBlogCamp!!
Bloggers blogging
Journalists whining
Writers struggling
PRs… hopeful, but moaning
Why can’t we just all get along!!
Social media gurus
Social media
Social networks
THE Social Network
Tweets
Twits
Twats
Hashtags
Oh, it’s not really hash…
Geo-location
Geo-location-gaming
Geo-location-social-gaming
Geo-for goodness sake I don’t want people to know where I am!
Geo-I’m so popular I need everyone to know where I am! – all the time…
Check-in
Check-out
Foursquare
Boresquare
Gowalla
Facebook Places
Travel
Tourism
Hospitality
Freebie
Junket
Economic reality?
Subscription
Paywall
Unique content
User generated content
PR written content
Ad-funded
Sponsored posts
Sponsored tweets
Sponsored bloggers
Aggregation
Segmentation
Aggravation
Simon says
Simon seeks
Where’s Simon?
SEO
SEM
PPC
CPC
CPA
Affiliate
White label
No label
Troogle
The elephant in the room
Apple
iPod
iPad
iTravel?
Android
Blackberry
iPhone
The REAL year of mobile?
But what’s it all about?
Destinations
Experiences
Community
Content
New places
New faces
New challenges
New opportunities
WTM
DLR
Anyone for Olympics 2012?
But why are here?
Because we love to travel
Travel
Travel
And thanks Kev for moderating this wonderfully “Wolfian”
@happy hotelier – errr, thx
evin,
I am *so* glad you posted this. The crowd’s anti-paywall vibe was intimidating. But putting aside Murdoch and the Times’ particular incarnation of a paywall, I think the idea of using subscriptions or “toll charges” is a legitimate one to discuss.
It’s a difficult discussion because it requires holding three contradictory concepts in one’s mind at the same time:
“People value what they pay for.”
Content is an exception to the above rule because it is too commoditized and infinite to be ever valuable enough for someone to pay for. In other words, “Content is information you don’t need [as opposed to information (like what you might get from an FT investment newsletter]” as Clay Shirky and Paul Graham have argued.
When people have “paid” for content, what they’ve actually paid for is a delivery system and packaging, not the actual content. The iTunes model is really a “toll” system, with payments so small that they’re just “nicking” you for the cost of doing business under the threshold of pain. The cable TV model for subscriptions is really a cable/plumbing cost and not a valuation on Dexter or Sex in the City.
All that acknowledged. But I have to think that Americans and Britons are news junkies, and travel addicts, and that some slice of the most dedicated hobbyists will pay a small fee to get curated content in a way that allows them to maintain their status within their social circle/network as “experts” in travel without having to spend three hours a day consuming 25 news feeds from various platforms.
In short, at least one startup will develop a paid-subscription model, and it will be profitable, but it won’t “scale” up to the size of today’s mainstream media companies. In other words, entrepreneurs who explore paid content models may hit upon one that works well enough to make a good, satisfying living despite the overall trend being a content-must-be-free model. For every Yahoo News there will always be a subscription-driven content model like The Economist or Cooks Illustrated, I bet.
My apologies for these ramblings being a bit incoherent. Thanks again for posting.
–Sean
P.S. I also enjoyed your “Spoken Word poetry” about the state of travel digital content today.
@Sean. Thanks for the comment. All valid points.
What’s the level of irony around the paywalling model? I don’t get that. It’s just obvious to me, if you switch terms radically on your viewers in midstream – no matter how valid the reason – you’re probably going to create some level of resentment when they hit a paywall one morning. On the other hand, if you provide some interesting content plus a section that’s paywalled for subscription from the inception of your site, then hopefully no one feels led down a garden path, no?
I hope you had a grand time though. Me, I have no winter clothes left to visit England in because my beat is strictly tropical nowadays.:)
Wish I’d been there to weigh in on the side of paywalls – as per your post Kevin I believe very much that if something is good, it is worth paying for. No debate.
@jeremy – you were missed!