Confessions of a Travel Blogger

As a travel blogger, I always have to accept criticism from users about their check-in experience. How long can I continue to create works by packaging check-in points and creating fake scenes?

Yunying (pseudonym) had expected the complaints and even insults that came from private messages from time to time.

As a travel blogger, she occasionally feels the urge to quibble when faced with negative reviews such as "The scene is not like this at all", "Scammers should go to jail", "Waste of time, I have reported it". But this inappropriate emotion will soon be suppressed by the increasing number of collection views.

Besides, Yunying was in the wrong. Before May Day, she posted a travel note on social media, strongly recommending a stream suitable for taking photos, using eye-catching words such as "super niche", "film and television poster level", and "this is the romance of the county town" to emphasize how worth visiting it is.

Many people believed it and came from far away to check in. It turned out that the so-called "poster-level stream" was just a small ditch outside the county town. If you don't have some composition skills or pre-preparation, you will probably take pictures of stranded garbage and overgrown weeds - but you can take pictures of Jia Zhangke's movie posters. I also went to see it. In addition to being impressed by Yunying's creative ability, I also felt that she was not wronged to be criticized.

The environment around the creek

Yunying admitted that there was some exaggeration in this creation, but she tried to make up for it: "This is really not a scam in tourism content. Let's not worry about whether it is a stream or a ditch. If you spend some time to find the angle, you can really take a good photo, right? Compared to those who make something out of nothing, I am still quite conscientious."

Moreover, according to her experience, the fans of small travel bloggers are not fixed, and netizens usually leave after scolding them, which basically does not cause too much negative impact and can be dealt with coldly. Yunying's top priority is to think about how to package the next "niche" check-in point and how long her career can last.

1. Make the stinky ditch a check-in point

In March this year, when Yunying saw the poster of "The Dream Return" on the Internet, an idea flashed through her mind: Can I find a similar check-in location? After all, fans and passers-by were discussing Guo Jingming's aesthetics, and the makeup and composition of the poster were in full swing.

Travel bloggers have always liked to find inspiration from movies, TV shows, and variety shows, which naturally generate topics and popularity. When "Where the Wind Goes" became popular, they quickly switched to Dali life. Now that "My Altay" is a hit, they immediately rushed to Habahe County, Xinjiang.

It’s just that it’s too expensive to check in the same style, which is a creative cost that most travel bloggers cannot afford. Yunying told Hard Candy that county travel bloggers like her have few fans and it’s difficult to monetize. “I can’t really follow the trend, and ‘faking’ is more cost-effective.” So after the poster of “The Dream Returns” became popular, the first thing she thought of was to find a similar pond or stream.

Yunying visited several places. "Some have nice scenery, but it takes two and a half hours to drive from the center of Changsha. They are too remote and no one will go there. Some are not fresh enough because other bloggers have been there long ago and have been through a round of 'anti-fraud'."

Therefore, the small river at the beginning became the most compromised choice. After deciding on the location, Yunying chose a weekend with good weather to create on site. "I found some large leaves as props and brought a scoop net to clean up the garbage. It took nearly two hours to shoot. The total number of views of this note is more than 400,000, which is my best work this year. It's worth it."

In Yunying's opinion, this is far from the ceiling of travel bloggers' imagination, not even her own ceiling. She once recommended a stone shaped like an eagle's beak, with a photo of standing on it overlooking a town, and the copywriting was "You can also take photos of life in the county town." To check in at this place, you have to drive for more than ten minutes on the mountain road, and there is really only a bare stone on the scene.

According to Yunying, the undeveloped strange rocks, ancient villages and forests are the focus of the county's tourism bloggers. "In the eyes of many young netizens, these places are mysterious and wild. We can package them with concepts such as vitality and natural energy fields, and teach people to relax in the most relaxed postures." The most unexpected thing for Yunying was that she passed by the flower wall of an abandoned primary school and wrote a spring-themed photo guide, but she was also chased by a large number of netizens for the address.

Of course, in order to prevent being reported, Yunying will still work hard on the copywriting. The most common is to add some limited scenes or time, such as "morning after the rain" and "gift of early autumn". If netizens who follow the trend to check in express dissatisfaction, they can attribute the reason to the wrong timing. "Anyway, this kind of place is boring, and no one should be willing to go there a second time."

2. Fraud, the fate of travel bloggers

Yunying was also "tricked" into the travel blogger business.

At the beginning of last year, she was overwhelmed by work and frequently read news about people quitting their jobs. She was deeply hurt and attracted by the glamorous life of travel bloggers. They were all young people, why was their life like a wilderness while she could only play the role of a beast of burden? After learning from the pain, Yunying decided to join the team of people who quit their jobs and live abroad.

She followed the trend and went to Dali. She rented a garden courtyard for a small amount of money and began to share her daily life of relaxing and socializing on social media. Fortunately, Yunying happened to take advantage of the topic bonus of quitting her job to travel and becoming a popular city. In just two months, she had six works with over a million views and gained more than 100,000 fans on the Internet.

Strictly speaking, Yunying did not become popular because of her travel content. Her best piece of content was about how cool and comfortable it was to "quit your job and become a travel blogger". To this day, many netizens who want to replicate the same life still leave comments in the comment section to learn from her. Now it seems that she has already begun to let her imagination run wild in this note that seems to be stating facts, deliberately beautifying the kind of life she has chosen.

Yunying has posted a series of Dali videos, which attracted considerable traffic in the early stage, but the popularity gradually declined. She had to start learning from similar creators and became a special forces-style travel blogger following the hot spots, running along the rising route of Dali, Zibo, Quanzhou, and Tianjin, a popular city on the Internet.

At this stage, Yunying's update frequency and creative level are still rising steadily. She told Hard Candy that she can write several articles about food, drink and entertainment when she goes to a big city or an internet celebrity city. "I can write at least three travel notes when I go to Changsha for a day on weekends. For example, I can write about internet celebrity stores, codes, categories, etc."

Of course, there are two obvious problems with this type of creation. First, there are quite a lot of creations on the same topic. If you can't find a novel angle, you won't get much traffic. Second, the creation cost is quite high, which greatly squeezes the living space of mid- and low-end travel bloggers. In half a year, Yunying's savings were almost gone, and she had to return to her hometown in the county.

Unexpectedly, county tourism and county tourism bloggers became popular again at this time, and a new creative logic emerged.

Compared with first- and second-tier cities, the tourism resources that can be developed in county towns are very limited. People just visit those few places and eat at those few restaurants. In fact, there is no need for any travel guides or check-in guides. But the good thing is that when she returns to the county town, Yun Ying, who has more than 100,000 fans, can also bear the title of Internet celebrity. With the accumulation of traffic, she has also been invited by many stores in the county town to stand on the platform and check in. "I earn three to five hundred yuan for each promotion, and occasionally I have travel packages from other places. I can earn an extra one or two thousand yuan a month, which is very good in a small county town."

Unfortunately, such an easy life did not last long. On the one hand, there are limited stores in the county that need to be promoted, and they are usually one-time sales with little chance of repurchase. On the other hand, Yunying's creativity has obviously declined after returning to her hometown, and the limitations of relying on her old capital have gradually emerged. Under the dual pressure of monetization and content, she embarked on the road of faking "niche check-in points in the county".

This is a common dilemma faced by tourism bloggers in the county. Yunying knows clearly that there is nothing worth visiting in her hometown. Any scenic spots with a little appeal have already been developed by the government. It is not their turn to dig up and package them. "It's not that we want to commit fraud. We don't have money to travel. If we stop updating, we will lose followers. In short, we have no choice."

3. Where is the county tourism heading?

Compared to having no traffic, Yunying thinks that being scolded is also a pleasure, "At least it means that there is attention and I can continue to do it." During the May Day holiday, the small ditch allowed her to successfully refresh the reading data of a single note in the past six months, and once again rekindled her confidence in creation. In particular, the cost of tourism fraud is low enough, and it is nothing more than some verbal disputes. According to Yunying's observation, travel bloggers in first-tier cities may make a certain undeserved Internet celebrity check-in point popular, and there may be public controversy after being exposed. "But it is just a general attack without focus, and it will not be directed at a certain blogger or a certain creator. Every time it is just a quarrel over aesthetic hegemony, and the damage is almost zero."

Bloggers in county towns face even less pressure. Netizens who have been "scammed" by them often console themselves by saying "it's just like that in a small county town", and at most complain a few words, as negative reviews don't have much room to ferment. Moreover, people who travel to county towns are often just tired of city life, and take advantage of weekends and holidays to go to the countryside to relax, and the more meaningful thing is the journey.

But the relatively relaxed public opinion environment still cannot offset Yunying's anxiety. In the past year, she has tried soft advertising, live broadcasting, and other monetization methods, but it is becoming increasingly difficult for travel bloggers to make money. The current situation is that there is almost no atmosphere for commercial investment in the county. The usual practice is to cooperate with restaurants, amusement parks, homestays and other places to strive for some discounts for issuing coupons and opening groups, and then earn commissions based on the final conversion. In addition, try to produce some popular content to obtain a share of the platform's traffic.

"Do you think we don't want to create well? I also want to follow elementary school history to check in around the world, drink coffee in a hundred cities, and look for forgotten ancient villages. These are truly valuable things, but these creations cost money, and only the rich second generation and MCN agencies can afford them."

Therefore, most county tourism bloggers only produce pictures and texts, which is the most cost-effective way. "It's just a small amount of money. If you take it as your main business, it would be difficult to survive without hundreds of thousands of fans. A colleague I know spent hundreds of thousands of dollars shooting videos and only made two or three thousand in total."

Of course, the unprecedented popularity of county tourism has given these bloggers hope. According to Ctrip data, during the May Day holiday this year, county hotel orders increased by 68% year-on-year, and scenic spot ticket orders increased by 151% year-on-year. Zhengding, Hebei, Anji, Zhejiang, Yangshuo, Guangxi, Pingtan, Fujian and other places are particularly popular. Yunying told Yingtangjun that a group of county tourism bloggers who had stopped updating have come back to life, "Everyone has the confidence to start the 'scam' business again."

In order to reap the benefits of county tourism, many local governments have also rethought their promotional routes and extended olive branches to local travel bloggers. After May Day, Yunying attended a closed-door meeting to discuss with relevant departments and tourism colleagues whether a local bridge could be promoted as an Internet celebrity attraction. "It's just an ordinary cable bridge, but the higher-ups think it's something that other counties don't have. Anyway, as long as the area is small enough, each town has a unique setting."

All these made Yunying feel very excited. Originally, the real motivation for her to continue creating was fame. "In a small place like ours, if you can have more than 100,000 fans, your relatives and friends will think you have made a name for yourself. Internet celebrities are the best filter that life has given me. I really don't want to take it off."