Infographic: The mostly self-serving state of travel blogging in 2013

The rise of the travel blogger is a bit like the rise of Long Island City in New York: every year for the last decade the New York Times has been doing a story on LIC as the next hot neighborhood in NYC, only to do another one next year saying it is coming, soon.

And people who live in LIC think they’re in a frontier community of sorts and boast about it all the time (um, that would be me too, an LIC resident), about more open space, amazing views, authentic Queens within reach, to the point of mild annoyance of everyone else.

That would almost perfectly mirror the “state” of travel bloggers as well.

FHR, a UK-based hotel accommodation services company, did a survey of travel bloggers at the end of 2012, to the take the pulse of “rapidly-expanding industry” of travel blogging as it puts it, and comes up with some interesting stats, which it made into, what else, an infographic.

Among them:

• 74 percent of them care about SEO and work on it.
• 94 percent monetize their blog, 86 percent through sponsored posts (somewhat controversial because of cases of lack of disclosure)
• 91 percent charge for sponsored posts (why wouldn’t they, that is why it is called “sponsored”)
• Good portion of travel bloggers keep multiple blogs. More blogs, more revenue opportunities, of course.