Traveler 2.0

I recently came across this website. What they are planning to do is pay for 30 people to travel around the world for a year.

This is something which I happen to know something about.

Let me run the numbers:

At a minimum, it would cost $10,000 a year to travel around the world. This would be visiting the poor countries, eating instant noodles, and not really spending much money on anything other than what you’d need to survive. That averages to $27.40/day, every day for a year. Realistically, you are looking at $20,000 to travel for a full year.

Traveler 2.0 is expecting their travelers to visit a new city every 3 days on average. That means you are actually moving around and paying for transportation. This puts the expense at least $20,000/year if not more. Moreover, if you want people to follow along, you’ll want to visit the sexy places, and those are mostly in Europe, Asia and North America and those are expensive.

Lets use $20,000/year as a base. I think it is very low for a schedule of 1 city per 3 days, but it is a good lower estimate.

$20,000 x 30 = $600,000 for the first year, just for paying for travel expenses. Everyone and their brother will be applying for this, so the application process will be difficult and there is a high probability that they will get a lot of stinkers who are no good at blogging. Toss marketing, administrative and other expenses on top, and you are looking at a minimum of $1,000,000 the first year alone.

They expect to have 100,000 unique visitors per day in the first month. This is total horse shit. I follow most travel sites, including major ones. The only sites with that sort of traffic are the ones who have established brands outside of the Internet: National Geographic, Discovery Channel, Frommers, etc. You aren’t going to get that much traffic in the first month. It is absurd. It takes time to build an audience. They are just sort of assuming success in the business plan.

Take the top 30 travel bloggers (of which I’d easily count myself as one) and you don’t have 100,000 unique visitors per day. Nothing close. Take the top 1,000 and you probably don’t, because most travel blogs are only followed by friends and family.

Here is how they describe how they will make money:

Under precondition, each traveller is required to maintain a blog site, for the aim of creating a following and gaining
interest in the TRAVELLER 2.0 brand. All travellers will be expected to review any services and products they
utilise during this campaign period and encourage suppliers to register their services with TRAVELLER 2.0.

So, they don’t even have the suppliers lined up. The people traveling are supposed to be doing sales.

If you are visiting a new city every 3 days, plus doing all this, where are you going to find time to do anything interesting that would make people want to read your blog??? Shit, I can barely do what I’m doing and I’m not trying to do sales and review products I use.

What is the incentive of the people traveling to do this? I assume there will be some sort of contract which will probably make a bunch of disgruntled travelers after a few months. They will be stuck trying to enforce a contract on a 20-something with no assets who is out of the country.

Read the small print at the bottom of the page. “* Conditions and set criteria apply. Remuneration based on profit outcome.” So, there is a good chance you wont get a dime if they don’t make any money….and they wont. Certainly not if they are basing it on “profit” and not including travelers as a cost.

Scam.