Only three months late… Oops! As is my annual habit, I would like to take a few moments to summarize my Voyageer 2025 year in review. Well, this is going to be a quick one.
Have you heard of Dead Internet Theory? It’s a massive internet conspiracy theory that I do not believe, but it does have a few unique insights. Basically, the theory is that the majority of web traffic is driven by bots, comments are made by bots (just look at Facebook and X and you will see a lot of bot content), and posts are written by bots.
I will assure you that a human being writes this blog… me. Please see the above photo. I think travel blogs are poised for a comeback as AI continues to fabricate itineraries rife with errors and unrealistic day-to-day expectations. Please help prove me right by sharing any of the posts here on The Voyageer that you might find helpful to your fellow travel enthusiasts. Leave a comment on what you would like to see more of!
This is the first year I have started to get some traffic from Chat GPT and Perplexity, among other AI sources. I am glad that the site is being recommended to users instead of just paraphrasing the posts I spend hours on (although I do know for a fact that the entire content of this site has been scraped by the AI engines).
As always, I get visitors from every corner of the world. In 2025, I had at least one hit from over 134 countries, including some micro-nations! The United States continued to be my largest source of traffic, and my second and third sources of traffic were Japan and Singapore. What interesting data!
Guest posts
From The Voyageer’s inception, it’s been my goal to open this blog to new voices in addition to my own. I am always looking for travel lovers to post here. One person can’t possibly visit every corner of the US or of the world; not to mention that everyone has their own lens through which they approach the world. A huge thank you to Jean (my mother), who wrote three very interesting posts for me last Spring. Don’t forget you can contact me to join the contributor team if you have a travel experience you’d like to share.
Here’s the part where it has the potential to sound like one of those NPR pledge drives.
I started The Voyageer with the goal of making money doing what I love (which is travel writing). Blogging is not my full-time career, but content creation here at The Voyageer is a fun and creative outlet that I enjoy doing, but making a little money to break even and cover web hosting helps motivate me to write, research, and recommend more travel posts here.
Some bloggers I follow have transparency policies where they share how much they’ve earned blogging. I like the idea so here you go: My grand total for 2025 is $116 earned from affiliate links, $0 from sponsored posts,$0 from personalized trip itineraries, and $219.85 from booking. com commissions. Thank you so much for your support.
I had to make a shift halfway through the year when booking. com purged thousands of small creators like me from their affiliate network. I pivoted to TravelPayouts and overall, it was a fairly smooth transition with a considerable amount of invisible work to sync hundreds of old posts to the new system.
Despite the downtick in published content, I’m committed to bringing you high-quality, human-written travel content (when I publish, I strive to make it worth it). Running a website takes time, money and I am always striving to reach and then surpass my break-even point. If you would like to support me, you can book your hotels through my hotel affiliate links (included on most of my posts) or, you can shop with one of my affiliates on the sidebar such as Big Bus and JR Pass.
In conclusion…
I want to thank everyone who has followed along since the beginning, and also those of you who have just joined me recently. Thanks for all your support! Cheers to the new year!
