Is Facebook Killing the Influencer Economy?

Is Facebook set to kill the influencer economy? That question arose during my recent conversation with Gary Arndt of Everything Everywhere and the Everything Everywhere podcast, and it’s a question we seriously have to consider and contend with in the coming year or years.

He explained every time a brand or an agency, or one of the influencer marketing platforms, pays an influencer to post content on social platform, those are dollars that the social platforms aren’t getting. How long do you think Mark Zuckerberg and the MBAs that pull the strings at those networks will tolerate that?

Gary Arndt is one of the most influential travel creators in the world. His Everything Everywhere blog has been a mainstay for the industry for more than a decade. I asked him to come on the show to discuss is recent pivot to podcasting. But boy, did I ever uncover so much more. We talk about his shift away from social media influencer work because of COVID, the volatility of the travel space and the potential threat from Facebook. He goes deep in his strategy — including the dollars and cents monetization approach — to building his new podcast. 

But we also talk about how social media is killing blogging, how an expert in the field collaborates with brands in multiple mediums and what mistakes he sees brands and influencers making today he would clean up if he could.

I call this a “head explode” episode. Listen. Learn. And share!

You can find Gary Arndt on LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram. The Everything Everywhere blog is on the main website at everything-everywhere.com. There you can find the Everything Everywhere Daily Podcast, or you can find it wherever you listen to podcasts.

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Winfluence Transcript – Gary Arndt – Everything Everywhere

Jason Falls
Hello again friends thanks for listening to Winfluence – The Influence Marketing Podcast. Is Facebook set to kill the influencer economy? That question arose during my recent conversation with Gary Arndt of Everything Everywhere and the Everything Everywhere Podcast, and it’s a question we seriously have to consider and contend with in the coming year or years.

Jason Falls
Here’s the scoop: Facebook owns Instagram. Every time a brand or an agency or one of the influencer marketing platforms pays an influencer to post content on those platforms. Those are dollars that the social platforms aren’t getting. How long do you think Mark Zuckerberg and the MBAs that pull the strings that those networks will tolerate that? You’re starting to see shifts in that direction Facebook launched its Brand Collabs Manager a couple of years ago. That affects Instagram as well. But perhaps more insidiously, for a creator to tag a brand, you have to utilize the collabs connection to enable both proper disclosure on the network and in some cases for the brand or service in question to be able to track their analytics. To put it bluntly, if Facebook and Instagram or any other network wanted to change its policy tomorrow to say you the brand or you the influencer have to pay us a commission on any influence or execution on our platform it could.

Jason Falls
Gary Arndt is one of the most influential travel creators in the world. His Everything Everywhere blog has been a mainstay for the industry for more than a decade. As we talked recently to dive into his recent pivot to podcasting. I uncovered a wealth of information and experience from Gary for you. I can probably break this episode up into three or four different episodes. We talked about his shift away from social media influencer work because of COVID, the volatility of the travel space and the potential threat from Facebook. He goes deep into his strategy, including the dollars and cents monetization approach to building his new podcast. You’ll not only learn a ton of information here if you want to add podcasting or other channels to build your influence, but you’ll hear Gary’s thoughts on how Facebook is killing the influencer economy, social media is killing blogging, but also how an expert in the field collaborates with brands in multiple mediums and what mistakes he sees brands and influencers making today, he would clean up if he could.

Jason Falls
Ladies and gentlemen, this is a head explode episode. The brilliant and influential Gary Arndt up next on Winfluence.

Jason Falls
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Jason Falls
Okay, first off, Gary, I can count on one and a half hands, how many U.S. states I have not been to. I think you can do that with countries of the world. Am I right? What’s the what’s the latest tally?

Gary Arndt
If you include UN member states, I have been to 130. So I have 63 more to go. And I’ve been to every state in the US twice. And I’ve been to every Canadian province three times.

Jason Falls
Wow. That’s, that’s big. Well, I mean, you know, when you when you do nothing, but travel for I think it was nine years or something, you can do that. Right?

Gary Arndt
Yeah. So just the brief background for people who don’t know who I am, I sold my house in 2007. Had an internet company that I started in the 90s. And I thought I’d travel around the world for a year. And that year kind of turned into a decade. And I really just never stopped. Even when I stopped traveling full time. I mean, I still spent a third to half of my year on the road for the last five years. So.

Jason Falls
So I mean, with with access to, you know, all that great content from traveling, you’re a photographer as well, so, but you also, you know, have a real knack for uncovering the culture and the interesting things to do when you are visiting a place. But without access to all that great content as a full time traveler and your ability to share that in compelling ways. You know, you became an influencer. I think, arguably the top travel blogger in the world. I know you were one of the top 25 travel blogs in the world in 2010. According to Time Magazine, which is no small thing. I think you’ve been National Geographic traveler finalist for blogger that you’re twice. I think you also have three Lowell Thomas awards, which is the most prestigious prize and travel journalism too. So you kind of built a blueprint for travel bloggers, and in many ways, all bloggers on just how to build a business out of blogging. Did you know you were doing that as you did it? Or kind of? Were you just figuring it out along the way?

Gary Arndt
No, I wanted to travel. So I mean, I had a bit I’ve been working on the internet for over 25 years now. So basically, since the web was a thing, I had been doing stuff on it professionally. So when I started to travel, I started a website, because that’s just kind of what I do. I I’ve always had a personal website, but there was no plans to make a business out of it. And I was traveling for about three and a half years before anybody in the travel and tourism industry even called me even talk to me. So it was it was not until 2010. And tell anyone ever reached out to me, just to give you an idea. So I didn’t make a dime. For like the first five years I did this. So it was not. And I should say, and I’ve had this discussion with many of the early people. We did it because we loved it. And there’s a lot of people recently, younger, who, you know, we had websites, we had email lists and RSS feeds and that stuff. We didn’t have Instagram and any of this. And now all these people are influencers and I use air quotes around that. And you know, it’s not it’s just about showing off, hey, here I am in this place. Oh, look at the great time I’m having and you know, some fake photoshoot they took hours to set up. So the people I think that I’ve really had the lasting, I don’t know, a following, in least in in the industry I’m in are the people that really did it. And they did it because they loved it. And there’s a level of respect I think that people have for them, as opposed to kind of the real shallow influencers you’re seeing on social media where it’s all just about selfies.

Jason Falls
Yeah. Well, there’s a there’s a big difference. And I talked about this in the forthcoming book, which, you know, I love to plug of course. But I talked about the difference between influencers and people with influence. And I think that’s a very distinctive difference in the travel space. Because when you’ve got people who are doing it, because they love it, and because they love to share the knowledge and they love to be helpful to other folks. And, you know, to use kind of those old school tactics. They’ve got, you know, an archive of content in a blog that shows they’ve been doing this for a long time. And they really can contribute to people’s travel decision making and things like that, versus you know, the people who are they don’t really have a blog anymore. They just kind of use Instagram as their primary point of contact. I think in the travel space, there’s a there’s a big difference in how the audience reacts. And I think you hit it on the head. They look at the people who are a little longer in the tooth, who have a lot of deep rich content and social media doesn’t always deliver that.

Gary Arndt
Yeah, and you know, travel is a lifelong thing. It’s not a you can be a fashion a young, fashionable, hip person, I think it’d be an influencer in fashion, simply by your taste. Travel takes time. If you look at some of the most respected people and travel Arthur Fromer, I want to say is like 92. Rick Steves, probably in his mid 60s. It takes time, you can’t just do a lot of you know, and most people in your in your 20s, you don’t have a lot of money. So you can’t travel. If you look at most people who travel, if you ever go to a national park, it’s going to be older people. That’s where a lot of the money spent because they have time and money. So it’s Yeah, it’s a very different thing. And I think that one of the things I’ve seen so many marketers, at least in travel, they were very late to the game. Like I said, No one contacted me for a very long time. And then all of a sudden, everyone wanted to be on Twitter, they had to be on Twitter, and they started throwing money at Twitter. And then it had to be Facebook, and then oh, Pinterest, and then Snapchat, and they always felt like they were gonna get left behind. So they had to jump on whatever the latest thing was. And I remember when Snapchat was becoming popular, I was like, You do know the demographics of this group, right? That this app was created. So kids could go to parties in high school and not get trouble when they share pictures of them drunk. That’s the point of this app. Those people don’t travel.

Gary Arndt
If you’re in high school, you neither have the ability or the money to travel. So why are you targeting this demographic, and people just didn’t care they needed to, you know, oh, we’re doing the hip latest thing online. And if anything is going to come out of this pandemic, I think it’s going to add some sanity, that the things that work, are the things I mean, Internet’s not been around that long. So I hate to call it traditional, but like, email lists, a website, a podcast, things like that, that they work in. Let me tell you, I don’t I don’t, I don’t see Instagram coming back. Because every dollar you spend with an influencer on Instagram is $1 that Mark Zuckerberg is not getting. And in their mind, that is a problem that needs to be addressed. They want you to spend the money with Facebook, not with influencers. So I believe they’re going to kill the whole influencer economy eventually.

Jason Falls
I don’t necessarily doubt that they I mean, Facebook obviously has a brand collaboration platform now where they want brands to go to engage influencers so that Facebook and Instagram get their cut. Not exactly real popular out there with either influencers or brands, but they’re certainly trying and they can, they can definitely, you know, tighten the screws on that. So kind of on a related sort of tangent here, I had a question kind of down in my list of things I wanted to ask you. But I’m going to bring it up now. Because, you know, travel is a different animal than some verticals. But the the topic we’re talking about here, I think kind of lends into this. I think that travel is different, because that depth of content is something more sought after by people who are planning vacations, who or who are aspiring to travel the way people like you do. But how has blogging changed in the segment versus maybe what you have seen, you know, maybe 10 years ago or so. And as a follow up to that, our social networks and social media killing blogging, in travel, or elsewhere, or both.

Gary Arndt
It’s really different. So when I started my blog was my social media, people came to my website, and every day they would read what I posted. And I would just write thoughts about the place I was, I would, you know, some clever title for the blog post that was like a song lyric or something like that. Nowadays, I follow a bunch of travel blogs still via an RSS reader, which no one does anymore. Everyone’s writing the same article. It’s just listicle articles for SEO. That’s all it is. There is no organic sharing of articles, you can’t, you know, Facebook, you know, admitted makes it very hard to get links shared, are to get any traction that way. So it’s become a one trick pony in terms of where you get traffic from. And that’s search. And that’s it. And unique to the travel vertical. I’ve seen things where like Kylie Jenner posts about a makeup product and the next day sales spike. And I believe that, that that’s true, that travel doesn’t work that way. Right? Travel is distinguished by the fact that it’s a very long sales cycle. So if I talk about a place and you say I want to go there, it might be two or three years before you go and attributing the sale to where that idea initially came from is very hard. Second, it’s a big ticket item, going and purchasing a $20 lipstick. I don’t know how much lipstick costs, but you know that you know that that’s an impulse purchase, amount of money travels not like that. Not only are you going to spend 1000s of dollars, but you have to spend a lot of time. You have to, you know schedule time off from work you have to schedule time off from school, perhaps for your kids and stuff like that. There’s a lot that goes into it. So it’s a very different thing. And the other thing I noticed talking to a lot of other influencers in other niches, nobody cares about travel, unless they’re going on a trip. You don’t follow travel like you do sports or politics, right? There’s always something going on in sports, there’s always celebrity gossip, there’s always new tech news, there’s a new iPhone that’s coming out. There’s always new stuff. Nothing is new in travel. Literally nothing. Right. Mako Picchu, not changing. Right. So it, the average travel website is going to always get less traffic, usually a lot less traffic than, say, a food website, or a fashion website.

Gary Arndt
The redeeming part of it is that the expenditures that you spend on travel are usually going to be a lot more than what you’re spending on food, and usually even fashion. And that that’s kind of the uniqueness of that business.

Jason Falls
I wonder though, if if search is, obviously, you know, the the bloggers that you follow now and all the contents the same, everybody’s posting listicles to try to win search, and that’s become the one trick pony for getting traffic. I wonder if that isn’t the result of the fact that you know, you don’t have people that are going to follow travel content consistently, that they’re only going to go looking for something when they need to look for something and therefore search has to be your priority?

Gary Arndt
It absolutely is. And one of the problems is that Google talks about Oh, you have to have you know, they talk about EAT – expertise, authority and trustworthiness. Well, that doesn’t apply to travel. Because I can, I don’t want to even mention their names, I can tell you several sites that are getting millions to 10s of millions of pageviews per month, that are nothing but machined. You know, they have a list of 15 things to do in this fix it 15 things to do in this and it’s just a machine created list of destinations. All of the photos are taken from Shutterstock. All of the research is done on Wikipedia and other sites. And that’s all it is, and they just are killing it. And even a lot of the blogs, you know, all the stuff Google tells you not to do usually works. I’ve seen so many sites that are buying links and all this stuff, and they’re having a great deal of success with it. And at the end of the day, SEO is a zero sum game. If I ranked number one, you cannot rank number one. And and that’s life. And that’s why I’ve kind of I’m kind of just getting off the train. I don’t really even want to be honored anymore.

Jason Falls
Yeah, I was that was the my next sort of series of questions here was to make sure everybody knew that you know, Everything Everywhere is that award winning travel blog, but you’ve pivoted of late and have started, you know, a podcast which I want to ask more about the podcast more specifically in a minute. But I was going to ask the question, have you pivoted to the podcast and away from travel content. Because of that, because of COVID. Because of both?

Gary Arndt
Yes, to all the above. Even before COVID hit, Google had made some algorithm changes. And things were just starting to really suck. I didn’t like where it was going. There was no reason to travel anymore. I could I could write all the travel articles having being a quality photographer. So I’ve been named travel photographer of the year, three times in North America. None of that matters, the number of places I’ve been to the everything I’ve done and experienced none of that matters to Google. So that that was bothersome. And then in March, when the pandemic kind of hit and everything shut down. I lost 95% of my income.

Gary Arndt
I gotta tell you in a million years, I never thought that the travel industry would just disappear. Because it’s a really big business. You know, it’s on a par with things like agriculture and energy worldwide. And it did. And at first I thought, well, you know, in March, wow, this will probably be done by late April. And I was actually planning on a trip to China in May. Okay, that didn’t happen. And then I was thinking, all right, well, maybe I’ll run this thinking of running a tour to some national parks in the southwest in October. That didn’t happen. And and I lived in Minneapolis, just just to kind of throw salt on the wound. I lived in a block off Lake Street where all the riots happened this summer in my neighborhood was destroyed. Completely. Gas stations burned down. Buildings just demolished in nothing had been fixed for months. So I eventually just packed up all my stuff one day and and left. But I had in the back of my mind. And I plan this two years ago for a podcast. And the podcast wasn’t going to be a travel podcast per se. Because I’ve never cared about the house of travel, the flights, the airlines, the restaurants because we don’t we don’t go places to sit in an airplane. I always tell people, you know, there’s been these actually some places that are have been offering in airline experience during the pandemic, I’m like, get a TV dinner, get an uncomfortable chair, put it in a closet and sit there for eight hours.

Jason Falls
You nailed it!

Gary Arndt
But really, no one likes flying. It’s a thing you have to do to get somewhere cool. And so I had this idea of like, Well, why can’t I just tell the cool stories about these places, it doesn’t have to be about the hotels and all that like a normal travel thing. Because that’s, that’s what people really care about. And I started doing research, and I was really getting down a rabbit hole. So my first episode was gonna be on why the Mona Lisa is the most popular painting in the world. Because, you know, why is this painting that’s not of anyone famous, not a religious figure, so popular. And I’d heard that 25% of the people who go to the Louvre, go see the Mona Lisa and leave? Well, as it turns out, it’s 80%, not 20%. And I was I had like enough for two hours for a show. And I just did the math and a two hour show might work for Dan Carlin. But it the economics of a podcast like that a scripted podcast, not like doing interviews like this just didn’t work out. So come June, I kind of went back to the idea. Except I thought, Okay, what if I did it totally differently? What if I did a daily show? Every single day short episodes? Well, the economics of a daily show work so well, it’s not even funny. And when I told I had other friends who had successful podcasts, and I pitched the idea to them, they all said the same thing. It’s a great idea. But it’s gonna be a lot of work. And I was like, I got nothing else going on right now. I’ve lost all my business works, not a problem. And so I launched this, this podcast, and yeah, it was a big pivot. And this is where I’m putting all of my energy right now. And just to describe, everyone’s called everything everywhere daily. And every day is a story about something.

Gary Arndt
I’ve told the story of people of places, I’ve told the story of the guy who just carries the nuclear football with the President. The story of Nijmegen, in the Netherlands, where they have a walk across the bridge every day to honor the 48 American soldiers who died taking that bridge in World War Two. How many Nobel Prizes Albert Einstein would have won every day, something interesting that you can learn. And I have to write a script tends to be about 1500 to 2500 words every day. And that’s what I’m doing. But because it’s like an honor, if you want if you want me to go into the the nuts and bolts of the the economics behind it …

Jason Falls
Absolutely. Please do!

Gary Arndt
The average CPM you can get for a podcast is about $25 Could be more could be less $25 is an average. And is everyone listening to this, you know, CPM is cost per 1000. Now, if you have a weekly show, one subscriber will be responsible for approximately 50 downloads a year, right. So you take a week off for Christmas, whatever, 50 instead of 52. If I’m doing a daily show, I’m getting something that’s a fifth of a CPM. So it’d be $2.50 is the value of that subscriber over the course of a year. If you’re doing 365 shows, at 25, let’s say I just have one ad buy or I could I could put into so I’ve been calculating it at $25 for a mid roll plus $15. For a post roll, that’d be $40. The value of that subscriber is $14.40. That’s seven times more than what you’re going to because it’s a daily show instead of a weekly show. So to kind of boost and jumpstart the audience growth process, you know, I did all the things you do. I posted on social media went out to my email list on my website did all that. And then I began buying advertising on podcast apps, overcast podcast Republic, I even had a coupon for Bing. I’ve been doing search ads. And the cost of acquisition for a subscriber for me is somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 cents to $1.80. That is an enormous arbitrage between the cost of acquisition for a subscriber and the value of a subscriber. And now that I’m starting to monetize it, I’m able to basically take all that money that’s coming in, pump it right back into growth, and grow much faster. So my downloads this month will be over 60,000 the first month it was 6000. So I’ve had a tenfold growth in six months. And I’ve only just now started this process. So, you know, the economics of it doing it daily just are so so much better that in and I’ve also because of the nature of the show, it’s not a travel show, but it’s travel adjacent.

Gary Arndt
So, one of the first sponsors was the Spanish Tourism Board. And I’ve worked with them in the past. And they’re real fans of me, they subscribe to the podcast. And after listening to it for a few months, they said, they came to me and they said, We would like you to do this. So I did 10 episodes, something about Spain, I did one on Picasso, one on Spanish are Christmas traditions and Catalonia, one on Spanish food festivals, things like that, just different odd things, and not not, you know, talking about the hotels and stuff and and they loved it. So I can still do the travel stuff, make it travel related. So I can use all my contacts there. But also pretty much do whatever I want.

Jason Falls
That’s fantastic. And, and incredible insight for people out there who have the idea of doing a podcast. That’s that’s the math there, folks. So hit rewind and take notes on all that that’s really good stuff.

Gary Arndt
Yeah. And you say your I should say, whatever your No, you, if someone starts a podcast, their goal may not be to sell ads, right? It could be a corporate podcast in you’re doing it for branding reasons. But however you do it, figure out what the value is of a subscriber. And then figure out you know, like the annual value, whatever that might be, whether they’re buying a product, whether you have a course, a book, whatever. And once you do that advertising, I think just is simpler to calculate that once you can figure that out, then it really changes your approach to the show and how you can grow it.

Jason Falls
Interesting. So again, on a tangential related note, I want to talk about Gary Arndt the influencer because you partner with brands on campaigns where you’re posting about them on your channels, or you have before, I think you’ve done some partnerships before where they engage you to provide content for them, probably your use of your photography and such. But you also consult with brands in the travel space, or you did before the travel industry kind of came to a screeching halt, to helping them with technology and things like that, of course, we met because you also speak at conferences and events. So when a brand reaches out to you for a collaboration or a partnership, maybe aside from the podcast, but maybe including the podcast, what gets you excited about working with a given client?

Gary Arndt
How open minded they are, how willing they are to to do new things. Like this thing I just mentioned with the Spanish Tourism Board. Travel has been almost non existent hasn’t done anything with podcasting for forever, you know, how long is podcasting been around 15 years, they’ve done pretty much nothing. And there’s been no interest. So for for Spain to come to me and say, yeah, we want to do this, you know, they’re they’re taking a bit of a risk, at least from from their perspective, my podcast is relatively new, I think that’s great to be able to, to try something. And it wasn’t a huge investment on their part. And it’s not like there was anything else going on right now anyhow, because no one’s traveling. But for them, it was an opportunity to get into top of mind for people to be hearing about Spain. So that’s, I think, always a good sign that there’s so many people, they see what other people are doing. And it’s okay, we’re gonna do that. And they really don’t want to stray too much from what they see other people doing. Because if they do what other people do, then you won’t get fired. And not getting fired, is the thing that really motivates most people. If you’re you remember the old expression from the old computer days, no one ever got fired by hiring IBM. And that’s a lot that goes into it. And so what a lot of people do is they just see what their competitors do and what the industry does. And if you do that, even if it blows up in your face, you can always point and say, Well, this is what you know everyone’s doing. Whereas doing something novel and unique is is taking a risk. And not a lot of people necessarily want to do that. The other thing, and this is kind of going to contradict what I’m saying. I mentioned before this tendency to always want to be doing whatever the latest thing is without really thinking it through.

Gary Arndt
The last … well, I’m not doing it this year, but the last several years I’ve spoken at the New York Times travel show. And I said the two areas that that travel marketing is dropping the ball is email and podcasting. And these are the two oldest things out there really in terms of online marketing. And they’re the reason why they’re so old is because it works. It’s successful. And I mean, I guess It’s kind of weird, but doing something daring and travel right now means doing traditional things. You know …

Jason Falls
That’s an interesting way to look at it.

Gary Arndt
But TikTok it’s it’s it’s literally advertising or doing something on a podcast, right?

Jason Falls
I read recently that 96% of content creators say they want to do far more than just social media posts endorsing a product. That obviously that’s true for you. What does an ideal relationship with a brand look like for you in a total package, if you had an ideal situation where a brand comes in and says, Here are all the things you do and hear all the things we want? What does that look like for you?

Gary Arndt
Well, at a minimum, they’re gonna collaborate with me in terms of what the product and what the project is going to be. The best ones I’ve had is when that happened. So I did a project with three m, for post it notes, you might think, well, what the hell this post it notes have to do with travel. So I did do a series of social media posts. But one of the things I did is, you know, those little stickers that you put on a contract, there’s a little arrow that says sign here. So I took a map of the world. And I put those all over the map, with all the places I’ve been pointing, I’ve been here, I’ve been here, I’ve been here, I’ve been here, I’ve been here. And I, the math was quite full, because I’ve been to a lot of places. But that went over like gangbusters, people loved it. And it got shared and, and everyone loved it. And they never would have came up with that if they hadn’t asked me. You know, they just wanted me to write things on a post it note and post it in a place and that’s fine. But you know, get get the person you’re working with involved and stuff. One of the things that I’ve had just horrible luck with is pitching an idea to a brand or to a destination. Because more often than not, they’re more interested in the ideas that they come up with than your idea. Even if it’s the same idea. You can pitch it, they’ll reject it, they’ll come back to you A month later with the exact same idea. But as long as it’s their idea. And they can, you know, internally champion it as such, then it’s something that they’ll do.

Jason Falls
Yeah, that’s true in the agency world to the best agency people, the best strategists out there. And I don’t know that I’m necessarily one of them. But it’s an art to making the client say yes, by making them think it was their idea. And if you can do that, and close the gap on the the client coming back to you a month later, two months later, with the same idea, only they said, they came up with it, if you can do it in a conversation versus waiting for a month, that’s where you really make your money as an agency strategist is by pitching things in a way that the client, you know, owns them. I’m not real good at that. Because I like to own part of the idea. I guess it’s my ego at play there. But I’ve definitely seen that happen.

Jason Falls
I wonder on that kind of On a related note, what mistakes Do you see being made in the space or maybe before COVID and travel kind of, you know, erupted a little bit here got disrupted a little bit? What mistakes Do you see being made in the space either by brands, or by other influencers that you observe?

Gary Arndt
Well, the influencer one is easy. They make it about themselves. And the brands fall in for this stuff. Because we don’t care about numbers, we really care about quality content, the way that really means we really just care about numbers. Because they’ll you know, they’ll show themselves in this, you know, wearing an evening gown at the top of a mountain. And something that is completely ridiculous. And then the destination where they’re at is just a backdrop for them. Where they are doesn’t matter. You know, they’re just taking a picture of themselves. And I don’t understand how that sells a destination. Being a background to someone, yet. There are so many travel brands, I’ve worked with that especially the destinations and tourism boards, which if you’re not in the travel industry, they they represent a large amount of the spend, right? Because it’s primarily government money. And they don’t have to show a profit, which is a whole host of problems because they don’t really care if it’s successful. They just need to be able to show something to a higher up and say look what we did look at these numbers. So it’s not necessarily getting people to want to go to that place. If someone is just wearing you know, an item of clothing or it’s a selfie, it’s not promoting the place it’s promoting the person and there should be more than that. There should be more of that trying to actually sell the product and the destination not promote the influencer. And with the influencer side. That’s the problem. I don’t think that’s going to go on forever. I’m a big believer in what’s called Stein’s law and Stein’s law states that anything that can’t go on forever won’t. And I think that the pandemic is going to cause people at least in the travel industry to reconsider a lot of what they were doing, because money is going to be very, very tight for the next several years.

Gary Arndt
Many of the tourism boards get their money from taxes from like hotel taxes. Well, no one’s in hotels, so they don’t have any money. So any marketing they do, they’re gonna have to be very, very careful with what they do cruise ships, a tour operators, they’re basically doing zero revenue. So they’re not going to be in a position when they do start marketing, to be able to to have a lot of leeway to to waste money. So what I was talking about before in terms of, you know, being able to take a risk, maybe people are not going to be doing that for the next several years. So I don’t think that money is going to be going to that type of influencer in the future.

Jason Falls
Do you think the influencers that sort of break the the code on that and are able to drive transactions and what are all or part of the solution for the travel industry getting back on its feet?

Gary Arndt
I don’t know. And, and this is really one of the problems as far as like, what travel is going to do going forward is that I don’t know, travel, print media, has been a pretty established thing for a couple decades. And right now, every travel section in the United States as far as newspapers, with the exception of the Washington Post, I believe, and maybe the Minneapolis Star Tribune is gone. All of them, the LA Times The New York Times, as they said, they’re taking it offline temporarily during the pandemic, but I don’t believe it’s ever going to come back, the LA Times just close theirs. They’re all gone. There were three big travel magazines. One of them National Geographic traveler just closed its doors last year. One, Travel and Leisure just got sold this last week, and the company that bought it, bought it for branding purposes, not for the magazine. And so I don’t know, what’s what’s really going to happen going forward. Personally, I’m positioning myself, so I do not have to rely on the travel industry anymore. If I should be able to work with them. That’s great. But my plan going forward is to try to monetize as much as possible directly from my audience, and not the industry because I just don’t know if there’s going to be any money. I don’t know how they’re going to be spending it over the next two years.

Gary Arndt
Smart approach for everybody out there who’s a creator or an influencer to learn from Gary, thank you so much for the insights, where can people find you online?

Gary Arndt
Go to my podcast, just search for Everything Everywhere Daily. It is available everywhere you get podcasts. And check it out.

Jason Falls
Yeah, do. I’ve been checking it out because it prepares me for trivia night. And that’s what I like about it, because it makes me smarter about stuff that I don’t necessarily read don’t necessarily know about. And it’s, you know, short pithy stuff that I can soak up some knowledge. I really enjoy it.

Gary Arndt
I have a couple of teachers that are now playing it during homeroom at their school, and I have some home schools that are more and more people that are using it for their kids. Just because it’s a way to Yeah, it’s not about any particular topic. It’s just sort of, it’s a gateway into a whole bunch of other different topics.

Jason Falls
Everything Everywhere. Go find it, Gary, thanks, man.

Gary Arndt
Thanks for having me.

Transcribed by otter.ai

The Winfluence theme music is “One More Look” featuring Jacquire King and Stephan Sharp by The K Club found on Facebook Sound Collection.