At the end of 2022 I published the first annual “state of the business” post detailing how Frequent Miler has been doing in terms of blog readers, podcast listeners, revenue, etc. Now, once again, here’s your chance to peek behind the curtain, but this time for 2023…
Overview
It’s amazing. It seems that the more fun we have at Frequent Miler, the better we do. By every metric, 2023 has been our best year ever. Readers, viewers, listeners are way up. Revenue is way up. And, I think if you polled everyone on the team, they’d say that fun is up too.
I believe that our success is a result of always putting the audience first. Every decision we make is driven first by what we think is best for our audience regardless of revenue consequences. The most obvious result of this is the way we only publish the credit card offers that are best for our readers. That often means that affiliate links, and associated revenue, are left on the cutting room floor. But our audience-first mentality also shows in many less obvious ways. For example, many blogs have pop-ups that beg you to sign up for their newsletter, or video ads that slow down the page load. I hate both of those things and so we don’t do them even though they would likely lead to more money for the business (if you’ve seen any of these on our site, it has been accidental and we’ve fixed it as soon as possible).
The Team
This year, Tim transitioned from part time to full time, and Carrie recently increased her time to 20 hours per week. Nick and I remain full time and Stephen continues to contribute at 10 hours per week.
I consider everyone on the team to be equally part of what “Frequent Miler” is. I absolutely love this team. We’re all committed to making Frequent Miler great, and we have lots of fun. Podcast followers already know how much fun Nick and I have bantering together. And with our monthly Ask Us Anything series, you can get to know the whole team.
Audience Stats
We don’t do any advertising to try to increase our audience. Instead, we just keep publishing informative and (hopefully) entertaining content. And, as you’ll see below, people are discovering Frequent Miler in bigger numbers than ever before…
Blog
From 2015 to 2021, our blog readership had hovered around 7 to 8 million page views per year. That was great, but in 2023 we saw nearly double that number with over 15.5 million page views!
Podcast
As you can see above, our Frequent Miler on the Air podcast audience has seen terrific growth over time. The chart is limited to USA downloads because in 2021 and 2022 there were a suspiciously large number of downloads from overseas — it seems that bots were downloading the podcast for some reason. Regardless, the USA market represents about 92% of our real audience.
Youtube
Our Youtube audience has been growing at close to the same pace as our podcast.
Finances
As you can see above, 2023 was our best revenue year ever. The vast majority of Frequent Miler’s revenue comes from our credit card affiliate links. It is remarkable that our revenue has continued to grow despite the fact that we show only the links that offer the best welcome bonuses even though that often means that our affiliate links aren’t shown at all.
Our second biggest source of revenue is through ads shown on our blog. This ad revenue accounts for about 13% of our total revenue. I haven’t been tracking ad revenue on its own over time and so I could only easily pull up two years of data, but you can see that ad revenue has also increased:
Except for a few thousand dollars from Youtube ads, all of our revenue to-date comes from the blog. The podcast, Youtube, and social media postings contribute indirectly by leading people to discover the blog for its content or for our list of unbiased best credit card offers.
Thank You!
We wouldn’t be able to do what we do without you. Thank you for reading, listening, and watching. Thank you for recommending Frequent Miler to family and friends. Thank you for your comments, emails, and Facebook group posts. Without you, we would not have been able to reach this level of success. We appreciate your continued engagement and thank you for being part of our journey!
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awesome, thanks for sharing, and hopefully many more successful years to come!
After more than a decade, FM is still my #1 miles and points resource. Congrats and keep up the great work!
Congratulations on your great year.. Keep up the good work!!
Thanks Greg for not having popup ads and videos! Your blog is the first one I turn to every day.
I am so glad the business is doing good! You guys are really good at the content as well as the presentation. You are the only blog that I refer to my friends who ask… and most of my consumption on the domain comes almost exclusively from what you put out in different channels.
I am hoping the growth continues in an exponential rate, although some of this might have been triggered by pandemic(revenge travel) and inflation combination…
With the level of expertise that you have, an adjacent stream of income would also be award travel booking service… Is that something on the minds of the gurus?
Lastly, it would be an awesome addition to have regional specific content put out… you already have at lease three regions(East coast, Midwest and NorthWest) in your team…
Last of the lastky :)… Go international!! Go big!
earlier this year I stayed overnight with a couple I’ve known for a long time in SoCal (was co-worker with wife)…they are very very well off financially, but he was traveling int’l for the first time. The whole family of 4 was going and they bought business class tickets for 4 to Japan, and he remarked that it does get expensive and he wanted to know how I travel in business for lower cost.
I told him doing the points thing might not be worth their time (Because they are well off)..but he still wanted to know.
I only recommended one website…..don’t know if they are reading this blog now nor if they’ve told anyone else.
bravo!
Great jobs and congrats on the success of the blob and the team! Keep up the good work!
Congratulations on the strong year! I very much appreciate you letting readers know when a better card deal is available in a two-player mode. When it comes to new applications, if family & friends aren’t able to generate a referral or aren’t getting much from it, I come here and follow FM’s referral link.
Congrats on the growth! FM and DoC are two of my favorite sites that provided lots of value, info and an open atomosphere. It felt some other sites became too commercial, polarized, political and prohibitive. Apparently they are censoring readers’ comments and blocked critics.
Thanks and keep up the great work
Congratulations and well deserved. You guys have carved out a unique and valuable space in the mileage world.
You guys are the best resource in the game! Your ethical conduct sets you apart from the others as well.
I continue to refer anyone interested in this hobby to your newsletter.
I have been in this hobby to some extent since 1997. My first rewards card was an Orvis Visa card. I earned some very nice items from their catalogs for a number of years. Then I found Rick, The Frugal Travel Guy, in 2008, and dove in at warp speed!
I have been traveling as an international nomad for the past four years with mostly business class flights booked on points, as well as some hotel stays.
All I can say is:
THANK YOU EVERYONE!!
I flew a nonstop today ORD to PSP that has been consistently 45k+ miles or $400+ and was randomly available for 12k yesterday using some AA Conservation Simply Miles. Cancelled the terrible SW connecting flight we had and banked the $ that won’t expire. All this because of things I learned here and from this team – thank you! I share widely and often about the benefit that reading FM provides.
Would reiterate all the praise in the comments. Two things that I’ve pondered on, in regards to getting more traffic/ears/eyeballs:
We’ve had a lot of people comment that they would like to published q ask us anything as a podcast, but it’s been a conscious decision of ours not to do that. We hear from people all the time that discovered us from our podcast, and we decided that we would rather those people stumble on a podcast with regular segments and some structure rather than a completely impromptu ask us anything that may be full of all sorts of details and nuanced questions or things we don’t know the answer to, etc. I’m not saying that we’ll never do it, but we’ve discussed it numerous times and come to the same conclusion every time so far.
As far as publishing the episode on a weekday, that’s not something we ever thought about, but now we’ll talk about that. Thanks for the suggestion!
Have you considered publishing them under a separate podcast account?
Yes, and we decided not to.
Nick, it would be interesting to hear what led you all to change your mind as of 2/6/24, when you dropped a very well-formatted, helpful, and blissfully ad-free AMA into the FM podcast feed.
Whether or not you’re able to comment or not on the specifics, your team deserves credit. You opted to do more work, with zero marginal revenue benefit to you, to address a community request.
Kudos, and thank you!