We are a group of travelers who came together to build the platform that we always wanted to have: a global community of independent travelers, where it’s easy to meet new people and find information, and where bloggers can monetize high-quality posts.

While there are some large, well-established platforms aimed at tourists looking for information on sights, tour packages and hotels, there’s no major platform that provides content created by independent travelers for independent travelers. There’s a huge number of people looking for genuine experiences and off-the-beaten-track destinations, and they need a place where they can find recommendations… and contribute their own.

As a niche market, “Travel” features an unusual abundance of small blogs with high-quality content. These blogs often contain exactly the information that travelers are looking for, but in most cases, they’re hard to find. Independent blogs simply can’t keep up with the search-engine optimization of large sites. And due to the small exposure, travel bloggers struggle to earn the income they deserve. Many turn to large social media networks, which have in the past few years made it easy to gain followers.

The trend, however, is that these large platforms would rather keep readers on their sites, and have been throttling traffic toward the originating blogs. These social media platforms inject their own ads between content that others have created, without sharing the profits. To add insult to injury, they even demand that creators buy ads if they want their followers to see their posts. Also, these social networks are only made to discover new posts, not to research destinations.

At the same time, travel communities are split over several platforms such as groups on Facebook, Couchsurfing, TripAdvisor or smaller forums. Contacting the author of a post is usually done either in the comment area or by email. TravelFeed, on the other hand, is a community of travelers and travel bloggers where readers can easily chat with their favorite authors.

With full-scale manual curation, we make sure that the best posts get the visibility they deserve, often months or even years after they’ve been published. Content is monetized through the Steem Blockchain where creators get rewarded with cryptocurrency. This is the perfect blockchain for travelers: set out on a new adventure, write about it on TravelFeed, and be rewarded with real money. It’s a dream come true, to get on the road, and get paid for doing what you love? At TravelFeed, we’re working hard to make this a reality.