You post content. You grow your audience. You wait for brand deals to roll in.

This is the path every travel creator follows. And it’s broken.

The Math Nobody Shows You

Influencer marketing CPM dropped 53% year-over-year to $4.63 in 2024.

Let me translate that: Brands pay less per thousand views than they did last year. And the year before. The trend continues downward.

Nano-influencers (1K-10K followers) earn $25-$500 per post. Most land on the lower end.

Do the math. Four posts a month at $100 each. That’s $400. Before taxes. Before expenses. Before the hours spent pitching, negotiating, creating, revising, and waiting 60-90 days for payment.

The Middle Gets Squeezed

Brands operate on two strategies now.

Strategy one: Partner with mega-creators who deliver massive reach.

Strategy two: Work with dozens of nano-influencers for cheap content.

Mid-tier creators? The ones with 10K-100K followers? They sit in the middle with nowhere to go.

One creator reported 8-9 brand partnerships in early 2025. The same creator had 15-20 in 2024. The work dried up by half.

This pattern repeats across the industry. 71% of creators earn under $30,000 annually. 80% of bloggers make little to no money.

You Build Their Asset, Not Yours

Every brand deal follows the same structure.

You create content. They own the results. The partnership ends. You start over.

That Instagram reel promoting a hotel? The hotel benefits from that content forever. Your benefit ended when the check cleared.

Compare this to a digital product.

You create a travel guide once. You sell it for years. Every sale goes directly to you. No negotiations. No waiting 90 days. No hoping a brand picks you.

The Algorithm Compounds the Problem

Brand deals require reach. Reach requires the algorithm. The algorithm requires constant content.

Google’s March 2024 update created what industry insiders called “blogger carnage.” Travel blogs saw 40-90% traffic losses overnight.

One blogger watched daily Google sessions drop from 3,500 to 100. Another saw monthly pageviews fall from 37K to 14K.

Instagram and TikTok operate the same way. Your reach depends on factors you don’t control.

Building income on brand deals means building income on borrowed land. The landlord changes the rules whenever they want.

What Works Instead

52% of creators have experienced burnout. 37% have considered quitting.

The burnout stems from a simple problem: endless work for uncertain pay.

The alternative? Own your income stream.

Digital travel guides solve multiple problems at once:

• You create once and sell repeatedly
• No algorithm determines your revenue
• No brand decides if you’re worthy
• Payment hits your account immediately
• Your expertise becomes an asset you control

That itinerary sitting in your notes app? The one friends keep asking for? People would pay for it.

The Path Forward

Brand deals have a place. They work as supplemental income, not primary income.

The creators building real businesses in 2025 do something different. They package their knowledge into products their audience buys directly.

You already have the expertise. You already create content proving that expertise. The missing piece? A way to turn that expertise into something you own.

Tourli exists for this reason. It lets travel creators build and sell digital guides without coding, website building, or payment processing headaches.

The question isn’t whether you’re “big enough” to sell guides. The question is how long you’ll wait for brand deals that may never come.

Ready to stop waiting on brands and start owning your income? Create your first guide on Tourli.