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I'm Glad We Failed to Become RV Influencers

I had a quick vision the other day. One of those mental flights of fancy that happen in the shower.

What if we had been successful at becoming RV influencers? What would our life be like now?

It wasn't good.

"Dystopian" is the word that came to mind.

Hustling While Traveling

Rewind to 2016.

We were hustling. Building our website. Blogging. Podcasting. Hawking tshirts and stickers. Tracking the other active family travel bloggers. Promoting it all on social media.

Looking for that magic bait to get people to subscribe to our mailing list:

  • Download our monthly budget!
  • Setup your RV in 20 minutes using our checklist!
  • Download our origami camper van!
  • Learn how to homeschool legally in all 50 states!

Why?

Building the Platform

I was writing a book. Not the book I just published. This (other) book was meant to tell the bigger story about families ditching the suburbs in favor of non-traditional lifestyles. I was interviewing other RV families, boating families, tiny house families, and biking families.

To help write the book, I'd joined Platform University. PlatU taught that the best way to sell a book was to first build a following. Authors with an established platform would have a line of customers waiting when the book was available.

It's not unreasonable advice.

And we were succeeding.

Early Success

Our web traffic, social media audience, and email list subscribers were all growing. Our website consistently got included in "best RV blog" lists.

We interviewed with several media outlets, talked to reality TV show producers, and spoke at RV-related conferences. RV dealers were printing off our blog posts as "owners manuals" for new RV owners.

I even registered an RV-content related domain name and built a small website to market ourselves as content creators to companies in the RV industry.

Burning Out

And it all came to a crashing stop in 2017.

Why?

Simple.

Burnout.

Add all this effort to running our main business, traveling full-time, and transitioning kids-turned-adults off on their own, and it was too much.

Tearing Down the Platform

I abandoned the book project. We sold our travel-related website. We quit as much social media as we could, and removed all the casual travel-related connections from the accounts that we kept.

We sold/abandoned/demolished the rest of the "platform" we'd built, got off the road and started living a small-town, non-travel life.

Now fast-forward to 2021.

Maybe Too Soon?

I was close to finishing a memoir about our time on the road. And I found myself staring at the rubble of that platform, second-guessing whether we should have been quite so thorough in tearing it down.

The new book was still RV-related. The platform we built would have been handy for marketing it.

I set off to rebuild a platform of some kind. I didn't want to burn out again, but I put a reasonable level of effort looking up old connections, searching for new RVing families, and networking through the RV industry.

A New Market

In the few years we've been off the road, COVID and an increased population of remote workers caused the RV market to explode. Manufacturers are reporting record-level sales of new units. With labor and supply chain issues affecting the lead times of new RVs, prices also jumped for used RVs.

All those new RV owners increased the demand for RV content. I remember struggling to get 10K followers on our social accounts, now it's easy to find RV-related accounts with 100K+ followers and boasting millions of views or likes.

And everything is monetized.

Commercialized Content Creators

A blog isn't enough. Now you need subscription-based members-only communities/insider groups/camping asscociations. Coaching services/schools/online courses to learn how to RV, blog, or create online courses. Gear. Merch.

All in addition to a Youtube, Instagram, or Tiktok account where you post a daily drip of short-form content.

Have you ever returned to a favorite woodsy, quiet, authentic, peaceful, camping spot from your childhood, only to find it now surrounded by fast-food joints, mini-golf courses, t-shirt shops, and Segway rentals?

That's what the full-time RVing scene feels like now.

But Still, Buy My Book?

Don't get me wrong.

I get it.

People need to make a living.

No one's forcing people to buy.

We even tried some of that stuff. I still am, really. I'm dressing up our RVing experiences as consumable content you can buy like everyone else.

But as I scroll through social media it feels like all I see are:

  • Scripted play-acting or silly dance videos
  • Pitches for "must-have" accessories that we never owned
  • Top-ten lists for meals/campgrounds/waterfalls/dump stations
  • RV makeovers
  • Obvious ideas sold as "hacks"
  • Pitches for the lifestyle

All shared with "Home Alone" thumbnails showing people with cartoonish overexaggerated expressions. And all ending with questions in hopes of prompting the audience engagement they've grown addicted to.

Nacho Content

I call it "nacho content." It's quick to throw together and tasty when fresh and hot and the chips are crunchy and the cheese is gooey. But come back in a couple hours and it's cold, nasty, and doesn't reheat well.

Articles like this and this confirm some of my suspicions - creators aren't neccessarily creating the content their audience wants, or even that they enjoy creating. They have to create the type of content that the platform algorithm favors, at the pace the algorithm dictates. It's publish or perish.

The result?

Burnout. Depression. Mental health problems as a result of the bullying, harassment and discrimination they can receive in the comments.

Nostalgia Rather Than Rant

I don't mean this to be a rant. 

I'm just missing how it used to be.

Nostalgia is defined as "a sentimental longing or wistful affection for the past, typically for a period or place with happy personal associations."

We used social media to coordinate meetups with others, find new places to go, and log our travels. We shared information freely, making happy personal associations with like-minded people.

I'm glad we failed at growing that effort any larger. One reason we got on the road was "simpler living." Being a popular influencer doesn't look simple, fun, or healthy these days.

As we search for a "new nomadic normal" for ourselves, I feel nostalgic, wishing the travel-related social media scene felt as authentic and commercial-free now as it did back then. But that's just not how it is anymore.

Maybe I just need to order one of these t-shirts for myself?