We emailed this message to our most avid RVtravel.com readers in late January, 2023. We are showing it to you now to help explain what RVtravel.com is all about, and why your financial support, no matter what amount, one time or ongoing, is so important to our mission of delivering honest, valuable news and information to our readers.
Dear RVtravel.com reader,
Thank you for being such a loyal reader of RVtravel.com. We appreciate you very much!
We bet you didn’t know this, but we produce RVtravel.com and all our newsletters with a staff of only five full-time employees. Yes, just five! We work seven days a week to get everything done, not because we need to, but because we want to. Okay, we admit, we’re perfectionists (close, anyway)!
Our staff and two-dozen freelance contributors have posted more than 18,000 articles on our website, and each year we publish more than 400 RVing newsletters. As you can imagine, it’s a lot of work.
We all wear many hats. We answer hundreds of emails each week, solve problems, generate new ideas, implement new projects…Whew!
And, importantly, we pay our writers. They work hard for us, and we are not about to take advantage of them. We get pitched every week to post articles for money. No way! Other publishers take the money, even solicit it. We do not even consider such “payola.” It’s wrong!
Times have changed; our challenges are real
Today’s challenges as an online publisher are greater than they have ever been. When we began publishing in 2001, there were only a handful of informational RVing websites. Today there are thousands — websites, blogs, Facebook groups, YouTube channels, podcasts. And guess what? Everybody is an “expert” (or so they think). The result: a lot of unreliable, misleading information.
The robots are coming. . .
Some publishing experts predict that by 2025 more than 90 percent of the content on the Internet will be written using Artificial Intelligence (AI). It’s already happening (but not with us!).
Alas, keeping our readership stable and strong is increasingly challenging. We do not hire “content creators” — freelance “writers” who crank out articles by formula. The best way we at RVtravel.com can set ourselves apart from such fluff is to write the most valuable, useful, accurate, educational (and often entertaining) articles available anywhere — written by real RVers, not pretenders.
Your help is vitally important to us
If you have the means, would you please consider a one-time or ongoing contribution to RVtravel.com? Sure, you can continue to read without contributing, but aren’t we worth more than free? We rely on our voluntary subscribers to help us be all we can be. Because of this support, we do not need to bow to pressures from commercial interests, which means we can be honest in what we write.
So please consider pledging your support to help us continue to produce high-quality, valuable and honest news, information and RVing advice, and not being forced to write wishy-washy articles just to rank high on Google and pad our bank accounts.
The best to you in 2023. Be healthy. Be safe. Have fun. Keep reading.
— Your buddies in RVing — Chuck, Emily, Jessica, Diane, Kim and the rest of the gang
P.S. Our voluntary subscribers receive a special ad-free edition of our weekend newsletters.