Lonely Planet Announces Revenue Sharing Deal with Bloggers

Lonely Planet, who on Thursday relaunched their own website have made further changes, this time to their content. In an innovative move, the BBC Worldwide outfit will begin to republish online reviews written by travel bloggers and will pay the bloggers for their efforts via a revenue sharing scheme.

To be launched in February, the scheme (codenamed BlogSherpa) appears to be an attempt to combine the popularity of Lonely Planet with the passionate knowledge of travel bloggers to create unique content from a broad base of sources.

Matthew Cashmore, Lonely Planet’s Innovation Ecosystem Manager, explained  “What Lonely Planet has is traffic. If we can provide a gateway to your content and if you let us put that content on lonelyplanet.com, we’ll give you the advertising on that page. Imagine how much you’ll be earning if your AdWords ID is on a Lonely Planet page.”

It seems like a terrific opportunity for bloggers worldwide to promote their content, earn money and prestige from their writing. However, is this possibly a reaction to the current economic climate and an attempt to gradually reduce costs and therefore the number of professional writers Lonely Planet currently employs?

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