What: Wild Bum encourages freelancers to create detailed travel guides for sale on the site.

Expected pay: uncertain

Husl$core: $$

Commissions & fees: 25%

Where: Nationwide

Requirements: none listed

Review:

Wild Bum is a travel information site that encourages freelancers to create detailed travel guides and list them for sale on the site. You set the price. (Most of the guides are priced at $25 – $75.) Wild Bum will pass on 75% of the revenue from the sale to the guide’s creator.

The travel guides Wild Bum is looking for are highly detailed, with restaurant, hotel and sightseeing options spelled out. So the site suggests that you start with the city that you live in, assuming it’s of interest to travelers. A typical guide is likely to fill 20+ typed pages, so they’ll require time to create. As a result, Wild Bum suggests that you list them for sale for $25 or more.

Wild Bum’s value proposition

Here’s the problem: Would you pay $25 for a travel guide (that you can’t review even in part) that’s written by someone you don’t know and whose qualifications are, well, amateur? And would you do that in an environment where you can get travel guide written by a professional travel writer for considerably less? I wouldn’t either.

Then, too, it’s easy to read hundreds of online travel blogs for free. Or to Google “best things to do in (pick the city)” or “best restaurants/sightseeing in …” In other words, if you want guidance when traveling, it’s pretty easy and cheap to find. All of this makes Wild Bum’s value proposition suspect to both consumers and freelancers.

As far as I can tell, the traveling masses feel much the same way. Although there are numerous travel guides listed on the site, we were unable to find a single one with a consumer review. I’m guessing that they simply don’t sell.

Deal killer

If you didn’t mind putting in some work for a speculative return, Wild Bum might still be worth trying. But the site added a deal-killer into its terms. The deal killer? Once you publish a travel guide on Wild Bum, you can’t use that guide “or any version of the guide” anywhere else.

So, if you decided to, say, publish your own travel blog — or an ebook — and wanted to use the work you’d already done and published on Wild Bum, you’d run afoul of this rule. The penalty? You must surrender the copyright to your own work to Wild Bum. This is a wild overreach, as far as we are concerned.

Recommendations

If you love to travel and/or guide people to the best places to visit in your city or others, we’d suggest you sign up for Viator or ToursByLocals. While all of these sites are pretty dormant during the global pandemic, they are sure to come back when travel is once again possible. And they’re far more lucrative and far less restrictive than Wild Bum.

If you want to write travel guides, you can start your own blog and sell advertisements on it with Google Adsense. Again, this is likely to prove more profitable than working with Wild Bum.

9/18/2020