With so much of the focus on differences between fire hydrants and street signs in different countries, the direct appeal was niche and the side-appeal that his very light and only occasional commentary on the photos was sometimes interesting, so that seems too indirect to possibly work as a way to catch a money-making amount of readership. This was tail-end-of-the-early-Web sort of stuff, started a few years before the rise of the contracted out ("Four-hour workweek" sorts trying to jumpstart that kind of "hustle", at least in the early days) monetized fake blog.
There was no pitch, and no ads, no self-promotion and barely any personal background at all, it was just "here's a crappy plain list of places I've been that breaks in surprising ways if JS is disabled" and if you clicked the links you'd get some broken-English (sometimes... other times you'll have to get out Google Translate) light commentary on photos he took there, though often there'd be several photos in a row with no commentary aside from maybe basic labels like "a bollard in [city]", that break down as about:
- 30% fire hydrants,
- 20% street signs or other road markers or traffic control devices,
- 20% bollards,
- 5% adaptive architectural details in very-cold or otherwise out of the ordinary environments
- 5% photos of the above things but specifically highlighting how much worse leftover French colonial infrastructure tends to be than British,
- 3% dudes shitting on beaches
- 2% disgusting illegal open air dumps, often on Pacific island "paradises" since I guess they're just covered in such things almost anywhere that's not a tourist hot-spot, which made a ton of sense in hindsight once pointed out—very limited space, lots of goods coming in, not rich enough to send the trash somewhere else, so of course that's a problem,
- nearly 0% any photos of normal landmarks or attractions you'd expect a tourist to take,
and 15% all else, usually observations of drug-related cafe culture stuff (I had no idea there were so many locally-tolerated-and-widely-openly-used but barely-known-to-Americans drugs out there before browsing that blog, often some kind of chewable leafy product or another), non-fancy food, whatever rusty barely-working ancient rural motorized mass transportation he'd ended up on this time, or slice-of-life observational things like a little "movie theater" in a very poor city that's some folding chairs in a little room with a smallish CRT TV and a DVD player at the front and a guy taking money at the doorless entry doorway (or dudes shitting on beaches, already covered separately because it featured weirdly often). Quite a bit of coverage of how shitty planned cities almost always are, and why (too much focus on big, wide roads that don't really need to be that big or wide, with huge unusable green spaces making them even worse, all in the name of getting big impressive sight lines on a few scattered monuments and buildings—this ties into the "place vs. non-place" concept I've seen used to criticize similar types of vision-first and "green space" obsessed city planning on other parts of the Web)
Like, the extreme focus on details most people wouldn't think to take a photo of and that are also kinda boring to nearly everyone convinced me the dude's angle was just that he... found comparing minor but common features of fundamental infrastructure more interesting than most people. When he had photos of anything but that sort of thing, it was more of an afterthought or accident, it seemed like. Plus there weren't even any ads or attempts to promote himself or products.
There was no pitch, and no ads, no self-promotion and barely any personal background at all, it was just "here's a crappy plain list of places I've been that breaks in surprising ways if JS is disabled" and if you clicked the links you'd get some broken-English (sometimes... other times you'll have to get out Google Translate) light commentary on photos he took there, though often there'd be several photos in a row with no commentary aside from maybe basic labels like "a bollard in [city]", that break down as about:
- 30% fire hydrants,
- 20% street signs or other road markers or traffic control devices,
- 20% bollards,
- 5% adaptive architectural details in very-cold or otherwise out of the ordinary environments
- 5% photos of the above things but specifically highlighting how much worse leftover French colonial infrastructure tends to be than British,
- 3% dudes shitting on beaches
- 2% disgusting illegal open air dumps, often on Pacific island "paradises" since I guess they're just covered in such things almost anywhere that's not a tourist hot-spot, which made a ton of sense in hindsight once pointed out—very limited space, lots of goods coming in, not rich enough to send the trash somewhere else, so of course that's a problem,
- nearly 0% any photos of normal landmarks or attractions you'd expect a tourist to take,
and 15% all else, usually observations of drug-related cafe culture stuff (I had no idea there were so many locally-tolerated-and-widely-openly-used but barely-known-to-Americans drugs out there before browsing that blog, often some kind of chewable leafy product or another), non-fancy food, whatever rusty barely-working ancient rural motorized mass transportation he'd ended up on this time, or slice-of-life observational things like a little "movie theater" in a very poor city that's some folding chairs in a little room with a smallish CRT TV and a DVD player at the front and a guy taking money at the doorless entry doorway (or dudes shitting on beaches, already covered separately because it featured weirdly often). Quite a bit of coverage of how shitty planned cities almost always are, and why (too much focus on big, wide roads that don't really need to be that big or wide, with huge unusable green spaces making them even worse, all in the name of getting big impressive sight lines on a few scattered monuments and buildings—this ties into the "place vs. non-place" concept I've seen used to criticize similar types of vision-first and "green space" obsessed city planning on other parts of the Web)
Like, the extreme focus on details most people wouldn't think to take a photo of and that are also kinda boring to nearly everyone convinced me the dude's angle was just that he... found comparing minor but common features of fundamental infrastructure more interesting than most people. When he had photos of anything but that sort of thing, it was more of an afterthought or accident, it seemed like. Plus there weren't even any ads or attempts to promote himself or products.