Ranking of the most visited travel blogs (March 2020)
I discovered by chance the Ranking of the best French travel blogs in 2020 proposed by the blog Chris and voyage.
This ranking is based on the methodology of the Ranking of the 200 Best French Travel Blogs carried out in April 2018 by the Tourdumondiste website.
These rankings are always nice because they allow you to discover nuggets held by travel enthusiasts.
However, I have a little trouble with the proposed methodology.
Without going into detail, the ranking criteria are linked to the :
- The number of followers on Instagram
- Among the followers on Twitter
- Among the followers on Facebook
- The Similarweb ranking (tool estimating the traffic of a website)
- The Alexa ranking (another tool estimating the traffic of a website)
Each of these criteria has the same level of importance.
As a result:
- 60% of the score is related to presence on social networks. This is relevant if we want to calculate an “influence score” but it strongly devalues blogs that are little or not present on these media.
- The Alexa ranking isn’t very relevant, especially outside the United States
To evaluate the importance of a blog, the most relevant indicator seems to me Similarweb. Similarweb is a tool that estimates the traffic of a website (whatever the source of traffic: search engines, social networks, e-mail, …). The data is only estimated but the tool is reputed as the most reliable on the market and the orders of magnitude are generally very accurate when compared to the real figures.
Obviously this isn’t a qualitative criterion, excellent blogs can have little traffic and vice versa.
Here is my simple methodology:
- I took over the 300 sites of the Chris and voyage ranking
- I removed the “professional” sites to keep only the personal travel blogs
- I got the monthly traffic estimated by Similarweb.
And here is the result.
