We’ve received a whole bunch of traffic today from Frequent Miler on account of the 5% Citi credit card link we found. We’re as surprised as anybody by the traffic, as we didn’t even find out until yesterday that Frequent Miler was aware of this blog. Our pageviews today as of 3:00 pm are more than twice what we’d ever had in our previous busiest week.
All of which is to say, we didn’t expect to be inundated with traffic as we’ve basically been writing for a handful of friends who read the blog regularly, as well as writing for ourselves just for the heck of it. It didn’t occur to us that this post would go viral (viral by our modest standards, anyway) so we didn’t give much thought as to whether the link was already out there on the interwebs (it apparently was not).
The reason we didn’t give much thought to it was that the link was so easy to find–a simple google of Citi’s website turned up the link. It was literally 10 seconds of effort.
That said, now that the link is out there, there’s certainly a good chance the lumbering dinosaurs over at Citi will figure out what’s going on and take it down, so we advise getting while the getting’s good.
Beyond that, there’s the question of what information should be revealed on a blog. We’re aware of certain spend manufacturing tricks that would probably work (between work, family, and blogging, we don’t have nearly as much time as we’d like to play around with this stuff) that we don’t want to comment on simply because we have thought about those and we figure we’d probably rain on somebody’s parade–possibly a lot of parades, actually–if we did that, for little to no benefit for everybody else.
Then again, Frequent Miler has earned a lot of points for a lot of people by publicizing Vanilla Reloads. There’s a tension between sharing deals and killing deals and frankly we’re not sure of the best way to balance things.
That said, if we had thought about it beforehand and known the views we’d be getting, would we have printed the Citi link? The answer: darned if we know. This blog has no advertising and brings in no revenue whatsoever, so that’s not a big concern. We’re generally in favor of things which maximize the amount of money customers can make from big companies. Would more people get 5% by bringing this link into the light of day, or by just emailing it around to friends and family for years to come, assuming Citi never pulls the offer? Again, we have no idea. Either way, we certainly hope we didn’t foul up the plans of anybody who was aware of this link and was counting on it for a future application.
One mitigating factor is that Citi has a history of putting out this offer with some frequency and in fact did so quite recently, so we’re optimistic that after this app is inevitably pulled, there will be another 5% deal out there. What do you say, Citi?
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