Pop quiz, hotshot! I’m going to give you two mystery credit cards, and you’re going to tell me what credit card I’m talking about, what airline I’m talking about, and which card is better. Ready?

CREDIT CARD A: Earns 1.25 miles with Airline X per dollar spent on all purchases. $95 annual fee.

CREDIT CARD B: Earns 1.30 miles with Airline X per dollar spent on all purchases. $0 annual fee.

You can probably guess what card A is, since not too many airline cards give you 1.25 miles per dollar. It’s the Chase British Airways card, of course! (Note: this is not an affiliate link, and I get no money if you click through.)

And credit card B? It’s the American Express Blue for Business (Note: this is not an affiliate link either):

The card earns 1 Membership Reward point per dollar spent. MR points can be exchanged for Avios at a 1:1 ratio, plus you get a 30% bonus on all purchase-related points earned each year. Voilà, 1.3 points per dollar spent. (Though before you rush out to get this card, please note that you do need to have a more premium Amex card, e.g. a Gold card, in order to be able to transfer points from this card to one of the MR partners.)

So which card is better? That’s a trick question. The answer, as always with these things, is it depends. The Chase card comes with 50,000-point sign-up bonus, vs 10,000 for the Amex Blue, so clearly if you’re looking for a big one-time gain, the BA card wins.

But the Amex Blue for Business belongs in the conversation. You can actually earn more Avios with it than you can with the branded card, and there’s no annual fee. There are many cases where you can get two cents of value or more per Avios, so you’re talking about a 2.5%+ card with no annual fee. I could get a CLT-LGA roundtrip ticket with seven months of Amazon payments.

Another pop quiz: why don’t other bloggers in the points and miles community talk about this card? It’s not an amazing card, but like I said, it belongs in the conversation since there are some people and some situations for which it would be useful.

Frequent Miler, to his credit, is the only major points-n-miles blogger I know of who has mentioned this card (he even has it on his best credit card deals page). I wasn’t able to find any mentions of this card by the rest of the boardingarea.com crew, or by Points Guy or Frugal Travel Guy. If I’m missing one, by all means let me know and I’ll gladly correct the record.

This goes back to what Matt wrote about the other day regarding the economics of blogging. The incentives of big league bloggers are not aligned with the incentives of their readers. This doesn’t mean that they’re bad people, or that there’s anything wrong with getting paid to sell, just that most of them are sacrificing the quality of their product in exchange for card-whoring. They get paid to push certain cards, and they don’t write about other potentially useful cards since they’re not getting paid to do so.

I don’t mind if a blog has advertisements, or if they promote a really good deal, or if they subtly work a relevant link into an article, or if they ask me to use their links to help support the blog. Bloggers have to eat, right? Just be honest about it and don’t punish your readers with irrelevant and/or subpar affiliate links.

There are some who still produce a good blog despite the temptation to do otherwise, and hats off to them, because it’s got to be awfully tough to resist the temptation to cash in for a substantial short-term gain. Those of you who merely read and don’t blog should be aware of the incentives underlying some of the content you’re reading.