This is amazing, you are awesome for doing this.

In investing, this is why expense ratios and fees are so important to pay attention to. They're this.

It's less about being "smarter," it's really about identifying your advantage and understanding whether you can exploit it. This could be something as obvious as an information advantage (insider trading) to simply having more time/patience. If you can buy and hold for decades, you can wait out the bumps, the people who are forced to sell, and for more money to enter the market.

I think the key difference is the audience. For a lot of food bloggers that share their recipes, the initial group of readers is loyal fans. They want to hear the stories and the recipe is almost secondary.

When you find a recipe through search, you want the recipe and have to wade through the story and the photos to get to it and that's frustrating. Oddly enough, it's also what may help that article rank higher in search too.

As someone who has been quoted by major news outlets in what's likely a similar fashion - adding color to the story rather than reporting news - there is rarely "vetting" and the fact checking that occurs is merely confirming that what the journalist wrote matched what I said. They don't try to find additional sources to corroborate the story.

So the fact checking focused on the surveys conducted, the methodology, etc - not whether Drew Cloud was a real person.

(Also, I'm a real person so it's possible they do this type of vetting and I never experienced it because... well, I'm real)

This has been my experience as well. Most of the writers are either under so much pressure to pump out articles they just simply don't have time to fully vet every source OR they're a contractor and don't care to seriously vet the source.

Another benefit of publicly sharing your learning is that if you misinterpreted or misremembered something, others can point it out so you don't go through life with incorrect ideas.

Doesn't sound like you lose anything if you include roundtrip

And long enough. It's a lot of survival until you learn enough to make money.

There are a lot of blogging categories that are surprisingly profitable but in different ways. The internet is quite vast!

FWIW, that fluff is what builds a relationship with readers and for a lot of food blogs that's what separates you from powerhouses like seriouseats. You can usually just jump down to the recipe card if you want to skip the fluff.