How a travel photographer built an audience without algorithms, with Gary Arndt

Travel photography looks glamorous from the outside, but the business behind it has been quietly collapsing for years and the pandemic only sped it up. We sit down with award-winning travel photographer Gary Arndt, creator of Everything Everywhere Daily, to trace the real arc: Starting with a high-end Nikon he didn’t know how to use, improving through sheer volume and deliberate practice, and building an audience by posting a photo every single day back when blogs and RSS were the center of online discovery.

Then the ground shifted. Phones put “good enough” cameras in every pocket, travel magazines thinned out, newspaper travel sections vanished, and more publications leaned on stock imagery and tourist boards instead of assignments. We dig into how platform algorithms narrow what gets rewarded, why context-heavy photos can lose to easy “wow” landscapes, and how that pressure shapes everything from creative choices to where photography tours end up.

Arndt explains why he pivoted to podcasting in 2020 and why audio still feels like the old internet: no algorithm deciding what shows up next, a direct subscription relationship, and a format that compounds over time. He breaks down his daily workflow, how he never runs out of topics, and what monetization looks like with host-read ads and strong CPMs, plus why a listener relationship can be deeper than likes on a feed.

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Transcript

Welcome And Guest Introduction

0:00

The Dead Pixel Society Podcast is brought to you by Mediaclip, Advertek Printing, and Independent Photo Imagers

Speaker 0:09

Welcome to the Dead Pixel Society podcast, the photo imaging industry's leading news source. Here's your host, Gary Pageau

Gary Pageau 0:17

hello again, and welcome to the Dead Pixel Society podcast. I'm your host, Gary Pageau, and today we're joined by Gary Arndt, who is the host of the Everything Everywhere Daily podcast and an award-winning travel photographer. Hi, Gary. How are you today?

Gary Arndt 0:33

Good. How are you?

Gary Pageau 0:34

So Gary, let's talk a little bit about your journey in the world of travel photography. How did you get started on that, and how did you manage to win ev- almost every possible award?

Gary Arndt 0:45

It

Learning Fast With A Real Camera

Gary Arndt 0:46

started out of boredom. I had an internet company in the '90s that I sold. Went back to school, realized I didn't wanna be an academic. Came up with the idea of selling my house and traveling around the world, and I sold it in 2007, and I bought a big fancy camera with a lot of buttons and dials on it that I didn't know how to use, thinking that would take very good photos. And I learned real quickly that's not how it works. That you can, in fact, take very bad photos with a very nice camera. I bought a Nikon D200. Which was their flagship, crop frame, camera at the time. And I like my first weekend, I was in Hawaii and I was taking some very bad photos and I realized, "Okay, I gotta learn how to use this." That all of these buttons and dials do something.

Gary Pageau 1:35

Right.

Gary Arndt 1:35

And that was a process that took me a couple years and, some of my very early photos of my travels are pretty bad. But thankfully you've heard the thing about doing something for 10,000 hours or- I was able to get in a lot of reps because I was traveling full time and I had a lot of very photogenic things that I was visiting. So I took many tens of thousands of photos and learned how the camera worked and learned about exposure and everything else, and gradually, my photography started getting better and better. And eventually, I got to the point... One of the big things I did, actually, was I... This is before Instagram, before even Twitter or anything became popular. I had a,

The Daily Photo Habit Builds Skill

Gary Arndt 2:26

travel blog. And what I began doing in 2008, this was less than a year after I started traveling, was I began posting a photo on my website every day. And that act of putting something up publicly was a huge thing that motivated me to become better at photography. Because when your work is public, you don't wanna put something up that's garbage.

Gary Pageau 2:51

Right.

Gary Arndt 2:51

So then again this was before Instagram. And, the blog at the time had a pretty good following, and that made a huge difference.

Gary Pageau 3:00

Were you, like- Again, because it was pre or early social media, w- you weren't getting a lot of feedback on those pictures. Were you getting any feedback?

Gary Arndt 3:10

Yeah. Before the rise of social media apps, the blog was the social media.

Gary Pageau 3:15

Right.

Gary Arndt 3:15

So I had people that subscribed to the website on RSS and they would get it every day, and this was about 25,000 people. And they would leave c- comments. So there was quite a bit of feedback. But it wasn't like Instagram where it's an algorithmic feed- giving you something. Or people, just are scrolling and they look at it for two seconds and maybe they- hit and move on.

Gary Pageau 3:37

Yeah.

Gary Arndt 3:37

Because it was on a website, you saw a much larger version of the image. You saw it in landscape format, which is how most of these were intended to be seen. And so yeah, there was definitely feedback.

Gary Pageau 3:48

I kinda miss those days, of the kind of forums and blogs and websites and all that stuff. It seemed like it was a more civil and discoverable time then. You weren't having the algorithm dictate to you.

Gary Arndt 4:01

We'll get into that, but that's one of the reasons why I kinda shifted to podcasting.

Gary Pageau 4:06

Yeah.

Gary Arndt 4:06

but basically,

Awards And The Travel Media Crash

Gary Arndt 4:07

I got better over time- I won, three Lowell Thomas Awards, which are the, kinda the pre-eminent, they're called the Pulitzer Prize for travel ph- travel journalism. Maybe not quite as, that prestigious. I was named Travel Photographer of the Year by the Society of American Travel Writers and twice by the North American Travel Journalists Association. In fact, the first time I won, I was in Namibia, and I was in the desert for five days, and I remember coming out and going to, an internet cafe, and there was just all these emails saying congratulations, congratula- I didn't know what it was about. And then I won, and I realized when they announced it, it was at their annual convention, nobody there knew who I was. Because I was the first digital guy to have won it.

Gary Pageau 4:50

Right.

Gary Arndt 4:51

And I got to know a lot of these guys, and it was very interesting because a lot of people, when I tell them I'm a travel photographer, the first thing they think of is National Geographic. No, I've never shot for National Geographic. The only reason I would do so is, I think, for the prestige factor of it, not for anything else.

Gary Pageau 5:06

Right.

Gary Arndt 5:06

But a lot of these guys these old s- one guy I got... bob Holmes, I became pretty good friends with. He started shooting for them in the '60s, and he told me, it's a lot of people, they wanna do what you're doing, that having that freedom and that flexibility and your own audience w- is... Because it... Travel photography became a pretty horrible business.

Gary Pageau 5:28

Right.

Gary Arndt 5:28

Everyone has a phone in their pocket. Travel media basically disappeared. A lot of the magazines folded. All the travel sections of newspapers, for the most part, have folded, all but a handful. And so there isn't really a, a market for travel photography anymore. The, a lot of the stories that do run, they just get stock photography from local tourist boards.

Gary Pageau 5:49

So I have a question. Back then, how was the business side- constructed, right? Did you have your own gallery that people could, get your photos? Were you on a stock agency? Were you doing things on assignment? What was the model back then? 'Cause like you said, it's changed quite a bit now.

Gary Arndt 6:06

like I'm, I actually, Peter Lik, I think- Yeah he has galleries. So I actually met him once in the field, in Puerto Rico. He was doing a TV show with, I think, the Weather Channel or something, and he was visiting the Camuy caves, and he just happened to be there the same time I was. But I've never done anything like that. I suppose I could have, but the problem is there, there isn't a lot of demand for that kind of photography. Not when, not in an age when people have phones in their pocket.

Gary Pageau 6:37

Right.

Gary Arndt 6:37

There isn't a lot of demand for people to buy a photo that they didn't take of a place they didn't visit.

Gary Pageau 6:42

So before we get into the future, I wanna talk a little bit about, when you started out. Did you have a bucket list of places when you had your camera? Or how did you go about your early tour? What was your decision-making

Gary Arndt 6:54

I started by going west.

Gary Pageau 6:56

Okay.

Gary Arndt 6:56

I spent, half a year to cross the Pacific. So I was on the road for 13 years, basically. And I should always say that I was a traveler first and a photographer second.

Gary Pageau 7:06

Okay.

Gary Arndt 7:07

So it's not "Oh, I'm a photographer. I'm done traveling. I'm gonna go be-" "a wedding photographer." No. I will stick a fork in my eye before I ever have to be a wedding photographer.

Gary Pageau 7:15

Right.

Gary Arndt 7:15

The photography came from the travel. So I always went to places I was interested in and tried, I always called myself opportunistic- in that I wasn't on an assignment. "Go there and shoot this thing." I went someplace where I wanted to go and just tried to capture what I could from the time I was there.

Gary Pageau 7:33

Okay.

Gary Arndt 7:33

So there were some exceptions to this rule, but it's not like I was sitting in one spot for 18 hours waiting for the perfect conditions to get a perfect shot of this thing.

Gary Pageau 7:45

Which, which is usually what travel photographers have to do, right? They have to scope things out, wait for the sun to be at a certain angle and

Gary Arndt 7:52

all that. Because they're there on assignment, and they're there for, to get, h- how many photos may run in an article? Six? whereas because what I was doing was- Kind of what you'd call a proto-influencer.

Gary Pageau 8:06

Right.

Gary Arndt 8:06

It's very different from what it is today.

Gary Pageau 8:08

You're right.

Gary Arndt 8:09

Because it was still very early days. But I was doing stuff with tourism boards, and the blog played a big part of it. And the photography kind of just became my calling card.

Gary Pageau 8:18

Right.

Gary Arndt 8:18

I've done gallery shows, but I didn't have my own gallery. And the problems with the business end of things are one of the reasons why I eventually stopped doing it in the pandemic.

Gary Pageau 8:28

Right.

Gary Arndt 8:29

I know a lot of very good travel photographers. And what most of them are doing now, if they're still doing it, is that they just run tours. And so they're not really even in the photography business so much, they're just in the tour business.

Gary Pageau 8:43

In the event business. Yep. Yeah.

Gary Arndt 8:44

And

Instagram Algorithms Narrow What Wins

Gary Arndt 8:45

what I noticed, like on Instagram, I developed a pretty good n- following. I've 180,000 people that follow me on Instagram. But it was only certain photos that ever got a reaction from people. So it had to be a mountain in the Rocky Mountains in Alberta or in, Patagonia or a waterfall in Iceland or a rainbow or something like that. And those were the only things that ever got likes. If it was a picture of a person it didn't perform at all or a prairie or even, with some exceptions, some nature photography of animals. But that was, yeah it was such a minimum range. And if you look at where a lot of these people take people on photography tours, it's those places.

Gary Pageau 9:30

Yeah. So do you think that is 'cause, because of the algorithm or that's where people are actually interested? I'm just kinda curious because it seems to me like you were in the pre-algorithm world, and now we're in the, algorithmic reinforcing what you've already looked at sort of thing, and there's not as much discoverability, actually.

Gary Arndt 9:50

Yeah, that's a huge problem. People do like mountains and rainbows. Yeah. I understand why. But, there's a lot of great photography, ju- just to take an example everyone will be familiar with, the Afghan girl photo- I think that wouldn't do well on Instagram if it wasn't already famous.

Gary Pageau 10:07

Yeah, it makes a lot of sense because it's a striking photo, but you kinda need the context, and what the algorithm doesn't really respect or interpret is context.

Gary Arndt 10:19

Yeah, and I have, like I said, I have just of what I've edited and uploaded, and it's all available online for free if someone wants to check it out, I have tens of thousands of photos, of which I would say maybe there's one to, a thousand photos that I think are pretty good. And I could probably put in a gallery or print or something. But there just isn't a lot of demand for it. And that was one of the big problems. When the pandemic hit, I had contracts with some tourist boards and some other things, and everything dried up, and that was just on top of the trend that was already happening with travel media disappearing, Yeah at least in print.

Gary Pageau 10:54

Yeah. Even like you said, the magazines kinda dried up. Even the photo space, I think there's only one or two print magazines left,

Gary Arndt 11:02

And the ones that are still printing are a fraction of what they used to be.

Gary Pageau 11:06

Right.

Gary Arndt 11:06

They're really thin. And, th- there's just, the budgets are just aren't there.

Why Podcasting Still Feels Old Internet

Gary Pageau 11:13

So let's talk a little bit about your pivot then from, travel photography where you could see, obviously because of the pandemic, it accelerated the curve, right? It accelerated the demise of the travel media business, right? 'Cause people weren't traveling, so it ki- the trend was already there. You saw it coming, and it accelerated. So why on earth would you shift to podcasting of all things?

Gary Arndt 11:40

So first of all, a lot of travel blogs, when I started it was the golden age of travel blogging. People discovered you and they followed you with an RSS reader, and your blog was the focus of everything. And then it shifted. Then it was Twitter, Facebook, whatever, and people followed you through those platforms. And then they pulled the rug out, and then you had to pay them to promote to reach the audience that already wanted to follow you. And then by the time the pandemic hit, most blogs were getting 90% of their traffic from Google and SEO.

Gary Pageau 12:07

Right.

Gary Arndt 12:08

And to do well in SEO, you don't need to be a good traveler, you don't need to be a good photographer, you don't need to be a good writer. You just need to be good at SEO. You don't need to even visit the places you're writing about. You can just do research online. And that wasn't something I wanted to be part of. And the only part of the internet which is still the way it used to be is podcasting. Where there's no algorithm. People... Like, when you are on YouTube, it'll show you a video it thinks you wanna watch.

Gary Pageau 12:35

But

Gary Arndt 12:35

with podcasting, it's not showing you an episode. If I discover your podcast, I'm gonna probably follow your podcast and I'll listen to everything that gets put on the feed. That's not algorithmic. That's you determining what the feed is.

Gary Pageau 12:50

Right.

Gary Arndt 12:51

And so I created a podcast that was not a travel podcast per se, but travel adjacent. I could use all the information that I, and the things I learn in the course of traveling. And more of a daily educational show, and that has just exploded. And all of my friends that are still running travel blogs are very frustrated 'cause they've lost all their traffic, where- I'm doing a million and a half downloads a month now just on the show.

Gary Pageau 13:18

And so talk a little bit, is that a business? 'Cause there's a lot of podcasts, that aren't monetized or what-

Gary Arndt 13:24

It is absolutely a business, and it's the best business I've ever had.

Gary Pageau 13:28

Okay.

Gary Arndt 13:29

So it, it is... Like I said, with that many downloads, then you can make some pretty good money from advertising.

Gary Pageau 13:35

Right.

Gary Arndt 13:36

And more importantly, with podcasting, on a blog or social media, people can see your images and stuff, but they don't have a real connection with you. When you can hear a person's voice- You develop a parasocial relationship that is very difficult to replicate if you're only seeing images and words. For example, almost a year ago, I had my fifth anniversary party for the show, and I had it in Appleton, Wisconsin.

Gary Pageau 14:03

I'm aware of Appleton because one of my good friends lives there, but yes, it's not an intersection point of major travel.

Gary Arndt 14:09

People stay here when they're going to a Packer game.

Gary Pageau 14:12

Right.

Gary Arndt 14:12

But I had a full house, and I had people fly in from California and New Jersey and drive in from all the surrounding states- To come to this event. And I think that's only possible with podcasting. When I was doing travel photography, I would run tours, and it was always like pulling teeth to get 10 to 12 people to show up.

Gary Pageau 14:31

Right.

Gary Arndt 14:32

With the podcast, I proposed doing a trip to Rome. And I had 100 people within 48 hours that expressed interest, and that was when my show was one-tenth the size it is now. It is a far better platform for developing a relationship with people than I think social media or blogging is.

Gary Pageau 14:51

Okay. So did you do any research before you d- 'cause again, you started in, July of 2020, right? We're in the depths of the pandemic at the point, and that was... Was that sort of the idea is, "Oh, listen, I gotta do something and I'm gonna try this thing," or did you have a plan? What was your like-

Gary Arndt 15:09

I had-

Gary Pageau 15:10

process like?

Gary Arndt 15:10

I had something very different in mind. I was thinking of doing something more like Hardcore History with two to three-hour episodes that I would release once every other week.

Gary Pageau 15:18

Yeah.

Gary Arndt 15:19

But the math just didn't work out. So in the middle of the pandemic, I had talked to a friend that had a successful podcast, and I should say I had been doing podcasting since 2009. I was the co-host on a show called This Week in Travel, and, I have friends that had very successful podcasts. So I had learned a lot over the last decade, and it was like if I did a daily podcast, then the numbers work out much better. So I pulled the trigger on that. The format of my show today is exactly the same as it was for episode one. Exactly the same, and it's very simple, and it works, and I think that's been a lot of the reason for the show's success.

Gary Pageau 15:56

So

The Daily Format And Topic Pipeline

Gary Pageau 15:57

walk us through a little bit about what the format is and what it is. I'm just, I'm, I'm hoping all my listeners, all 12 of them, go and listen to your, your podcast, but can you walk us through the format of doing... 'Cause that's a lot to do a daily show. It's a lot-

Gary Arndt 16:10

It is

Gary Pageau 16:11

of work.

Gary Arndt 16:11

And they were right. So basically I write a 2,000-word script. And so it's a solo monologue show, which makes it very easy to edit. And I have some writers now that help me, but I did 2,000 episodes basically on my own. And every day is something different, something from history, math, science, geography. Just to give you the last couple episodes. Today's episode is on the history and all about the element sodium. Yesterday was the el- the epic- Epic of Gilgamesh. We did one on the history of the Korean Peninsula, wide screen film formats, real life cryptids, the Yellow River in China, a proposed project to drop a nuclear weapon on the moon in the 1950s, the Gallipoli campaign in World War I. So every day is something completely different.

Gary Pageau 16:55

Yeah.

Gary Arndt 16:56

And so it's for curious people, and one of the things is that it's not algorithm based. So rather than an algorithm feeding out the same thing, "Oh, you like this? Here's more of the same thing."

Gary Pageau 17:05

Yeah

Gary Arndt 17:06

it's something completely random, and stuff that you might have not even known that you didn't know.

Gary Pageau 17:13

Yeah, that's interesting 'cause I can't see a lot of connections between those various items, between the nuclear device on the moon and the Yellow River, and the Korean Peninsula. Don't see a lot of connections between those.

Gary Arndt 17:25

It's just all stuff that you might be curious about.

Gary Pageau 17:27

So how do you come up with topics on that? 'Cause you've been doing this now for, let's see, daily for almost six years.

Gary Arndt 17:34

So yes,

Gary Pageau 17:34

You ever gonna run out of stuff?

Gary Arndt 17:36

No, because it's- it's literally everything everywhere. So I can talk about anything. I've done... I'll be doing 2,200 episodes within about a month.

Gary Pageau 17:44

Right.

Gary Arndt 17:45

And I created a Google Doc that had 100 ideas for shows. And I have been adding and subtracting from that same document for six years now, and I have close to 1,000 ideas on that list. And then there's a whole bunch of other stuff that my team, 'cause I have two other writers now that help me, that we talk about all the time that even aren't on the list. So we never run out of ideas, and every show seems to, Bring up an idea for yet another show

Gary Pageau 18:12

Okay. So to monetize this at the level you're at, do you select certain advertisers? Are you on a network where they just sell them for you? How does that-

Gary Arndt 18:21

Yeah, I'm on a network. Most of the money comes from host-read ads, and- That's- So you get pretty good CPMs if you're doing that. And I have the numbers. Like I said, I've had over 60 million downloads of the show since I started.

Gary Pageau 18:36

Right

Gary Arndt 18:36

Gets about a million and a half a month, and with those kind of numbers, you can do pretty well with advertising. But podcast is a tough game that way.

Gary Pageau 18:45

Yeah.

Gary Arndt 18:46

You can do very well with a small audience if you're marketing your own product or service.

Gary Pageau 18:51

Right

Gary Arndt 18:51

And then at the very high end, if you have a lot of traffic, you can do it through CPM advertising.

Gary Pageau 18:56

Yeah, where you've got, Harry's Razors and who knows- what else,

Gary Arndt 18:59

and I've literally done ads for Harry's Razors.

Gary Pageau 19:02

So is there somewhere else, now that you kinda have this process down where you've got this sort of, I don't know, you're kinda striking me as almost a PBS show- format, where it's almost a, an educational kind of eclectic, format. Where else can you take that, right? What can you do with that? Are there, books you could do? Is there, what... it seems like with this level of content that you're creating, almost 2,000 words a day, th- the sky's almost the limit on other things you could, directions you could take that in.

Gary Arndt 19:33

Yeah,

Gary Pageau 19:33

yeah, exactly.

Gary Arndt 19:33

I have over two million words that I've published. They're all m- all on the website. I could w- spin it off into a YouTube channel, but to be completely honest- You make less money on YouTube unless you have a monster channel- than you can with audio. And a lot of people don't realize this, the CPM rates for audio are better than YouTube. And it requires a lot more work because you're doing video editing, which is far more time-consuming than- doing audio editing.

Gary Pageau 20:03

Yeah.

Gary Arndt 20:03

could be spun off into books, but to be honest, nonfiction books are really- plummeting in sales.

Gary Pageau 20:10

Right.

Gary Arndt 20:11

Been thought about doing a tour. If I could get people to come to Appleton, then I could probably go to them. And if you look at the most popular cities where I have an audience, it's all the usual suspects.

Gary Pageau 20:22

Yeah.

Gary Arndt 20:23

New York, LA, Chicago, whatever the biggest cities are. So that's a possibility. Running tours, like I mentioned, I thought about just renting a riverboat in Europe- and selling it out.

Gary Pageau 20:32

Yeah, that sounds

Gary Arndt 20:33

so yeah, and I still haven't even bothered to open up a sh- store for merchandise, even though- I've had people begging for it.

Where To Listen And See Photos

Gary Pageau 20:40

So if someone was interested in learning more about the podcast, where can they go for more information on the Everything Everywhere podcast and possibly, either partnering or learning more?

Gary Arndt 20:54

Wherever you listen to podcasts, just go search for Everything Everywhere Daily. Or you can go to my website everything-everywhere.com.

Gary Pageau 21:01

Yeah.

Gary Arndt 21:02

All of my edited photos, it's all organized by geography,

Gary Pageau 21:05

nice. Can you like, can you actually do the wall art thing there if you want to?

Gary Arndt 21:08

Wall? Yeah. I use SmugMug.

Gary Pageau 21:10

Yep.

Gary Arndt 21:10

So you can buy prints from it. I haven't really get a lot of sales that way, but- Yeah I've sold a few.

Gary Pageau 21:16

Okay. Great, Gary. Thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it.

Gary Arndt 21:18

Thanks for having me.