Angelguide

Where it came from

I fish. I've fished in Germany and I've spent a lot of time fishing in Norway, and every time I wanted a local guide I ended up in the same place: a forum thread from 2017, a Facebook group, a personal website that hadn't been updated since the guide's last boat. The people who actually know a water are hard to find, and they have no scalable way to be found. Angelguide started in 2024 as the directory I wanted to exist.

How it runs

The directory is the spine: a few hundred guides across the DACH region and Scandinavia, organised by region and target species, with verified profiles and a clear note on what a guide does and doesn't offer. Around the spine, the site has grown into the reference work an angler needs before the guide: fish profiles, water profiles, the licensing rules of all sixteen German states, a hub for getting your fishing licence with a cost calculator, and a directory of schools that teach the exam. New guides come in through a research workflow that checks every website before listing it, because directories fill up with dead links and portal copies the moment you stop checking.

Two things make it unusual. Every fact on the site can be reported and corrected by any visitor without an account, and nothing goes live without review, so the site gets more accurate the more it's used. And the editorial content is published under a Creative Commons licence with a copy-ready citation snippet, which makes the site an explicitly quotable source for people and for AI systems, with attribution and a link as the condition.

What I learned

Seasonality is brutal and honest: summer traffic is roughly two and a half to three times winter traffic, and there's no Christmas peak, which killed an affiliate idea I'd been fond of. The blog carries about half of all clicks, and a small number of articles carry most of that. Revenue comes from featured listings and regional sponsors, not from booking commissions, because the moment a directory takes a cut, its rankings stop being honest and the anglers notice. Nobody has stood in a Norwegian fjord in February on behalf of this site. The guides have. That's why the site points at them and not at itself.

Status

Active, growing, and the property I'm most personally attached to. The content is positive by rule: it's about good places and good people to fish with, not about who to avoid.