How an Anonymous Blog Became an $18 Million Directory: The Atlas Obscura Story

Atlas Obscura looks like a travel site for weird stuff. Glowing lava lakes, self-mummified monks, bridges grown from living tree roots.

Underneath all of it sits one of the best directory businesses of the last 20 years.

It started with one guy, an anonymous blog, and a hunch: there’s a hidden layer of wonder all around you, if you know where to look.

In 2025 that hunch did $18.3 million in revenue.

Here’s how a crowd-sourced list of strange places turned into a media business, and what it teaches anyone who wants to build a directory of their own.

It started as an anonymous blog

First there was The Proceedings of the Athanasius Kircher Society, an anonymous blog Joshua Foer ran, named after a 17th-century Jesuit polymath who collected the world’s oddities.

Foer was a journalist hooked on curiosities.

He’d once won a grant to drive a minivan across America for 2 months with one mission: have an adventure every day and write about it.

He wanted to throw a real-world event for his readers, so he asked online for help.

A documentary filmmaker named Dylan Thuras answered.

Thuras was a blogger too.

He and his wife ran a travel blog called Curious Expeditions from Budapest, “traveling and exhuming the world’s extraordinary history.”

Two bloggers, same obsession. They met in 2007.

As Foer tells it: “There was no great resource for people like us out in the world trying to find the world’s wondrous and curious hidden spots.”

Foer had just finished driving the U.S. hunting down its strangest corners.

Thuras was about to leave for a year in Eastern Europe doing the same.

So they built the thing they wished existed: a directory where anyone in the know could add the hidden wonder in their own backyard.

They launched Atlas Obscura in 2009 as a crowd-sourced, user-generated site.

That one decision, build a directory and let the crowd fill it, is the whole story.

Why the directory was the genius move

Atlas Obscura barely had to create its own content.

Its users did!

Someone in Turkmenistan added the “Gates of Hell,” a gas crater that’s been on fire since 1971.

Someone in Venezuela added Lake Maracaibo, where the sky cracks with lightning almost every night of the year.

Then, 3 months in, a man running a bed and breakfast in Cherrapunji, India submitted the living root bridges, grown over decades from tree roots, with a note that they were incredible and going unnoticed.

That single submission became one of the site’s most iconic entries.

Do that tens of thousands of times and you get the asset: a database of roughly 30,000 places, most of it built by a passionate community for free.

Every listing is an evergreen, searchable page.

It pulls in travelers planning trips and people falling down a rabbit hole at midnight.

That’s the quiet engine of a directory.

Inventory that compounds while you sleep, and traffic that keeps arriving years after a page goes up.

By Thuras’s own account, this made Atlas Obscura the third-largest travel media company by web traffic, bigger than National Geographic, and second only to Nat Geo for time-on-site.

For a project that started as a blog with no name on it, that’s a serious result.

How the directory actually makes money

Atlas Obscura’s listings are weird public places.

You can’t send a featured listing invoice to a flaming crater in Turkmenistan, so the listings themselves earn nothing directly.

What they do is pull in an audience.

That audience is the asset, and you can monetize it a few different ways.

Atlas Obscura did it patiently, stacking revenue streams over 15 years.

Advertising and branded content. 

A big, engaged audience of curious travelers is exactly what advertisers pay for.

The directory’s traffic became the base for a media business.

Experiences and trips. 

They turned online listings into real money.

Weekend events across the country, and small-group trips to places most tour companies would never touch: abandoned communist monuments in Bulgaria, a salt-mine amusement park in Romania, the monarch butterfly migration in Mexico.

People paid premium prices for access to the wonder the directory had catalogued.

Books. 

Starting with the 2016 bestseller Atlas Obscura: An Explorer’s Guide to the World’s Hidden Wonders, they spun the database into a shelf of titles, including a kids’ edition, Gastro Obscura, and 2024’s Wild Life.

Podcast, app, and membership. 

The audience the directory pulled in became a platform they could extend into almost any format.

There’s a deeper reason it worked, and the founders learned it the hard way.

A lot of the strange little places they cataloged were dying off.

The cause is quiet and brutal: these places close because they’re under-loved.

Too few people know they exist.

A directory fixes that.

Visibility drives visitors, and visitors are money.

Atlas Obscura kept places alive, driving enough tourism to the living root bridges of India that a sustainable preservation industry grew up around them.

When your directory sends real economic value to the things it lists, everyone in the ecosystem wants you to win.

Investors noticed.

Atlas Obscura raised $2 million in 2015 (The New York Times was among the backers), another $7.5 million in 2017, and a $20 million Series B in 2019 led by Airbnb.

The lesson hiding in the wonder

Strip away the flaming craters and the mummified monks, and Atlas Obscura is a case study worth stealing from.

Pick a niche you’re genuinely obsessed with. Foer and Thuras built what they wished existed, and that obsession pulled in a community willing to build the directory for them.

Let the crowd do the heavy lifting.

The most valuable part of Atlas Obscura, its 30,000 listings, came from users.

A well-built directory turns your audience into your content team.

Own the asset, then stack revenue on top.

The directory came first. Ads, trips, books, and a podcast came later.

Each new revenue stream was possible because the directory had already built the audience.

One last twist, and it’s a good one.

In late 2025, the founders were voted off their own company’s board after disagreements over its direction.

The business had outgrown them.

That proves the whole point: a real directory becomes an asset bigger than any single person, including the people who started it.

You can build one too

You don’t need Airbnb’s checkbook or a decade of luck.

You need a niche, a way for people to add listings, and a platform you actually own.

That’s what GeoDirectory does.

It’s a WordPress plugin for launching a fully crowd-sourced, monetizable location directory, the same basic model behind Atlas Obscura, on a site you own outright.

Paid listings, featured placements, ads, memberships: the revenue tools are built in.

Josh Foer built a hidden layer of wonder, and it turned into a multi-million company.

The tools to build your own version, in whatever niche you can’t stop thinking about, are cheaper and easier to get than they’ve ever been.

The rat race pays you for your time.

A directory pays you for an asset.

Go build the asset!