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Monetisation of online content presents major opportunity for travel brands
Monday, 09 Sep, 2009
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TravelMole Guest Comment by Chris Nixon, commercial director of travel guides site www.simonseeks.com
As the web dominates sales in the travel sector, it is amazing how few options there are for companies to spend their online marketing budget.
Google is an obvious and productive choice, as well as working with the price comparison sites, a sector I know well from my years with travelsupermarket.com, and of course ensuring that SEO is a top priority.
More and more companies I speak to are nervous about putting too many eggs in these baskets and are keen to explore viable alternatives.
We have also seen how revenues for online advertising are declining on a global basis, despite online traffic increases.
One report in the Observer suggests this decline will not recover until well into 2013, well beyond most companies marketing plans!
A good example of a sector which is acutely affected is the newspaper industry.
Rupert Murdoch is already experimenting with ways in which he can entice his web users to pay for elements of his news channels and is trailing a ‘pay per view’ model with the Wall Street Journel.
However, we believe that there are ways in which you can monetise content, especially for more feature led content, whilst retaining editorial integrity at the same time as providing a useful booking channel for readers. Essentially this is how our model was born.
We are confident this has got to be the way forward and an exciting opportunity for travel companies to consider.
The traffic we drive to our partners’ sites is the highest quality, someone who has read a positive review by a third party in one of our travel guides, either from a professional, amateur or celebrity writer.
We know that user review sites such as Tripadvisor are popular and still have a place, however, when it comes to the motivation of a sale, a channel which recommends people’s favourite places and insider tips will surely give more credence.
The site is still in its infancy, and at two months we are working hard on development and expanding into areas such as specialist consumer guides, authored by our editor and consumer travel expert Nick Trend, which give expert moneysaving tips and recommendations on how to book travel.
Our car rental guide launched a few weeks ago and we are working on hotels and flights next which present further opportunities for partnerships with travel companies in these sectors.
We have bold ambitions, to be a top 10 travel site within a year of launch.
Response from the industry has been encouraging and we are committed to work with partners to make this happen and become a major alternative source of traffic for travel companies.
Phil Davies
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