How does wanderfly make money

Wanderfly leans on tags used to organize all of the content on the site. Every entry, whether it's a hotel, business, or attraction, is required to have at least one tag, such as romance, family, budget , or luxury , that describes the business or activity. The tags make it easier for people to browse the site and discover vacation activities they hadn't heard of or considered. Wanderfly is organized by city and country boards similar to what you'd see on Pinterest. The challenge with this cell Facebook pages are free so we started to see why should I pay for this when Facebook is free and has an enormous audience.

So we started moving in the direction of a travel vertical specific? Andrew : Sorry. I am not following. Why would Samsung want to have a site to let its customers view different destinations based on interest? In the case of Samsung, I shared this story about Samsung because I thought it was a good example. I think they were the first ones that paid us for something.

What they paid us for was a cross promotional blogging thing. We had a Content Manager. It had nothing to do with Wanderfly. Andrew : You were trying to make money at the time. That was kind of a technicality in a way. It kind of resonates with a general perspective I have that got more and more reinforced as we went on which is do whatever works.

Who cares if we started out saying that our business was going to be a consumer based thing where we make commission. Andrew : And if other companies had offered you money for the same thing, Wanderfly might have been a blog post writing company. And that was larger. It was in the tens of thousands. That was kind of like part promotion part white label technology.

Basically using Wanderfly to some degree our brand more just our UI, our engine to promote adventure travel for Jeep. Andrew : Different places you can go travel with your jeep.

Evan : Yes. Andrew : And at that point if I am doing it vicariously that is fine. Jeep is not trying to get me to ship my Jeep to these fun destinations. It was something that Telegraph was actually publishing on their site. So, they had the funnel and we were a vendor. We were a vendor using technology that we built in our expertise and our space. I think had things gone different and we had well I want get into that complete, that would become our business.

What were you going to say? What was the topic you were going to talk about? Talk about it vaguely. When I look at archive. I see what you are describing. A beautiful picture.

Lots of category options for the kinds of trips I want. I click a button I get to explore them. One woman who is recommending San Diego for a vegetarian Vegan trip. I click it. I see a hotel. I see tags. How did you guys shift to this?

Evan : In looking at the user experience, separately from the whole revenue business model discussion we pretty quickly identified we had this great user experience for a one time use or maybe a once a year use. Where people would love the site and love what it gave them and have a really good time for 15 to 20 minutes. We had a pretty long session length but ultimately we were giving them these great ideas and that was kind of it. There was no reason to come back. How frequently do you really need travel inspiration?

And, you know, you can come back and browse the pictures again, but beyond that initial value prop. And that same kind of tagged, structured, personalized recommendation approach, but more in the restaurants or hotels and just attractions and stuff to do in that place. So, that was, basically, we realized that by mid, you know, months into the market we really, decisively, said we need to extend this experience.

We were, also, the first, the version one was largely flash- based. And this was right around the time that Steve Jobs had convinced the world that flash was evil.

So, we said, we need a v. Which, very quickly, led to user recommendations. And, realizing, that we had curated most of the research content in that, sort of, first version, because we had or destinations. When you are doing local, you know, multiplying that by a hundred, at least, we said this is going to have to come from users.

So, we spent a lot of time on the onboarding process, and on the process of getting users to start making their own recommendations. And then, on the front end, we rebuild the entire thing from scratch in html 5 and JavaScript.

Andrew : How did you know that this was the next thing to try out? A lot of people loved the user experience and they would tell us and they would tell their friends. Evan : At that point, so I guess the original problem of, where should I go, came from having that problem ourselves and validating that with everyone we talked to. The question of, how do we know that was the right way to extend it?

Kind of in that same way, I mean, users told us and we would see people try to use the site in that way. We saw that we were turning, we were, kind of, turning away users who actually did have a destination in mind.

And that was a problem from day one, that we had this notion of serving the open-ended search. Evan : People would tell us, but it was also barely, at that point, kind of, intuitively obvious. We found a lot of people that want to fly were just not using the site on a regular basis because they had no reason to. There was…. Evan : Not exactly, no. I think there was, it seemed like it was a natural extension of the process. We saw other sites, we say that local, there are a lot of local sites and we, of course brushed up against some of the local sites.

This is right around when 4 Squared was starting to get big. And, we also, we had a version of that. So, I guess, we did have some validation in that, when you would land on Miami, we were sourcing the restaurants. And we would see people, kind of, clicking around there, but, we could tell in the traffic, in the analytics, and just, talking to people. And, again, kind of, primarily using it ourselves, that piece of the experience was just falling short. Because we were relying on third-party information.

Andrew : So, you know what? I interviewed Adam Goldstein of Hitmonk, and Adam said that he had this need that just seemed obvious, that shopping for flights is too tough.

And I asked him what he did afterwards and he said, essentially he went to talk to other people to see if he was crazy or not. And so, those kind of conversations validated his idea but also invalidated much of his approach to his idea.

Evan : Sure. You were thinking I have this vision, I know what I need. Evan : No, we certainly did that. I guess, I was kind of just taking that process in my description of it, what I was taking, that process for granted. And I mean when I say we, and what we knew, this is through, you know, a daily questioning internally through the people at Wanderfly and everyone we knew of, you know, sharing what we were building, bouncing it off of partners at the time, showing early comps, taking feedback, so yeah.

How would you ask them these questions? Evan : Well we had a lot of partners, because we had a kind of business heavy founding team, so with Kristy and the other founder, one of the other co-founders, Cesary were talking to a lot of these partners, so we had a base of people to start sharing some of these ideas with.

We also saw that they were asking for it too, just like users were. We had this feature that we launched as part of B1 that we had called Wanderlists and had a cease and desist around the name from a travel company, but basically a Wanderlist was a list of destinations. And that was kind of a fun way that we tried early on to try and extend the user experience and give people a reason to come back and, you know, not just browse these things one time, but also start to save them and you know, create a list and share it with your friends.

And there too, it was the same kind of thing where to us a Wanderlist was a set of destinations, but what if you were browsing Miami and had a set of things in Miami that you wanted to save? So we already had some cases already where some of our partners and ourselves and our users were kind of hacking that system and creating, had started to create, local venues as if they were destinations.

Andrew : I see. Evan : [??? So it definitely was still, launching B2 was definitely a significant risk. And so we made-. Andrew : Oh, yeah. Evan : -a big risk but it was, product-wise, it was the right move. Andrew : How do you get that? Evan : We powered a widget for them. So it was barely, I mean, we had our tiny little logo on it, but basically it was leading to their pages.

So we kind of used our technology, we basically overlaid our algorithms on their data. Which was a cool little tech project, actually. And you know, in retrospect, it was cool to be able to work with the New York Times, and you know as a little start up, and see our name on New York Times. Evan : There was no money. There was even any real, there was no traffic.

Because it was on their site and stayed on their site. And no one really, you know, we got, I think there were a couple pieces of news.

And it kind of helped in making us, you know, kind of puff up our chests and appear more legit than we were. Or just appear legit. I would say that was certainly a learning experience. Andrew : I told you in your pre interview one of your big challenges, as you were building this business, was sticking to your vision. Not, just vision. I think we were good about sticking to our vision on a product level. TripAdvisor makes money from advertising, as well as booking fees from hotels and attractions Since starting life in , TripAdvisor has been on a long journey to get where it is today.

Advertising TripAdvisor has three types of advertising revenue. Booking fees TripAdvisor also makes money from booking fees from hotels, attractions and vacation rentals through its instant booking product. Hotel vs non-hotel It's difficult to tell if TripAdvisor makes more money from advertising or from bookings simply because of the way the reports its financials, which breaks it down to hotel versus non-hotel revenue rather than advertising versus bookings.

Steven Loeb All author posts. October 15, How does LifeStance Health make money? LifeStance makes money on a per-visit basis when a patient receives care from one of its clinicians Read more October 01, How does GoodRx make money? The company makes most of its money from fees when someone uses a GoodRx code to fill a prescription Read more April 8, Expedia to spin-off TripAdvisor.

Other terms of the deal were not released. Without integrating the product with the core TripAdvisor offering, the product has instead been discontinued.

Users have a week to say goodbye. In an email to users, the Wanderfly team thanks supporters and encourages them to leave reviews on TripAdvisor once the site is turned off next week.

A few years ago, we created Wanderfly to make the online travel experience more personal, fun and beautiful. In , TripAdvisor acquired Wanderfly so that millions of travelers around the world could find the same travel inspiration and recommendations that Wanderfly fans already enjoyed.

The Wanderfly site will go offline in about a week. This means your Wanderfly account, profile and content will no longer be available on the site.