Blog homeI got some feedback today that my posts should be more intelligent. Wot? Don’t people like my youtube videos?
Right - so don your bow tie and prepare to read an intelligent post.
A couple of weeks ago I reviewed 15 travel itinerary saving / sharing websites - which was quite well received (and probably intelligent enough to meet the intelligence criteria that you guys are setting for me!).
One of the challenges that I wrote about was the issue of how to monetise these tools and websites. Monetisation for travel websites is normally based around three key components:
- Selling travel, transport or accommodation products (the traditional approach from existing travel companies)
- Selling advertising to those who sell travel, transport or accommodation products
- Hoping someone comes along and buys your company before you have to worry about making actual money (this is normally when your data has value to someone else) (rather a lot of sites are taking this approach!)
The forth option is “selling something else”.
I recently found an interesting travel itinerary site that has been monetised nicely that fall into this 4th category. (Although of course I don’t have any sales data to share)
FlightMemory.com / flugstatistik.de- they have a mechanism where a user enters their previous flight history into the website. You then can pay (Between USD 29 and USD 139) to have a poster of your previous trips printed out for you on a nice map. Information on the poster
Above is an example poster, I think.
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Greetings from PhoCusWright in Orlando and thanks for your kind words!
If only selling posters was more lucrative! While they look great and are priced reasonably, we have not had nearly the success in selling them that we would have hoped - not bad, but we are certainly not headed for retirement on poster sales!
I would actually add a 5th category to your monetization ideas above - up-sell. We sell a Premium Service option for 35 USD per year that is a nice value add for our users. PremiumService offers users a broad range of features and functionality that are not offered on our basic site. Again, we are not ready to move to Fiji and retire on these revenues but it has helped us cover our basic operating costs.
Nice idea! Whenever someone points out as often as Tom did that a site isn’t making money, you know it’s really raking it in!
And agreed with you Alex that there are frightfully many companies going down the third option for making money path at the moment. Let the bubble please burst soon so there will be some good technology for the picking on the cheap…
The more intelligent posters the better, I think (though you probably don’t want us pinning you to the wall!)