Welcome to the zero percenters

The Boot blog has suggested a new industry definition (quoting Phillip Wolf, CEO PhoCusWright)

They have defined a “zero percent site” as a site where zero (or near zero) percent of the site’s content is controlled or produced by the owner. Phillip / Tim suggest that 4 of the top 10 online travel sites (by traffic) are zero percent sites.

This therefore would group meta-search and user generated content sites into one group.

Of course, Google is a zero percent site as well….. not sure if they included that!

How the definition fails
I like the definition but I would prefer it if it was more consumer oriented.

For example, say you are signing up for a profile at a travel social network - when you first join there is no content for you to interact with (because you have no friends). These are the true zero percenters - sites where - on first visit - as a consumer you have nothing to play with.

A different way at looking at zero percenters
Perhaps a different way at looking at defining zero percenters is to define as the sites where zero percent of the company equity is owned by the web design team!

A few years ago you would find a number of leading travel websites were entrepreneur backed - hence there would be equity throughout the business - including the web design / development team. Nowadays leading travel portals are corporate backed hence stock isn’t given / earnt by mid-level employees (which the web team normally are)

I remember being offered 0.5% of the stock for a VC backed (non travel) website I was involved with in 1999 (as web design lead). I am still not sure if that was a good deal or not - but the offer was for a reasonable salary and some stock - and so that certainly got my attention at the time. When talking to web teams at large travel companies (who really are the key to the companies short and medium term success) none of them seem to have any stake in the success of the business. No wonder much of the current innovation is coming from start ups.

While talking about stock…… just what is going on over in the States?
Two VC backed sites have got my attention recently - Nile Guide (a weird name for a travel website - but at least doesn’t have the word trip in) and TravelMuse (named after this blog, obviously!)

Both seem headed for the overcrowded travel guide / travel suggestion sector - but what has piqued my interest is their “about us” pages.

TravelMuse has 16 named individuals (and a board of directors). Of the 16 - from the senior team - only the Director of Product Management has a travel industry background. The others are travellers….. yeah I like eating - but doesn’t make me a great person to run a restaurant. One example of where this lack of experience shows is on their inspiration finder - http://www.travelmuse.com/inspire/ (which actually isn’t a bad tool) - if you search for London - you are defaulted from London, Canada - rather than London, UK. This is the kind of thing travel websites sorted out years ago.

NileGuide has 11 named individuals (and a board of directors). These guys seem to have many more travel industry types…..

For what they are doing they both appear over staffed. I am not convinced that paying for 15 staff is going to make it that easy to make a return on just monetised destination content. There is too much competition. Also, if they are in “start up” mode - the stock will be spread thinly between their VC investors and all the initial employees. Content lead websites can be started with 2-5 experienced people and a community…. not 15.

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