This content was created by Max Brun. This content was uploaded by Max Brun. This is a YouTube video titled "How Tripadvisor Initially Drove Traffic & Reviews" (created 2024-08-02T00:31:45+00:00). The excerpt is an interview-style exchange between two speakers: an interviewer asking how TripAdvisor attracted initial traffic, ratings, and reviews, and a TripAdvisor representative (unnamed in the excerpt) who recounts the company's early B2B business plan, beta launch, inability to monetize via partners (mentioning Lycos), the subsequent pivot to a public website, and tactics used to acquire users—notably SEO, PR, crawlable pages and first-mover advantage.
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You know, with those kind of first steps for starting, you know, how did you kind of get the initial kind of traffic to kind of leave ratings and reviews and kind of really get the flywheel started? Yeah.
So the beginning, if you looked at the original business plan for TripAdvisor, we were a B2B company. We were gonna be selling this database of information about where to stay, where to go, what to do, where to eat. to all the other travel players because we would focus on crawling the web to find the best possible information. Because my problem when I searched on Google or Yahoo or AltaVista at the time and I searched for a hotel name, they were all crap. They were all travel agents offering me to make a reservation at this hotel. When I searched for a city, I got weather, I got real estate, I got maybe a little travel. I got nothing to help a person planning a vacation there. And so the goal was build that technology, stay a small B2B company, license it to Expedia and AOL Travel and Lycos and Yahoo and American Airlines and all the travel companies out there. We built that as a beta site, launched it. We started in February, launched it in October as just a beta site. And since we didn't have user reviews, the site had links to articles from newspapers or magazines or just on the web that we had found and had manually tagged to be relevant to the city, this hotel, this attraction, that sort of thing. Fast forward a year later, we still couldn't find any clients. None of these B2B players were willing to pay us money kind of per search. We eventually landed a client, Lycos. It was like the number 3 portal in the— on the planet at that time, also in our backyard here in Boston. We powered most of their travel section. And to make the long story short, we earned nothing. The partnership which gave us 50% of the rev share On those pages, 50% of nothing is still nothing. And so you were about to go out of business. We made the pivot to, hey, let's take our beta.tripadvisor or demo.tripadvisor and turn it to www and see what kind of traffic we could get, which we got through search engines and a little PR. And I can go into the search engine piece if you want, but hey, we were a site that had pages. We were open to search engines and the Expedias and other big travel sites were all behind a database, so they weren't crawlable. And so we had an absolute first mover advantage. We leaned into SEO heavily, got a lot of traffic. So if you search for a hotel name, odds are you would find it, you would find TripAdvisor in the top of the list. So we grew it a lot on the basis of free traffic acquisition and a good product. So Google was good at recognizing low bounce rate, high engagement, and then we did link building and the rest of the SEO game.
