Culture Trip: a business model combining media and travel
At a time when most media ventures are struggling with monetising content and increasing audience engagement, a startup focusing at once on media, travel and entertainment has shown tremendous success.
GEN spoke with Dmitry Shishkin, Chief Content Officer at Culture Trip to learn more about the startup’s monetisation and editorial strategies. The startup has secured 100$m in funding and reaches about 18 million users per month. Shishkin says the goal is to build “an editorially powered online travel business”. He tells us more about how Culture Trip earns money from both media and travel sectors, and what steps it plans to take next. We also asked him the inevitable question — about being part of a travel business in light of rising climate crisis.
GEN: The media, travel and entertainment environments are highly saturated, but Culture Trip has seen significant growth over the years, securing over 100$m in funding. What makes the experience of a Culture Trip user so unique?
Dmitry Shishkin: You are correct, but only in part. All these segments, media, travel, entertainment, are indeed saturated, but only if you approach them separately. Culture Trip wants to win in the overlap between them, that intersection is something we want to properly own. Editorially, the fact that the bulk of our output is created by local creators is a big differentiator. We commission content from them about the places they live in, love dearly and know intimately. That authenticity and originality is a big draw. Doing travel content is not enough on its own, so creatively we always try to add an additional cultural layer responding to different user needs. And more generally, Culture Trip’s business proposition provides a full-funnel experience for a user, from inspiring them to travel using our content, to helping them plan their trip and then to actually booking with us sets us aside in a very meaningful way.
Editorially, I am convinced that we are best placed to capture dramatic societal changes — globalisation, migration, ‘third culture kids’ — and the way they fuel cultural curiosity, which in turn is inherently linked with travelling. The motto on our front page — Created for the curious — sums it well.
What is the difference between Trip Advisor — almost twenty years old — and Culture Trip?
Some travel players focus on providing inspirational content, others, like TripAdvisor are better placed to deliver practical information at the planning or booking stages. Culture Trip’s main USP is that we offer both sides of the equation — highly creative, localised content that connects travel inspiration with the ‘how to’, at a global scale. There are of course many other players out there, some do a bit of content, some don’t, some try to do only one thing really well — we are attempting to build an editorially powered online travel business.
Who is your primary audience and which cities get most hits? Have you had to adapt or change any of the services offered based on trends in user engagement and practices?
The audience comes from English-speaking countries, and when it comes to the most popular destinations, then many of them are quite obvious, global cities — NY, LA, London, Paris, San Francisco, Tokyo, many other European capitals. Having seen an audience of around 18 million using our platform each month — from US, UK and the rest of the world — we know a lot about it, but of course, we are only starting.
We serve an open, multinational world, yet even from my time with BBC World Service and now at Culture Trip, I appreciate very well that young audiences from all corners of the globe, while diverse in appearances, cultures and beliefs, are often driven by similar things — a desire to explore, to be connected, to properly understand, to feel like they belong. They may follow similar people on Instagram, have many friends in foreign countries, have that famous ‘fear of missing out’ — there are a lot of commonalities for us to work with. We learn from them and adapt appropriately.
A great example of this would be the introduction of a special taxonomy of ‘content products’, which has become a key pillar to our editorial work. Every piece of content about any city belongs to a specific user need and needs to be commissioned in a specific manner in order to keep users consume more and get around the site. We know which ‘content products’ convert users better and we are aiming to be much more granular about it.
“On Facebook, our videos have been very successful — the social-friendly format and the travel topic, obviously, sit very well with younger audiences and the platform itself. The tone of voice played its role, I am sure, too.”
Like all other content creation organisations (we obviously don’t have a ‘newsroom’ in the purest sense of the word) we study our own performance and fine-tune it as we go along. It’s early days yet — I’ve only been here for 7 months in the new role of Chief Content Officer. The key for us at the moment is to get the new creative strategy properly embedded into our commissioning, while data and business intelligence teams give us more granular insights to act on it.
Not every piece of content is created equally, of course, and not every bit converts people in a similar way or plays a similar role ‘taking people down the funnel.’ I see us becoming the world leader in appreciating and utilising content influence on travel booking business and people’s preferences.
How do you seek to monetise content and what is the overall business model of Culture Trip? The company seems to be prioritizing travel-based business model — particularly with the launch of the new online travel booking system — over a media-based one.
The business we are building is a travel one and media one, so we earning money from both sectors. We recently launched our own online travel agency — which I actually used earlier this week to book my upcoming break in Tel-Aviv — that will allow us to offer our users who came to us for our content a chance to complete their travel planning with us, via a wishlist functionality content that helps people to orient themselves and plan their itinerary. However, we also have been quite successful recently with our branded content work for the likes of GoPro or British Airways. We are also experimenting with local and unique experiences in cities that would be offered to our audiences to buy too. Content is the anchor for all of these.
Let me explain what it looks like in practice. Take our homepage today — one of the profiled cities is New York, there are four articles to get people’s attention but hundreds more in the archive), and all four of them represent different stages of travel and various parts of a travel funnel. 15 Reasons Why You Should Visit New York City at Least Once in Your Lifetime is an inspirational piece, A Guide to Brooklyn’s Coolest Neighborhoods is an orientational one, 10 New York Restaurants For The Perfect Instagram Shots helps you to plan your days and finally 7 Places To Stay in New York With Mesmerizing Rooftop Views offers you a fantastic selection of carefully selected hotels to book. We offer all you might need in one place, so you don’t need to go to a dozen places to get your inspiration, booking and planning.
The content of Culture Trip is quite diversified — you produce animations, video series, original articles written by local freelancers as well as lots of listicles. Tell us about your content and editorial strategy. What’s working best at the moment and what are your goals moving forward?
Different pieces of content, we call them ‘content products’, internally satisfy different user needs and serve a different purpose — from our wonderful animation and illustration (check out our short films promoting cities around the world) to monthly special reports, which in the last few months included Pioneers of Love to mark Pride at 50. Everything we do — from gifs to 10-min films — represent our brand and serve a purpose.
More generally, the creative strategy is quite simple but effective — we create stories inspired by travel seen through a cultural perspective and culture stories seen through the lens of travel. Every story regardless of format is based on a place or a location — places are an essential character to each of our stories. However, location-based storytelling isn’t enough to describe what we do: we strive to bring a cultural or personal slant to each of our stories. Culture Trip has always been about off the beaten track and quirky, and we find what is unique and special to every location, well known or not.
You mentioned that Culture Trip does not have a ‘newsroom’, but how do you organise the curation and editing? How do you verify the information given by freelancers to prevent misinformation?
It’s not a ‘newsroom’ in a sense that we don’t deal with daily news, but it’s very much a sophisticated editorial operation with data-informed commissioning, briefs, guidelines and editorial strategy documents shared with contributors, photo research done, video rights cleared, legal issues sorted — all you’d expect from a proper creative operation. We also have a crucial copy desk department in our workflow — where we check the facts, language, style etc — before anything gets published. Information about bookable places to stay comes from our partners, so it’s all checked, too.
Do you partner with legacy media or digital news organisations?Are you in competition with the travel departments of news media or do you see them as partners?
Not yet, but we have had some interesting partnership and collaboration conversations and are open to more of course.
Early on in my career, I promised myself not to think too much about what competition does. If you speak with an original voice and produce relevant, useful and engaging content people will come and then return. I am certainly following what’s happening in travel journalism around the world — like any other professional following their field — but I am not bothered by it if you see what I mean. The travel sector is one of the largest sectors in the world economy and with the growing middle class in developing countries, especially in China and India, we all will have enough to do, frankly.
In a recent interview with Forbes, Kris Naudst, the Culture Trip CEO, spoke about plans to use AI for curating the articles. Can you tell us more about what will be the role of AI in providing the service?
That’s actually one of the key reasons I joined Culture Trip. In my BBC years, I have always enjoyed working on the intersection of editorial, product and data and now I have a great chance to build on it. From better commissioning to demand dashboards, from automation in our processes to predictive content maintenance — machine learning will help us serve our audiences better and do things more efficiently. Content recommendation algorithms is a good example of it — the way we pull pieces from our vast archive and expose them to the audience, where it is most relevant. I can’t wait for it to become a part of my daily editorial routine.
How do you reconcile the business of Culture Trip — which is essentially about promoting travel — with the rising climate crisis?
Our aim is to inspire people to go beyond their cultural boundaries and connect with the world around them. We want to help people engage more deeply in the places they are interested in, to inform and inspire them about other cultures, people and experiences. I think we need to be quite clear with ourselves — it’s not our task to stop people from travelling, this will not happen.
The content on Culture Trip often focuses on the undiscovered or under-appreciated aspects of a location, whether it’s exploring the literary history of a place or lesser-known artistic neighbourhoods. Our stories encourage visitors to go beyond congested popular tourist hotspots. We’re also huge advocates for exploring your local neighborhoods and cities. Be a tourist in your home town to support local economies and lessen environmental impact.
We also take pride in working with our local contributors from around the world — this means in the overwhelming majority of cases we don’t travel ourselves anywhere, we guide others to tell the best stories. We have also started commissioning sustainable travel pieces, too.
A good editorial example of this would be a special project we published for Earth day, where we explored the theme of sustainable cities through the lens of architecture, food, waste and green spaces — from the way New York is going back to its rural roots to the rise of Chinese eco-cities. Separately, this piece describes the difference between green tourism, ecotourism and sustainable tourism, while giving the audience useful tips of travelling more responsibly.
Edited by Ana Lomtadze
Dmitry enjoys working on the intersection of creative and tech and cares deeply about what innovation and storytelling can do together to inspire people around the world. He joined Culture Trip in January 2019 from the BBC World Service, where he worked as Digital Development Editor for 41 foreign language news teams. Originally from Moscow, Dmitry has worked in various senior editorial development roles for the digital part of BBC News. He serves as a member of the advisory board of World Editors’ Forum for WAN-IFRA as well as a strategy consultant for analytics platform IO Technologies.
