WAYN vs. TravBuddy - who will get acquired first?

On one side, you have WAYN (Where Are You Now), a leading travel social networking site founded by 2 friends Peter Ward and Jérome Touze in Spring 2003.

In 2003, WAYN received a first financial backing from the business angel Stephen Pankhurst (founder of the UK school reunion site Friends Reunited).
In November 2006, WAYN founders secured a first round of financing of $11M from ECP (Esprit Capital Partners), Brent Hoberman (ex CEO and Founder of Lastminute.com and now Managing Director of MyDeco) and other key UK entrepreneurs in online businesses (David Soskin and Hugo Burge of Cheapflights and HOWZAT media LLP; Adrian Critchlow and Andy Phillips of Active Hotels (bought by Priceline in 2004 for £90M), and Constant Tedder ( ex CEO of Jagex, an online gaming company).

WAYN has attracted 12M registered users (45,000 members in 2005)

Different revenue models have been implemented on the site:

==> if you want to get rid of the ads, you can be a VIP and pay WAYN a monthly fee. Several options are available from £3.99/month with a 12 month minimum contract to £5.99/month with no restrictions when you want to stop your subcription renewal

==> Sponsored Ads managed by AdRevolver, part of BlueLithium (a company acquired by Yahoo in 2007) and/or DoubleClick (acquired by Google in 2007)

On the other side, you have TravBuddy, another online travel social networking site created by the two Bjorndahl brothers back in 2005. The company is privately owned and has attracted:

1.4M registered users
75,000 blogs
20,000 travel reviews
and almost 1M pictures loaded on the platform

The business model besides the social element of the website is driven by 3 revenue models:

==> TravBuddy has taken an API from the hotel meta search engine HotelsCombined.com (one of Hotel Blogs sponsors, please visit their site) where I believe TravBuddy has negotiated some PayPerClick shared revenue

==> Sponsored links managed by the site representation company TribalFusion who publish targeted ad placement with their customers. For example, the pictures tab reveals an ad from Westin.

==> Sponsored links from Google AdSense

These 2 ventures are not the only social networking sites in travel but they both have created some nice functionalities and some decent traffic instead of being a "me too" of Facebook in the travel space. My best guess would be that TripAdvisor galaxy is far from being complete and I am sure their management team with the support of Expedia Inc. is looking for other ventures to acquire like these two. My other guess would be TUI.

Comments

[Yoopster]

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[Guillaume]

Hello Yoopster!

What's the relevance between the post around WAYN and Travbuddy and your comment?

Guillaume

[Pete]

Hi Guillaume,

I think WAYN has done an impressive job diversifying its revenue model and successfully introducing a subscription business in a category where it's a big risk to do so.

But every time I use WAYN I wonder why they haven't introduced a redesign with better navigation and UI, etc. It seems like their ad placements are kind of erratic and under-optimized, and there's probably a good chunk of additional revenue to gain.

Pete