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The dream of travel — hopping on a plane to exotic or unknown destinations — is a dream of possibility. Rafat Ali sees that possibility through the lens of business. Skift, Ali’s travel news and information site, is approaching its first birthday and has shown some encouraging signs of growth. One of those signs: $1.1 million in a new round of seed funding, which will allow Ali and team to double Skift’s staff from 5 to 10. (Among the company’s investors are a few names familiar to digital news types, including Martin Nisenholtz and Gordon Crovitz, who held high-level digital positions at The New York Times and The Wall Street Journals, respectively.)
Billed as a “travel intelligence” site, Skift is a hub for travel industry news and information, an orientation not unlike that of Ali’s last media venture, paidContent. But Ali wants Skift to be able to grow beyond being a travel news vertical. Skift will expand by developing a suite of data tools and mobile products that he hopes will become indispensable to people in the world of travel, as well as its own news coverage to syndicate to other media companies, he says. The plan is for the site to be supported largely through content deals and advertising, but ultimately Ali would like to grow Skift through subscription-based data tools, some of which they plan to launch soon. “Our hope is it’s of daily use, a daily addictiveness — that this world becomes a Bloomberg dashboard, if you will, for people in the travel industry,” he said.
When we spoke last week, Ali and I discussed how Skift uses data, how the site will build tools for users, and why now is a good time to focus on the travel industry. Below is an edited transcript of our conversation.
I think the novelty, which should have been obvious, was that we were bringing sectors of the industry that were traditionally siloed together, with the big premise that these silos were collapsing in the travel industry, across airlines, hotels, destinations, cruises, and tech. The silos that are collapsing there because of digital are similar to what has already happened in the media, tech, and finance world. I think that resonated — the premise that the silos are collapsing, so we are the digital information brand that speaks to that, hence we’re going to bring all those sectors together and look at connecting the dots. I think that has resonated with people.
The other thing that’s resonated with people is — I had this philosophy at my former company as well — that B2B does not have to be boring. Travel, as you can imagine, is such a fascinating subject in general, so how can you make the coverage of the business of it boring? I think we’ve brought a very accessible tone. So covering the business of travel but also the creative promise of travel. I think we’ve brought those things together.
So there’s the trades that cover different parts of the industry, whether it’s airline magazines or sites, or hotel magazines and sites, or cruises and tours, or blogs that cover tech stuff in travel. There’s competition there, bits and pieces obviously. But we’re a layer on top of all of those. We’re curating a lot of stuff, linking to them, and bringing it all together.
The consumer news and information players are anybody and everybody — to some extent The New York Times, or people who do it on a dedicated basis like USA Today, CNN Travel, NBC News Travel. Of course The Wall Street Journal and New York Times covers the business news of travel. The wires do as well. But we’re bringing it all together.
We actually syndicate our content to CNN Travel and NBC News Travel at this point. We are syndicating inbound content from all the wires and stuff because we use NewsCred to get a lot of content for Skift. So I think we compete, but we’re also a layer on top of everybody. The whole point is for us to be the most pervasive travel information brand, which means that we have cross-dependencies on everybody and everybody has cross-dependencies on us.
These funds that are quite well known have invested not just based on our traction and the media part — which is great, because investors run away from anything media or content-related, or at least shy away. You have to give them a larger vision of what you’re trying to build, which is media plus data. We also know, logically, this is how we’ll scale, not just based on the media part.
We raised the money based on that. We’re hiring two developers — those are the first few hires after we raised this money. We’re five people, and now we’re doubling our staff, another five people. We already have one head of data, that joined after we last spoke. Dan [Nguyen], he’s the one who does Skift Social, but he needs a lot more help, so we’re hiring two new developers.
We’re bringing in not a CTO, but a technologist at large. He’s a very well-known figure in publishing tech. Hopefully we’ll announce him in a couple weeks or something. That will make a material difference in how people look at us from a tech point of view. We just hired a woman as our social media/audience development person — she starts the end of this month — to make a more concerted effort in social as well as other things. In travel, a lot of these bulletin boards still work quite a bit, so can we seed them? Anytime one of our stories get posted in one of these forums, we get a lot of traffic, so we want to do that in a more organized fashion.
We’re hiring a head of sales. That’s another top priority, because we’re already larger than most industry news sites. We’re at the stage where we can start advertising. So we’re speaking to a few people — hopefully in the next two weeks we’ll finalize one of them.
To some extent, we’re using the media funnel we’re building, which is Skift.com, the news information part of it, as a way to push people to subscribe to our data services. So it is a marketing funnel.
But it’s not purely just a marketing funnel. We’re going to monetize the media part as well. But then media serves as marketing in other ways. We can do 10 stories based on data we’re collecting, that will be in and of itself interesting and illuminating. That will potentially push people to subscribe to the data services as well.
The vendor who helped us build the mobile site, they have metrics on a lot of the players in the industry, and 20-25 percent is standard and they predict it’s going to go up across the industry to 30-35 percent of total pageviews for media-driven sites like ours. We can’t ignore it, it’s a big part of it. We are going to sell mobile ad products as part of the larger ad services we build.
On the news/information part, we may have an app for the news part of it. But I still question the value of the news apps for vertical sites, as opposed to just mobile sites that work well. But as we build the data services, both mobile and tablet together become very important. Those dashboards we’re building, Skift Social, isn’t necessarily well optimized at this point, but going ahead as we build those services it’s going to have to be. The data services have to be mobile — the alerting functions in those services, the ability to follow people, the newsfeeds, will all have to be mobile in one way or another. So that becomes a huge part of what we’re doing. That’s how we look at mobile.
But for now, on the media part, mobile and social really work well together. We would not be where we are this quickly without social. At all. Social is a huge part of why we made the mark so quickly. If they’re backward in online, the competitors, imagine how horrible they are in social. Just the fact that you are there, beyond just automatic headlines, is just a huge change in the industry. Part of owning stories, owning the day as they say, happens in social. And you have to back that up — you just can’t be tweeting, tweeting, tweeting without creating your own original stuff on the site that you can point to.
Image of Rafat Ali by Brian Solis used under a Creative Commons license.