How Tripadvisor got its users
The content has been produced for free by users for twenty years. The moat is not the template, it is the review inventory.
Confirmed. The team said it publicly, or the signals leave no room for doubt.
It worked because of something they already had, or a window that has closed. Copying it will not reproduce it.
The edge you do not have: Two decades of accumulated user reviews, banked before Google Maps arrived
- Content that produces itself
- Defensibility through sheer volume
- Critical mass before the content has any value
- A category Google will not simply absorb
Programmatic SEO in 2026
Still alive, but the bar has moved. Thin pages get deindexed, so you need real data on every single page.
Everything on this channel →The play
3 steps, in the order they ran them.
- 1
Create one page per place or entity
- 2
Have users produce the content
- 3
Lock the category before the dominant platform notices it
Run this against your own product
Carries the play above, and is written to tell you no when this channel is out of reach for you.
The same twelve channels as an agent skill. It reads your repository and eliminates what you cannot run. Open source, MIT.
curl -o ~/.claude/skills/howtodistribute/SKILL.md https://howtodistribute.com/skill.md
How big it got
Publicly listed company
What else they ran
The evidence1 checkable
They ran the same play
Want this verdict on your product?
Describe it. You get back the channel I would run in your place, the 30-day plan, and the number at which you stop.