Our community of more than 800 publishers is at the core of what we do at VoiceMap. In our June webinar, we handed the floor to publishers, and instead of a set topic, we invited questions from the community. By the time we went live, there were 34 questions waiting, across eight different topics.
A big thank you to Dan Sutherland-Weiser, Baltimore-based publisher and founder of Walk Past Tours, who moderated the session, putting questions from the community to VoiceMap’s Founder and CEO, Iain Manley, and various members of the team. We provide our answers to all the questions below, including some of the questions we didn’t get to in the session, and links to relevant resources. The conversation covered:
- Who uses VoiceMap, and who is it for?
- Sales, earnings, and benchmarks
- Platform strategy and competition
- Platform features and new developments
- Distribution and reselling
- Tour creation and content
- Marketing and promotion
- Community and collaboration
Watch the session recording here:
Who uses VoiceMap, and who is it for?
1. What is a typical VoiceMap user? Gender, age, country of origin, any other specific characteristics? Solo travellers or couples, families?
The data we have skews toward the most active buyers, rather than the full picture of casual users. From that group, some patterns emerge. They tend to be well-educated, frequent travellers who already consume audio (podcasts, audiobooks) in their daily lives. About 40% of our highest-value users are over 55. Users under 25 are a smaller part of the active buyer group, which reflects the fact that audio tours as a format tend toward history and culture as subject matter.
Beyond that, the data over 25 is fairly even across age and gender. Solo travellers are well represented, but we also see couples and small groups. Country of origin is spread, with strong representation from the US, UK, and Western Europe.
2. Are there examples of publishers who started without an existing audience or profile and went on to become successful? If so, what did they do well?
You do not need to be Sir Stephen Fry, or have a following, a media profile, or celebrity status to succeed on VoiceMap. You just need to find the right topic and get it in front of the right people.
Publisher Sarah Salter is a good example. She started without an audience in Cardiff and found her tours take off, when she identified a gap: Doctor Who tours. She targeted fans who were already comfortable with apps and actively looking for something to do in Cardiff and her Doctor Who tour is now one of the top-selling tours in the UK.
A few things she did well. She found a niche with a ready-made audience. She built a consistent visual style across her tours, so that anyone browsing a destination could recognise her work and feel a connection to tours they had already enjoyed. And she chose cost-effective marketing, business cards rather than expensive print runs.
3. What should I focus on when explaining VoiceMap and audio tours to my followers, clients, and colleagues?
The thing that tends to make people’s eyes light up is hearing the voice. If you can show rather than tell, pull out the app and play a clip, because the quality of the audio does a lot of the work. We also provide a tour trailer of your tour’s featured location, in the app and website for this reason. The VoiceMap trailer on YouTube highlights how listeners experience a tour and brings together voices from publishers all over the world and is worth sharing.
Beyond that, share the benefits of a self-guided audio tour: you can do a tour whenever you like, at your own pace, without joining a group or waiting for a guide. And you can pop in some earbuds and blend into the crowd rather than looking like an obvious tourist. For more guidance on how to describe VoiceMap to new audiences, see How to describe VoiceMap in the publisher documentation.
Sales, earnings, and benchmarks
4. What are the benchmarks for tour sales? How many monthly sales do the best-selling tours get?
Tour sales vary by destination, market size, and competition. We often see tours in smaller destinations, where there aren’t many guided options, do just as well as tours in larger popular destinations. And there is seasonality to account for: a number from May 2026 is not a reliable guide to June, let alone an annual baseline. Our top 50 tours show a consistent seasonal pattern, where sales dip every winter and return stronger every summer, year after year.
One benchmark we do use is one for early momentum: tours that make $50 in their first 100 days tend to become among the most successful on the platform. If a tour earns just $50 over that period – equivalent to roughly five sales at full price – it goes on to earn nearly nine times more over its lifetime, on average.
The $50 threshold isn’t arbitrary. It’s the point at which a tour has demonstrated enough demand from listeners to benefit from the work VoiceMap does to ensure tours get discovered and purchased. Reviews start coming in, visibility increases, and more sales follow. Tours that don’t reach the threshold in those first 100 days aren’t written off, but they’re waiting for conditions that may not arrive on their own. Read more about what the numbers say about early momentum here.
5. Can you build a meaningful income from VoiceMap tours?
Yes, though the word “build” is deliberate. There are publishers on the platform who earn enough from their tours that it constitutes a meaningful income. However, none of them got there with a single tour but have built a portfolio of tours over time.
The structure of the income is worth understanding. Once a tour is published and generates traction, it is largely passive. A well-placed tour in a destination that does not change quickly can run with minimal ongoing effort.
6. What is VoiceMap doing to support publishers in the first 100 days after publishing?
We are building the takeoff programme, designed around a pattern we have documented as the takeoff effect: tours that generate early sales, develop significantly better momentum in the long term. The programme will structure the first 100 days after a tour is published around specific marketing activities and milestones, formalising a lot of what has been discussed informally in publisher info sessions. We will share more details when the programme is ready to launch.
In the meantime, our peak season and tour promotion webinars cover a lot of the ground the programme will formalise.
7. Why do I see changes in my tour sales?
Tour sales fluctuate for a range of reasons: seasonality, changes to destination rankings, shifts in OTA traffic, new tours entering your market, or updates to your listing. Some of these are within your control and worth reviewing periodically – listing quality, photos, description, and reviews all have an impact. If you are seeing a sustained change you cannot account for, get in touch with your editor and we can look at your dashboard alongside you.
Platform strategy and competition
8. As AI tools become more capable, what is VoiceMap’s strategy for ensuring the platform remains a home for authentic, human-centric storytelling?
This is the thinking behind our recent brand update centered around the tagline “curiously human self guided tours”. As more AI-generated content enters the market, engagement with it is declining, and we think the platforms that double down on human voice and perspective are the ones that will hold their audiences.
VoiceMap’s response is to do the opposite of what the market is flooding with. Audio previews are now visible throughout the apps, so users can hear a real human voice before they buy. We use AI for research, for helping non-native English speakers with clarity, and for character voices where a publisher might otherwise have to recruit neighbours. But the core of what makes a tour worth doing remains the same: a real person with a real perspective on a place.
9. Will VoiceMap use AI features in the audio tour user experience, for example AI-powered user interaction?
It’s technically possible, but it’s not where we think development time is best spent right now, and it’s something we’d approach very cautiously. That said, we do use AI in tour production in a number of ways, as mentioned above. What we’re careful about is the distinction between using AI to make tours better during production, and adding AI layers on top of the user experience after the fact.
For more on our approach to AI, see our webinar on the topic: Weirdly Human: Art, AI, and the Future of Self-Guided Audio Tours.
10. What is VoiceMap’s market position compared to competitors, and how do you think about competition?
With over a million downloads globally, the VoiceMap app consistently ranks in the top grossing travel apps, often ranking in the top 10 in the UK and top 20 in the US. It’s the leading platform operating as a consumer-facing marketplace at scale. Most competitors focus on a narrow segment, driving tours in national parks or specific regions, or act as B2B providers for attractions and OTAs rather than selling directly to consumers.
We see competitors come and go, and the market is transparent enough that you can assess any platform’s actual traction yourself: review counts, app store rankings, and in-app purchase volume are all visible. If a competitor approaches you with an attractive revenue share, it is worth asking what their sales volume actually looks like before making a decision.
The best thing publishers can do is make great tours, build their audience, and stay active on VoiceMap. Every sale you generate on the platform strengthens the case that VoiceMap is the right home for audio tour content.
11. With the success of celebrity tours and the rebrand, what is the next big thing for VoiceMap?
Two things are in motion, the first being a public API. VoiceMap’s apps are currently powered by a private API, and opening this up would allow more third parties to integrate with VoiceMap and make the tour inventory visible through their own channels. The second is replicating the success of the London market in the US, including exploring celebrity-led tours similar to the QI and History Hit tours.
Platform features and new developments
12. How does VoiceMap support visibility for newly published tours?
We recently updated the ranking algorithm to give new tours a visibility boost in destination rankings, so that an established, highly-rated tour is no longer guaranteed to hold the top spot simply by virtue of having accumulated more ratings over time. A “new tours” shelf is also currently being AB tested on the website and in the apps. The changes will roll out gradually.
13. What data is used to put the Most Wanted list together? What do people actually want from those destinations?
The Most Wanted list is generated from two sources: app open data (showing where users open the app with location permissions enabled) and in-app search queries. Together, these show us where demand exists but we do not have existing or enough tours.
The list covers two broad categories: strategic destinations where we see proven demand but little coverage (often port towns and cities with steady visitor flow), and high-traffic attractions and themed tours that consistently perform well on online travel agents. We also run a royalty programme a couple of times a year, where we offer an increased royalty percentage and marketing support as an incentive for publishers to fill the gaps on the list.
14. Is my portfolio of VoiceMap tours transferable? Can I will them to my grandchildren so they receive royalties after my death?
In principle, yes. VoiceMap tour royalties are similar to royalties on a book or any other piece of intellectual property, and there is no reason why they could not be bequeathed to heirs. We would recommend getting proper legal advice to formalise any such arrangement, but the principle is sound and it is not something we would stand in the way of.
15. Might AI tools help with providing publishers with listener data and tour completion statistics?
We take listener privacy seriously, and there is a limit to the individual-level data we can share. That said, publishers on Pro and Premium plans can request custom reporting, which includes tour downloads, completion rates, and other user insights.
For aggregate performance data, AI tooling could eventually help us make more of what we already collect available in a more accessible form. It is on the roadmap, though we do not have a timeline to share yet.
16. Is it possible for a user to play their own music between locations on a lengthy tour with significant downtime?
This is not currently within the VoiceMap app, although we have looked at various ways to integrate music into our tours. A different way of looking at this is that silence between locations is not necessarily a problem to design around.
Silence used deliberately can be just as powerful as narration, giving listeners a moment to absorb what they have just heard before the next story begins. If the gaps in your tour feel uncomfortable, the more effective solution is usually to use the walking time as part of the experience: setting up what is coming, following up on what was just left behind, or building a thread that runs through the tour. That tends to serve the listener better than music they have chosen for a completely different purpose.
Distribution and reselling
17. Is it possible to automatically resell my audio tours to a local reseller using single-use voucher codes and give the reseller a commission?
You can resell your tours to partners using the VoiceMap voucher system. But this is not set up to provide a commission split for specific voucher codes. If you want to work with a local reseller using voucher codes, you would need to manage the commission arrangement manually outside VoiceMap’s systems.
There are two cleaner alternatives. The VoiceMap affiliate programme handles commission tracking automatically and is open to local businesses, hotels, tour guides, and content creators. The other option is to sell a bulk batch of credits to an operator upfront, which sidesteps the tracking question entirely.
18. Can publishers be affiliates?
Yes, publishers can apply to the VoiceMap affiliate programme via Awin and earn a 5% commission on sales of other publishers’ tours that they promote, not their own. Note that commission payouts are currently covered completely by VoiceMap, though this will likely change in the future.
19. How should a publisher’s referrals flag their connection to the publisher when applying to VoiceMap’s affiliate programme, to avoid being rejected?
When a referred person applies via Awin, they should mention the referring publisher’s name in their application. This provides useful context during review and helps ensure the application is approved quickly and placed on the right commission tier. If you are referring someone to the programme, let us know in advance, at affiliates@voicemap.me so we can look out for the application.
20. Can VoiceMap help publishers get TripAdvisor reviews from users? Could the closing message ask for reviews on the purchasing platform?
The best moment to ask for a review is immediately after a user completes a tour, while the experience is fresh. You can add a call to action to your closing location script pointing users directly to TripAdvisor, Viator, or the VoiceMap platform itself. But bear in mind that direct links are usually more effective than general requests, so rather direct them to leave a review on your tour in the VoiceMap app.