Our community of more than 800 publishers is at the core of what we do at VoiceMap. In our June 2026 webinar, we gave publishers the floor, and invited questions from the community. By the time we went live, there were 34 questions waiting, across nine different topics.
The session was moderated by Baltimore-based publisher and founder of Walk Past Tours, Dan Sutherland-Weiser, who posed questions from the community to VoiceMap’s Founder and CEO, Iain Manley, and various members of the team. We provide our answers to the top sixteen questions – plus the recording – below.
If you’d like to read the full set of answers – including some of the questions we didn’t get to in the session, and links to relevant resources – visit this forum post.
1. 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 to constitute a meaningful income – but none of them got there with a single tour; they built a portfolio over time.
The structure of their income is worth understanding too. Once a tour is published and gets traction, this income becomes largely passive. A well-placed tour in a destination that doesn’t change quickly can run with minimal ongoing effort.
2. Who is the typical VoiceMap user?
The most active VoiceMap users tend to be well-educated, frequent travellers who already consume audio, podcasts and audiobooks. About 40% of our highest-value users are over 55, while users under 25 make up a smaller share. This reflects the fact that audio tours and their subject matter generally lean toward history and culture.
One pattern holds across the board: once someone does a tour, they tend to come back – often for their second, sixth, or sixtieth tour. Beyond that, the data for listeners over 25 is fairly even across age and gender. Solo travellers are well represented, but so are couples and small groups, with strong representation from the US, UK, and Western Europe.
This picture reflects our most active buyers, rather than the full spread of casual users.
3. Are there examples of publishers who started without an audience and went on to succeed?
You don’t need to be Sir Stephen Fry, or to have a big following, a media profile, or a celebrity status to succeed on VoiceMap. You just need to find the right topic or angle and get it in front of the right people.
Publisher Sarah Salter is a good example. She started without an audience in Cardiff and saw her tours take off when she identified a gap: themed tours. She found a niche with a ready-made audience. Her tours target 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 our top-selling tours in the UK.
She’s also 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, sharing business cards for her tours at local businesses and attractions along her tour routes.
4. 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. 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 shows you the way that listeners experience a tour and brings together voices from publishers all over the world. It’s well 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.
5. How does VoiceMap support visibility for newly published tours?
We recently updated our algorithm to give new tours a visibility boost in destination rankings. That means 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. With over 2,000 tours, visibility for new tours is important. We’re also in the process of AB testing a “new tours” shelf on the website and in the apps.
6. What does VoiceMap do to support publishers after publishing a tour?
We provide support tools and guidance on promoting and distributing a tour once it’s published, and we’re building a takeoff programme to formalise that support further. It’s based on a pattern we call ‘the takeoff effect’: tours that generate early sales develop significantly better momentum in the long term.
The first 100 days after publishing is the benchmark to watch. Tours that earn $50 in that period (roughly five sales at full price) go on to earn nearly nine times more over their lifetime, on average. That’s not an arbitrary number. It’s the point at which a tour has shown enough demand to benefit from VoiceMap’s discovery and marketing work: reviews start coming in, visibility increases, and more sales follow. Tours that don’t reach it in the first 100 days aren’t written off, but they’re waiting on conditions that may not arrive on their own.
The takeoff programme will structure those first 100 days around specific distribution and marketing activities and milestones, formalising a lot of what’s already been discussed informally in publisher info sessions. We’ll share more details when it’s ready to launch. In the meantime, our peak season and tour promotion webinars cover much of the ground the programme will eventually formalise.
7. What makes a tour good, and does production quality matter?
A good tour tells its stories at ground level, with the kind of small, personal detail a local might mention in passing – and it lands exactly where it should thanks to perfectly-timed GPS. That’s what turns a walk through a new or familiar place into a journey, and it’s why the sites and landmarks along the way come alive rather than sitting there as facts on a plaque. Our guide to the ingredients of a perfect audio tour covers this in more depth.
Yes, production quality matters, and it’s something we care about. But well-produced doesn’t mean you need media training or a studio. It means a clean recording, a well-structured script, and a genuine connection to the subject. All these things are achievable with the tools and guidance we provide.
Some of the best tours on the platform are made by people who had never recorded anything before. What they had was a real perspective on a place and the motivation to share it well. What makes a tour memorable, from our perspective, is a publisher who finds the heart of a subject, and provides sufficient texture without over-explaining. They also put enough of themselves into the tour that the listener feels they’re seeing a place through someone’s eyes rather than reading a Wikipedia entry.
That editorial instinct is the hardest thing to teach, but any opportunity to make a tour better is worth taking – whether that’s interview audio, sound effects, music, more interesting route choices, or character voices. Tom Darbyshire’s webinar on how to tell a story is a good starting point whenever you create a tour.
8. What’s VoiceMap’s approach to AI, and does it put authenticity at risk?
VoiceMap’s strategy is to double down on the human storytellers behind our tours, rather than compete with AI-generated content. This is reflected in our recent brand update, centred on 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 hold onto human voices and perspectives are the ones that will hold their audiences.
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 destination.
9. As more places get a VoiceMap tour, is there a risk of duplication?
We monitor the platform for duplicate content and will advise publishers to differentiate if necessary. In most cases, though, multiple tours in the same destination are not a problem, but an asset. Tours that cover different routes, angles, voices, and themes give users more to choose from.
That principle also answers a related question that was raised in the session: do tours risk losing authenticity if marketing become too similar across the platform, or tours sound similar?
VoiceMap and all our tour creators benefit from a diversity of voices, stories, and styles. Tours that sound like each other are less interesting than tours that sound like the curious humans who made them. At the same time, some things work well regardless of style, strong opening hooks, human delivery, and a clear connection to place – and it’s worth learning from what already works. Applying those principles in your own voice isn’t a contradiction. It’s how you get really good at this.
10. Do you have a view on character-led tours or fictional stories?
A character-led tour is a more ambitious undertaking than a themed or concept-driven tour. The storytelling, production, and use of additional voices all need to be strong to pull it off. When it works, it can be the best kind of tour on the platform. When it does not, the concept can feel thin against the physical reality of the route.
The key question for any character-led or fictional concept is whether the material really needs to be experienced on site. If the locations are just waypoints for a story that could just as easily be a podcast, the format works against you. When the place and the narrative are genuinely intertwined, it tends to show in the reviews.
11. What changes have you seen in consumer tastes, and which formats are listeners looking for?
Across all formats (for instance general-interest walks, themed or single-story tours, indoor or outdoor tours) the storytelling quality, reviews, and how the tour fits with the destination matter more than the format itself. That said, a few trends are worth highlighting: What changes have you seen in consumer tastes? Which formats are listeners looking for? General-interest walks, themed or single-story tours, indoor versus outdoor?
- Shorter tours, under 90 minutes and ideally around an hour, perform consistently well regardless of format
- The general-interest “best of a destination” tour still has a place in new destinations, but not as much in destinations that already have a couple of tours
- Themed and single-story tours are growing, like the Gilded Age in New York or the Prague of Franz Kafka, attracting audiences already interested in a specific angle
- Indoor tours at museums and galleries are seeing encouraging growth, particularly in Europe
- Driving tours are significantly underdeveloped, relative to how much people actually travel by car in the US, which we think is a real opportunity
12. Does VoiceMap provide customisable marketing content, like branded templates for social media?
We’re working on a customisable brand toolkit for publishers, which will include branded social media ad templates and printed media. The toolkit will be built into the distribution dashboard and will auto-populate based on your tour’s content. You’ll then be able to customise it with your own images and roll it out across your platforms. An updated version of our ‘self-guided audio tours explained‘ video – created specifically for publishers to share with their audience – is also not far off.
Two tools are already available. There’s QR codes, which link the physical and digital and are worth sharing with partners, colleagues, or businesses along your route. There’s also print materials, where we can create A4 posters or DL flyers from your tour description for tourist information centres, hotel lobbies, cafés, and museums. Both are accessible from your tour’s distribution tab in Mapmaker.
If you want to see the full range of promotional tools available right now, our webinar on tour promotion covers this.
13. 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 – but not their own. Commission payouts are currently covered completely by VoiceMap, though this will likely change in future.
14. What data is used for the ‘Most Wanted’ list?
The Most Wanted list is generated from two sources: in-app search queries, and app open data (which shows where users who have enabled location permissions open the app).
Together, these show us where demand exists but we don’t have existing tours, or enough of them. The list covers two broad categories: strategic destinations with 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 with online travel agents.
We also run a royalty programme a couple of times a year, offering an increased royalty percentage and marketing support as an incentive for publishers to fill the gaps on the list.
15. How can I connect with other publishers?
With a community of more than 800 publishers, we have various options to connect with and collaborate with other publishers. The publisher forum is the perfect place for structured posts, questions that benefit from a more permanent, searchable answer, or announcements that you’d like to stay findable over time.
The publisher Facebook group and LinkedIn group are more conversational: the right place for quick questions, peer recommendations, sharing what’s worked, finding collaborators, and informal discussion.
While the groups are only open to tour creators who have published VoiceMap tours, the forum is open to anyone, and is a great place for prospective publishers to find answers.
16. Is my portfolio of tours transferable? Can I will them to my grandchildren?
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’s not something we would stand in the way of.
More from our webinar series
This town hall is part of a running series where we bring publishers and the VoiceMap team together to discuss a specific topic. Recent sessions have covered:
- Tour promotion and marketing tools for independent publishers
- Getting your tour ready for peak season
- How to tell a story on a tour, with script tips from Tom Darbyshire
- Weirdly Human: Art, AI, and the future of self-guided audio tours
Each session gets its own recap and Q&A post on the blog, so if a topic is relevant to you, it’s worth searching for it even after the live session has passed.
You can find every recording on our YouTube channel, and we tag every recap, highlight, and Q&A post in the webinar category on our blog.
