Moats and ditches from brand and generic traffic

Doordash and Airbnb have some things in common and are very different in others. That makes them interesting case study subjects for brand differentiation, moats, and ditches.

Jan 11, 2021

One habit I stopped when the Covid pandemic broke out was staying at Airbnbs. One that I started was ordering groceries through Doordash. And yet, both recently went public with major success. Airbnb raised $47 billion in its IPO and is way more sensitive to the pandemic than Doordash, which almost tripled its revenue year-over-year in the first nine months of 2020 (source).

They have many differences between them - not just the impact of Covid - but also many things in common. One sells trust, the other convenience. Both rely on SEO (and mention it several times throughout their S-1 prospectus). One is highly differentiated; the other competes in a winner-takes-it-all market. Both are consumer marketplaces. And both grow on Google and compete against it at the same time.

Differentiation versus speed

The difference in differentiation shows that while Doordash competes in a tight race with Grubhub and UberEats (which recently bought Postmates for $2.65b), Airbnb doesn't face the same type of competition.

This becomes painfully obvious when we compare brand with non-brand traffic. According to SEMrush, only 15% of Doordash's ~39M monthly visitors come through branded keywords. For Airbnb, it's almost the exact opposite: 17.3% of traffic is non-branded (2.4 out of 13.8M monthly visitors).

Filtering both domain's keywords for top 10 positions and excluding brand keywords, Doordash shows much stronger growth while Airbnb has been flat since January 2018.

In fact, even Airbnb's strongest alternative, VRBO, has much more non-brand organic traffic. However, even VRBO's non-brand traffic is dwarfed by Airbnb's direct traffic.

Doordash, on the other hand, faces strong competition in SEO. Postmates, UberEats, and especially Grubhub are very visible on search engines for non-brand keywords (see below).

The best testament to the difference is that Doordash ranks for "{food} near me" while Airbnb ranks for "airbnb near me" queries.

I want to raise two interesting questions at this point. First, Doordash will be able to build strong enough moats not to be too dependent on SEO? Second, is Airbnb's brand an advantage in its competition with Google?

With and against Google

Both players state the importance of organic traffic explicitly in their investment prospectus - and both also cite competition from Google.

Dive deeper:

Growth Memo

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