What do you need to ensure a social travel site can keep going in the face of huge competition?
Many of these types of websites have never revealed some of the key metrics they work towards, so it's difficult to say.
But, would over two million visits over the course of a year help?
Or engagement with its audience to the tune of almost 150,000 reviews about attractions, restaurants hotels?
A database of 83,500 email addresses from its user base?
Perhaps a not-to-be-sniffed-at 43,000 likes on Facebook?
Surely a popular Facebook application along the lines of the TripAdvisor Cities I've Visited tool might be useful?
Sadly not, it would appear.
Six years on from its launch in October 2008, right at the moment when a brand might (repeat: MIGHT) have been able to capture the social travel idea before Facebook became all too encompassing, US-based GeckoGo is shutting up shop.
The service has essentially been in maintenance mode for a few years, it turns out, but co-founder Pokin Yeung says the site and its Travel Brain application for Facebook will not see much life past the end of this year.
Yeung admits that the site never reached a financial state that sustained the business.
"We kept going for as long as we could because we really liked our community, and so we continued to work on it part time, but ultimately that wasn't enough to keep it up to date at a level that we wanted."
She adds that both the site and application needed a lot of regular TLC to keep it fresh.
So, as many have mused ever since the social travel wave started in earnest in the late-2000s, data around traffic and engagement and content might look good on a spreadsheet but the financial reality is a lot different (and more serious).
The business is now trying to sell off some of the assets via an online auction, a process which is revealing a lot about the state of the company.
Revenue, despite the reasonably high levels of traffic and therefore potential for AdSense and a white label metasearch integration with HotelsCombined to kick in, has been low. Extremely low.
The highest amount it ever managed in a single year was $30,000 in 2011, and it has been dwindling ever since to just $4,000 during the course of 2014 (the decline in part because it has been maintenance mode).
Even after the site was left to churn over of its own accord, traffic still reached the 1.1 million visits during 2013.
Yet still money from essentially a media site was hard to come by.
The HotelsCombined partnership with GeckoGo, for example, generated just $25 in earnings in January this year from 226 visits.
Yeung says she hopes the brand will find a better home, but hints about the danger of leaving a content-heavy, social site in situ without any dedicated resource to oversee operations eventually gives in to the content "spammers".
"While GeckoGo is not fully functional, there is still a large database of user generated content. With a faster server and some updates there is the potential to reverse the decline in traffic.
"The site/domain could also be used to acquire search traffic and users for other websites."