Judy’s Book co-founder Andy Sack posts very candidly about the difficulties of launching a review/IYP site. Sack, who also founded Abuzz, one of the original review sites, and worked on Firefly, knows something about this subject by now.
Founded in 2004 at around the same time as Insider’s Pages, which just changed CEOs, Judy’s Book claims one million unique visitors; a national footprint; and content distribution deals with Google, Yahoo, Local.com, Yellowpages.com and InfoSpace.
Issue # 1 for Judy’s Book is achieving critical mass, market-by-market. “Momentum in any one location doesn’t transfer to others – you have to fight the same fight over and over,” writes Sack.
Getting repeat visits is tough, too. “Converting visits into signups, signups into repeat visits, & then into active use requires lots of money or passion or (best case) both at once.”
Despite the hype surrounding local online commerce’s arrival, Sack believes it remains very, very difficult to reach decision-makers at potential advertisers — and to get them to write a check (something that my clients usually refuse to believe). “Self service for this market won’t work — I think you need feet on the street to address this market,” he concludes. Another factor is the difficulty of good SEO, which is critical since 30 percent of Judy’s traffic is coming from Google. Google holds all the cards and they “keep changing the rules,” he says.
On the plus side, Sack says in a follow-up post that the user community has proved to be really responsive. “Consumers will do a *LOT* of work to get a deal (esp. something free).” He also notes that “people love to ask & answer questions on topics they care about.” (Thanks a lot to Niki Scevak’s Bronte Media for pointing to Andy’s Blog).
Andy’s posts actually served as a prologue to a major site change, where deals are as important as reviews. See a letter to Judy’s Book readers explaining the changes here:
http://blog.judysbook.com/weblog/2006/10/whats_new_at_ju.html
I agree with with Andy’s comment that self-service doesn’t work. It’s something local publishers (newspaper and TV) always ask for – somehow believing that local businesses will sign up in droves. I’m sure there have been some sporadic success with self-service (aka self-administration) but we are a long way from mass adoption at the local level.
If you agree that local search is (at least partially) yellow pages pages online, then it follows that you have to reach advertisers the same way print yellow page publishers have always reached local business – getting up close and personal.
We find that local publishers want their piece of the $15B+ yellow pages market but are often unwilling to make the same investment in content, sales and marketing required in the past to build print YP businesses.