I was interested to see the statistics you quote re: Live Deal.
I am involved with Newspaper Classified software, on line and in print.
Recently live deal barraged my customers (and potential customers) with marketing materials suggesting that Live Deal would add signficant revenue if newspapers only uploaded their entire classifieds sections to Live Deal.
They prepared a “potential profits” chart that showed how a newspaper could be making as much as ONE MILLION dollars A MONTH!!
The way a newspaper would make a million dollars a month, it turns out, is if they managed to get 500,000 of their customers to create car ads on LiveDeal, every month. And if each customer bought additional livedeal upsells, etc., etc.
It’s interesting to see that currenly ALL OF LIVE DEAL is getting (by their count) only 500,000 VISITORS each month. Not 500,000 ads, let alone 500,000 car ads. As for their current 200,000 ad, does this mean if 1 out of every 2 visitors was placing an ad. If so, that’s a lot of sellers — how many are buyers? In fact, Live Deal appears at this point to be cutting and pasting ads found on non-affiliated classified websites suchh as Craiglist to goose their ad counts.
To buttress their stories, the brochure points to a cars for sale website: “Silconvalleycars.com” or some such.
Live Deal points to this portal with pride, and says in the brochure that this portal alone “hopes to clear $2500/week”.
I think that hope is sincere and righteous, but as always, scratching the surface reveals more: his portal, it turns out, is owned and operated by (drum roll please): LiveDeal.
I’ve just returned from a newspaper convention in Kansas City. LiveDeal gimmee caps and T-shirts being handed out by booth bimbos. “They said we could make a million dollars a month”, glossy-eyed conventioneers could be heard muttering as they passed.
I can’t get over how dot.commish this is.
LiveDeal is serving Koolaid by the bucketload, IMO, and drinking their own urine. God knows what they served to the folks in Toronto.
Especially in cases like these quiet local directory sites, I’d love to see that unique visitors number show instead the number of uniques this month who spent more than 5 minutes on a site 90 days ago.
I think that the Press Release for the pulse points is easily interpreted as something that it is not – this is not a “google-scale” effort to carve out a niche in the WiFi world.
Rather, it’s an experiment in online content – where the content is not universally available, but provides incredibly deep content about a specific place – whether it be a cafe, neighborhood, or city. The real key to this concept is the incredible speed with which this content is available. Because the content is so close to the edge – the transfer speeds are only limited by the speed of WiFi (20-30 mbps max in the real world).
An example: the pulse points use iTunes Music Sharing to provide access to 1200 tunes from local artists – not in a “click and download” interface, but in a stream-on-the-fly interface. The performance is unlike any experience on the ‘net, because the content is so close to the edge. You can literally flip through songs as quickly as flipping through LPs in a record store… Suddenly, it’s easier to find and narrow in on the content that you want to hear.
The pulse point is more of a technology experiment – the ’skunk works’ project you talk about – that will take WiFi and combine it with geocaching, podcasting, videocasting, mobile phone interaction, and who knows what else.
The Globe will not end up putting out 1000 of these – but they will learn something tremendously important from them: what happens if content is suddenly available at 10x current speeds…
To add to my comments on that all-too-quick panel (geez, we could have talked about newspapers all day, I’m sure):
First, I’m sure Belo folks would tell you the e-mail marketing successes alone are more than enough to justify registration. We’re happy with a similar program at Scripps, as well.
I also don’t want people to get the impression that Scripps will move away from content-access registration. As fast as the conversation moved on the panel, I may have left that impression.
But we are looking at easing the thresholds for when consumers see the registration prompt, and at what we ask for in each stage of the process. Lots of good reasons to do that:
1. It eliminates the profile records created by “grazers” or “drive-bys,” the people who come to a site to see just one article one time, and never return. Those profiles, whether entered with valid information or not, are not “addressable” and therefore just clog up the database.
2. It eliminates most of the reason for the BugMeNots of the world to exist. See above. Drive-bys can get the occasional article unfettered by a heavy registration requirement, so they don’t have to troll for bogus log-ins.
3. It allows us, as you noted, to focus registration efforts at points in the customer experience where registration makes sense. Want an e-newsletter? Give a valid e-mail address. Want to enter a contest? Give valid contact info so we can notify you if you win.
4. The profiles that remain in the database are more likely to be “addressable” for e-mail and Web advertisers, with valid data for geo-, demo- and interest-targeting.
FYI, neither Belo nor Scripps sites, to my knowledge, saw the negative traffic growth reported by Houston. We saw a blip downward for a period of a few months on each site when we first added registration. But sites typically rejoined their old organic growth curve after that.
It’s what consumers want and we’ve been surprised by how well many advertisers have accepted – even embraced – them.
But, reviews alone won’t cut it.
Frankly, we’re more happy about our 10,000 business-built profiles than our 20,000 consumer reviews. And I doubt any of us thinks “review syndication” is the next big business.
To be a true “decision enabler”, you need a three-part data formula:
- Deep information provided by businesses, including photos
- What customers are saying (reviews)
- And third party bona fides (e.g. business licenses)
On top of that, you’ve got give users the ability to narrow down their search — and give businesses the ability to self-publish so they can add information at anytime.
Focus counts too.
It’s tempting I’m sure for Judy’s Book to stray into movie and product reviews. But LinkedIn is my model. Look at how well they’re doing through focus.
Of course, this being the internet, the pieces above very soon
will not be enough.
The big guys have upped the ante on maps. Pricing is important in a number of places. Video portfolios are next. Online scheduling where it makes sense . . .
It’s the guys with the audience and the advertiser relationships — not the reviews — that will win.
Not an eBay front? That’s pretty funny if you’re not hopelessly naive.
eBay is a substantial minority shareholder and that gives it some rights that will (prediction) be used to yank Craig’s chain one day and remind him that he has greater obligations to his shareholders than he has to his so-called community.
For now, Craig’s role is “useful idiot.” Anyone who believes otherwise simply doesn’t have a grip on how this game will be played out.
Thanks for this valuable reporting, Peter. But for local news producers, isn’t Yahoo’s disinclination to get into our business a _bad_ sign? A sign that they’ve realized that’s not where the money is?
Here’s my point: news outlets aren’t newsgathering operations. That’s never been where the money is. They’re information collectors, audience managers and content organizers. They earn their keep by from matching people with things they’re looking for (whether they know it or not).
You make a good point that local sites may never be the generalist portal, like Yahoo. But (regardless of “home page” settings) don’t they still have hope to become the niche portal, for the niche of people who care about, say, Gadsden, Alabama?
If Yahoo becomes the place people go for _local_ content, it won’t matter whose byline is under the story.
If you’re interested, I’m trying to develop these ideas further on my own site about local papers.
The roll-out of yellowpages.com has been largely successful although there are reported to be ongoing adjustments to fine tune the new format. Local searches seem to be more cumbersome than the realpages.com format however the greatly expanded content gives users more choices nationally. While the present format looks good I would expect the format to improve even more in the coming year.
I agree with the fact that Yahoo may not need to keep a Chinese wall up between their advertising efforts and those of their telco partners. While Yahoo is the portal partner to AT&T/SBC/BS and Verizon, it may find it more profitable to crank out their self-provisioning model and alternative sales channels to go after local advertising….since the thousands of feet on the street may not be 100% tied to the old RBOC’s. Yahoo enjoyed a nice run with SBC and Verizon as their portal and co-marketing partner. The telco’s growth in DSL has been very good….much faster than the cable providers…using aggressive price promotions and making a commitment to strong marketing. However, once people are online for a while, the need to have their hands held by a Yahoo portal provider falls
I think we can see the end of the portal deals by the end of the year. Yahoo’s development of compelling original content has not been that hot (ie…stuff that could go on their IPTV deals). However, Semel is a sharp Hollywood guy. It could work out soon.
I’d like to make a mild correction to your numbers for McClatchy’s and Knight Ridder’s online revenues. They were $55.7 million and $164.5 million, respectively, in 2005. We track these numbers very closely because they are extremely important — more than most companies seem to realize — in terms of being a gauge of how well these companies might be positioned to become “flatlined” or to represent good investments. For instance, Knight Ridder generated 5.4% of its gross revenues from its Internet operations, while McClatchy generated about 4.5%. It would seem, then, that KR was doing a better job of “seizing” the opportunity and that McClatchy, for all its Internet brilliance, was comparatively behind.
There’s an important lesson here. Knight Ridder wound up with a very vulnerable company by owning newspapers — and only newspapers — in very large markets. That’s were all the print erosion has been occurring. Unlike Tribune, which also owns large-market papers, Knight Ridder wasn’t unsulated by broadcasting or other assets. The lesson for the future should be that the new McKnight-Ridder, to survive, should be a company that rapidly grows a layer of insulation around it by becoming more and more aggressive with its online ventures. I am wondering, then, who will lead the effort — the Knight Ridder Digital hierarchy, or the McClatchy hierarchy. We will continue to watch the numbers very closely. If they grow beyond 7% of revenues this year, and perhaps beyond 15% by 2010, we’ll know they chose the right team.
We have been using http://www.Topix.net feeds for a while on http://www.merchantcircle.com becuase of the ability to get local feeds on our local merchant pages. As we prepare for the launch of our actual beta product in May, we have taken this further with the use of the combination of thier local and category feeds. The real opportunity we see with the topix feeds is the user generated content. It will be interesting to see how Yahoo pursues this given Yahoo’s leadership on social computing issues.
What a difference a year makes. In the last election cycle, there were still many complaints that Internet communications were only for national or state wide campaigns because of the lack of ability to target small groups of people. The E-Voter Institute event last Monday revealed a different attitude.
My decision to invite Dave Morgan to speak was a deliberate attempt to broaden out the understanding of targeting by the political strategists in the room. With a contentious race for the 50th Congressional seat here in San Diego and buckets of money being spent on television and direct mail, it seemed to me there is a chance for some innovative use of the Internet to persuade voters and get out the vote. Perhaps we can call it the Randy Duke effect.
I just read Gordon’s comments regarding percentage of digital operations versus offline operations. Although I don’t necessarily disagree with his assertion that KRD did a better job than McC at driving online revenue, displaying only percentage of offline revenue as a metric doesn’t always give a full and accurate story. With as much “funny money” being thrown around in annual reports from newspaper companies, its virtually impossible to tell how successful or unsuccessful their digital operations are. When upwards of 70% of all online revenue for online newspapers is a charitable “handout” from the print classified department of the newspaper for all classified liners that go online, its impossible to get a good read on how unprofitable these sites may be. Hence, without knowing what “percentage” or “how much per line” KRD is attributing to its online properties versus McC (in which a small offline percentage could greatly influence the overall online percentage), it’s difficult to say, with certainty, that KRD’s web operations are more successful at driving revenue than McC’s.
If there’s one action that could be taken on the part of the industry, it’s to begin separating the numbers of what was ‘earned’ versus ‘given’ to them. It’s understood that, if the print property didn’t exist, the local sites could never monetize their current online classified sections to the level being reported.
Hopefully this information will become more transparent soon.
Hi, Peter. I’ve known Chris for many years now (McClatchy was one of the partners in the old PAFET, which is where I first got to know Chris.). I’m not sure I would characterize him as a “notorious nickel-and-dimer.”
If he sees strategic value, he invests. And I sense he takes pretty good care of the people in his division, in terms of compensation and facilities (have you seen the McClatchy Interactive offices in Raleigh?).
He is definitely a realist, however, and won’t throw good money after bad. I find him to be someone you can count on for a candid view of our industry’s future, backed by experience and real-world metrics.
I’m not writing a fan club letter here, nor do I have aspirations to work for Chris or McClatchy. That characterization just raised my eyebrows a bit based on what I know.
I’m not at all surprised that RealCities is perceived as a dusty jewel in the Knight Ridder plunder. While RealCities’ performance over the past decade has been lackluster, the idea was right on target. We are absolutely entering a time when the major portals and access providers (Google, Yahoo, AOL, Earthlink, Verizon, Cox and MSN) have begun pondering local affiliate relationships. As Internet household penetration slows down — a predictable phenomenon with any technology as it hits 80% — the pressures from Wall Street to maintain double-digit growth will force all of them to seek alluring partners. RealCities offers a very attractive option: Good local news content, free local marketing, and feet-on-the-street salespeople…packaged in a network. All McClatchy needs is a terrific marketing and salesperson, and that dusty jewel just might look like the Hope Diamond to growth-hungry portals.
Chastened by Jay Small’s comment, I have deleted a reference to Chris Hendricks as “a notorious nickel and dimer.” Earlier in his career, at Nando, Chris used to frequently brag at industry meetings about getting rid of inefficient “bodies” that didn’t result in revenues. But that was a long time ago.
In fact, Chris is a pretty gracious guy, and I know he is highly regarded throughout the online community (NAA New Media’s Lifetime award etc.)
Ah, Real Cities. I go back to the days of its invention at Knight Ridder New Media and agree with Gordon’s view of its potential and potential value in the emerging marketplaces being born. It will take more than an energetic marketer to move it to that potential, I think. Real Ciites does bring together more than 100 markets, many large ones, around one central purpose: a national ad sales network.
But a national ad sales network is looking like too little, too late, given all the challenges. The potential of Real Cities though is far greater, and requires a wider vision, coming from Gary Pruitt at the top.
The industry needs a real network to engage in the major tasks ahead of it:
—-surely, national ad sales;
—-network representation and negotiation with the major traffic players, from Google to Verizon and all in between;
—-standardizing and interoperable platforms to make the cost of publishing cheaper and to add the ability to move ad, editorial and community content around as quickly and seamlessly as the Web requires.
Real Cites could be such a network, a latter-day New Century Network (maybe a decade later than it should be, but we are now approaching 2010 rapidly). Somebody needs to take the leadership, and McClatchy’s new standing in the industry positions it to make the effort, as does its roles in Classified Ventures, Career Builder (prob), NAA and AP.
On the subject of moving to McClatchy Interactive’s platform, I hear that much of its technology is fairly dated; what do we know about how up to date/flexible it is?
On staffing, I’m hearing that few KRD employees want to make a move to Raleigh, and that McClatchy is unlikely to keep a expensive San Jose tech base, once any transition ends. McClatchy is prob hoping for Google and Yahoo recruiters to help it avoid severance costs, as the KRD empties out ahead of the 7/1 or so closing.
Here’s a comment from a reader who didn’t want to be identified. I got a few like this!
“Sam Sebastian could spill all of the details of all of the classified initiatives of all of the CV papers in about 3.8 seconds, including time for taking a deep breath at the start.
Google gained a talented guy who was much too good for CV.”
Thanks, Peter! Just a clarification so everyone knows that I won’t be running premium services – I’ll be part of the product development team that dreams up and executes new ideas.
And hey, NAA will find someone great to join the Federation team (yes, the hunt for a replacement is on). There are still plenty of reasons to hang with the NMF!
Thanks, Peter, for giving Rob some of the recognition he deserves. Aside for being the industry’s repository for everything innovative (what we call “best practices,”) he’s the nicest, most thoughtful human being I’ve ever worked with, and he takes competence to a new level. Big shoes, brother, big shoes.
– “Gimme the Mike” is a package that is offered, syndication-style, to many local-market stations with both an on-air program and online voting component. When I worked at Belo, a few of our stations carried it, and that was back in 2004.
– That “Health Connection” idea also is common at TV-based sites operated by WorldNow, and was also tried at several Belo sites in 2003 and 2004 as a way to drive new revenues.
I was a party to the operations of several Belo TV-based Web sites for a few years there, and I can tell you they did much more than pay lip service to the Web as a new business development opportunity. At the same time, I believe we had (and Belo still has) some of the best local TV Web sites out there, offering news and information well beyond repurposed on-air segments.
I evaluated some of McClatchy’s technologies when we at Scripps were looking for content management solutions.
I wouldn’t call them “dated.” The CMS platform, for one, has undergone a total reengineering and offers very good flexibility and a number of modern new features for newspaper.coms.
Again, I’m not a McClatchy shill. We ultimately went a different direction for a variety of reasons, but McClatchy’s offerings were strong enough to make our final round.
Somebody, apparently at Classified Ventures, wrote an anonymous comment regarding Sam Sebastian’s move to Google Local. I don’t like anonymous notes, and/or personal attacks. But here is the gist of the comment:
“Sure Sebastian could out every classified initiative at CV, but the details aren’t that hard to divine….Uh, aggregate newspaper classifieds and leverage national online brands.”
Can CV’s classified initiatives really be so easily summed up? Is the danger of Sebastian’s spilling the CV “playbook” to Google as relatively unimportant as Johnny Damon spilling last season’s Red Sox playbook to the Yankees?
I used to work at CV, and you had to sign a non-disclosure agreement that stated you wouldn’t company secrets once you left. Don’t know if Sam had to sign the same thing, but it’s likely.
Last year (according to CMS) there were 323 Billion coupons distributed in the US and almost 5 Billion redeemed. Clearly consumers ARE looking for coupons. The fact that over 50% of Sunday newspapers are purchased FOR THE COUPONS is further indication that consumers are looking for them. The fact that consumers pay $30-$50 in droves for Entertainment Book of local coupons is further proof that consumers love coupons. 79% percent of all US consumers use coupons. It isn’t hard to get them to look them up at all.
In terms of our initial iteration, we made a strategic decision within a month of launching our free classifieds+coupons to carve off the classifieds and focus on online coupons. You can see our classifieds (which are 95% completed in a similar revamp) at http://www.southland.la. We are doing this for another company, and a few newspapers have mentioned an interest in this powerful classified ad solution. (Note also our coupons were $30/month originally)
I believe the self-service aspect of coupon creation is very powerful, as you note, but equally powerful is our multi-faceted syndication. Coupons are available through our website, affiliate websites, email, RSS and MOST importantly through an API such that coupons can be integrated through mashups into Internet yellow pages, local newspaper websites, maps, mobile phones, etc.
Of course, combining any form of advertiser content with user-based ratings is risky, but in the end, advertisers go where there are customers and customer go where their voice is heard. Not including user-ratings and reviews is more risky than including them in this current era of a read-write web.
online couponing has always had a financial model issue. Until Zixxo (or any online couponer) gets enough traffic to make it worth a business’s time, they really can’t charge for their services. Also, the Gen X, Y, Z etc. ‘kids’ don’t coupon as much as the boomers, which coincidentally are not bigtime internet users. The first online couponer that can couple coupons online with coupons offline will win this race I think. Bundling this service for an advertiser gives them a revenue model AND distribution.
Fox is apparently doing much more on the Web for its 25 owned-and-operated stations than I had seen. A good article by David Goetzel in Broadcasting & Cable (via PaidContent.org) reveals that Fox is relaunching its O&O’s in May.
According to the article, Fox’s redesigned sites will “offer extensive video streams (they offer hardly any now); content from corporate siblings FoxNews.com, FoxSports.com and Sky News; an entertainment section anchored by News Corp.’s movie portal RottenTomatoes.com; and significantly upgraded local news and weather sections, including opportunities for user-generated content.”
There are two critical pieces to the online coupon puzzle: content and consumers. ZiXXo’s model is based on hyper-syndication. Instead of trying to be a destination site ith the challenges of uilding content and traffic ourselves, we tap into the existing traffic of partner sites. Our affiliate model makes sure everyone profis accordingly and our various mechanisms, including an API make it easy.
Regarding the kids not couponing, that is largely because they shun inefficient paper-based solutions. These same kids don’t subscribe to newspapers, they want to get their info online, they want to share their opinions, they want to be able to share deals with friends, they want their local deals to come to them in the form of custom RSS feeds, etc. ZiXXo addresses all of these things.
Mistake. Backfence can’t create enough revenue in SF to make this a worthy buy. How many banner ads do they need to sell in SF to make up their money? hmmm
No surprise here. Hard to sell online advertising anywhere, let alone in a local market, with part-time people, with the overhead of commissions on top of that. The dot come bubble bursted 6 years ago. Local ads sell better, but not good enough to subsidize anyone’s income.
I like the way Backfence has built up a nice community feel with some useful local tools. It reminds me of the early years ‘98′ of citysearch when each city had it’s own editors and unique content at the time the cost of creating that unique content outwayed the spend SME’s were willing to invest in on-line advertising. I think that tide is turning as more and more local businesses are trying to tap into search marketing. Plus with the success of user generated content in the San Fran market there is a great chance at creating a terrific product.
This is great data…I wonder how aggressive newspapers will get in this space? Up until now, all they have done is advertise in their print mediums for their websites or classifieds. What if they actually bundled their online ads as part of a print ad campaign?
The YPA show was criticized by the (5) people I contacted, who have probably “been there and done that.” But some people found it useful to be there. It all depends on your perspective.
Here’s a positive note from someone who had not previously attended a Yellow Pages event.
” I really enjoyed the YPA conference. It was a whole new world for me, and I learned a lot about the way the business is currently set up – the various channels, their partnerships, etc. Quite an eye-opener. It wasn’t a sales opportunity for me, quite the opposite – but …. I can see how search is impacting all the various fringes of advertising industry. Chaos, confusion, new money, old money – it’s still sorting itself out, I’m afraid, but it does look like progress is being made. I saw that some folks were really creating new opportunities for themselves and for advertisers.”
Ted Buerger, a co-founder at American Town Networks, wrote to tell me not to jump to conclusions vis a vis the departure of two key execs. American Towns is healthy. revising its business plan, and remains a major contender in the social network space, he said. He also said that American Towns has penetration of 50 percent in his hometown, Pleasantville, N.Y.
I don’t doubt Ted’s veracity, but I’d like to know about the methodology for coming up with that figure. Most social networks are lucky to get above 5 percent. Here is the text of most of Ted’s note.
“Following is an update of the last few months:
1) On February 15, 2006, the AmericanTowns board turned over leadership of the company to Ed Panian and Jim Maglione, who had led the technology and community efforts of the company for the last several years.
2) Operating with the streamlined authority of a development stage company and employing technology and processes they had refined in the previous $1 million financing round, Panian and Maglione have in less than three months:
a. Launched 2 new regions (New Haven and Hartford) with a total of 56 towns, increasing AmericanTowns footprint by over 60% to 140 towns in 5 states;
b. Revamped content and processes for the existing 84 towns, with a traffic increase of 30% in the last three months and an increase in revenue from Google AdSense of over 45%.
c. Created a technology plan for a new technology platform and user interface with even stronger “social network” components, and a business plan to bring AmericanTowns to virtually every community in the nation by year-end.
3) In a meeting of April 13, 2006, the American Towns board fully endorsed this plan and a new financing round, and made available the funds necessary to support it. (The round closed effective May 1, funded entirely from current investors.)
4) All of the above was possible because of the founding vision of AmericanTowns, its dedication to connecting communities, and the hard work of Panian, Maglione and others testing different approaches in building effective community websites, including:
a. AmericanTowns’ first community site, in Pleasantville NY, is now believed to be the most successful community website in the country, with over 50% household penetration and a total of more than 2 visits per month for every resident household.
b. AmericanTowns’ MyStatenIsland.com, a partnership with Time Warner Cable, has proven that citizen-generated content can be successfully achieved in communities of up to 500,000. (Virtually all content is driven by the community)
c. Ten other AmericanTowns’ community websites, with enriched content and community building tools, have market penetration averaging in excess of 20% of households. (Management will be including these capabilities in all AmericanTowns sites as part of its national roll-out.)
Ed, Jim and the team still have much to do. But the best news about the above is that AmericanTowns now has in place a business and financial plan that, during 2006-2007, brings its organized but citizen-driven local websites to every town across the nation.
You of course have my permission to share whatever you think will be useful to your readers. I should also mention that, as part of our national launch, we wil be interested in working with others in this space – building on one of your thoughts, there is no need to duplicate what others are doing if we can better serve local communities by working together. “
4info.net which was originally funded by Tim Conner from USVP (who founded http://www.spoke.com with me) and DFJ recently had a significant stake taken in it by Gannett. Under Zaw Thet (who is the best intern I ever hired at Spoke and now runs 4info) they are getting alot of traction on SMS search via the phone.
The fact that a phone knows where you are makes mobile search naturally local. We are placing our merchant ads on 4info going forward because of the value we see in thier search base
As part of our bundles for our merchant we are included
Thanks for the comments. Glad I was able to get it across a bit. As I said there is alot of work to do. Like alot of others, we see the Yellow Pages as wasteful. interesting post We also see the channel it provides to small merchants as not working as you mentioned.
One thing we need is more local inventory and more local content for our merchants to leverage. We are looking for lots of both, so BD people, send us a note.
We’ve been using merchant circle since they began and every time they release a new feature, we think, “Yeah!, that’s what we need!” We’ve been in business for 20 years — there are few marketers that can give us the value that Merchant Circle can.
We saw this blog today and it made me happy for those guys who deserve it for the work they’re doing for the litte guys like us.
Did you see the Ingenio pay per call deal that was announced on May 11th? UpSNAP partners with Ingenio to offer more mobile directory listings. Ingenio provides pay per call listings to AOL, AOL mobile and infospace…now they are going to provide pay per call listings on UpSNAP. I think this reinforces your point.
Current Merchant Circle implementation raises lots of significant questions.
1. Sniping.
Just for fun, I wanted to see what would happen if I identified myself as the owner of a business listed in merchant circle. I picked a yoga studio where I know the owner (my wife is a teacher there, and I take classes). You can see the results by searching Yoga in Encinitas, CA. The business in question is Yoga 101.
With no verification, Merchant Circle put me in charge of the listing. I changed the title and content, and made my email the contact email. I could have also changed phone number, address etc.
I was nice and only added nice info. Because I did this, Yoga 101 is now the FEATURED business.
But if it HAD been my yoga studio, I wouldn’t have stopped there. I could have just as easily sniped ALL the yoga studios in the area, and changed their listings… From Soul of Yoga to Joe’s Suckypants Yoga, etc. Changed or removed legitimate phone numbers and addresses to confuse potential customers. I could spend a few minutes giving all of them multiple negative ratings. (Clear your cookie and vote as often as you want!!)
There is no method for the REAL owner of Yoga 101 to repossess her listing.
Maybe everybody will be honest and nice. Maybe it will be only a few moments before some merchants decide to change whole cities of listings to suit themselves.
Guarding against such sniping seems an obvious business process. But my guess is that it is prohibitively expensive and will not be done with this free, viral paradigm.
But unless there is some sort of verification, Merchant Circle listings will quickly degenerate into doubtful garbage.
2. Request a Deal
Boy, is this an odd feature.
User can “Request a Deal” of any listed merchant.
If the merchant’s email address is known, the form sends the user’s email (for example Yoga101’s email address has now been set BogusMerchantCircleEmail@hotmail.com so this form sends an email there).
If the email address is not know, the form “saves” the email.
The actuall email received by the merchant is “xxx@yyy.com requested a deal”. That’s it. There’s no place for the user to specify the deal request, nothing.
I suppose, when I get this email, I can respond to the user:
“What deal are you proposing?”
And then the user can respond back “I want free yoga” or some such.
And then I can answer “We don’t do those kinds of deals”.
And the user can then reply, in a snit: “Well if you don’t do deals, why do you have Request a Deal as part of your listing.”
To which I might respond: Because Merchant Circle doesn’t allow me to remove that function.
Anyway, what’s the point of all this? After 2-4 email exchanges, what: Somebody’s going to request a deal of a dry cleaner? Press my pants for Fifty Cents?
Clearly this feature is designed to suggest that someday there will be online commerce. Shopping carts, auctions, god knows what. All the buzzwords that VCs like to hear.
As built, it’s a cumbersome joke.
3. Those God-awful Picutres.
Bikrams Yoga College of India has a picture of an empty restaurant.
Coast Athletics has a picture of an empty beauty parlor.
Yoga 101 (”my” business) has a picture of something; liquor bottles I think.
(a) I spent 20 minutes trying to change the picture. I am a computer geek. I had no luck.
(b) What sort of goodwill comes from putting a picture of an empty restaurant or beauty parlor next to yoga studio listing. God knows where these pictures come from, or how they are selected.
Suppose I created on my OWN a website a page listing “info about people”. I suppose the bio of Ben T Smith IV on that page — his info is on the internet; I suppose I can copy it to my page. Then next to it I put a picture of say Chuckles the Clown, or Stalin, or Nick Nolte’s drunk mug shot. Why not? It’s my page?
What sort of legal difficulties will MC get into when Bikram’s yoga gets wind of the empty restaurant pic?
4. Attractive, yes. Easy, no!
Remember that 90+% of internet browsing is done on Internet Explorer, guys!
That site is wonderfully legible when viewed using a mac with Firefox or Safari. On Internet Explorer for the PC, however, the type is so small as to be practically invisbile. 8pt Gray type on basic instructions, like Here’s how to sign up?
Us middle-aged guys shouldn’t need magnifying glasses to figure out how to be part of the viral marketing campaign that will make merchant circle a success. The virus won’t spread unless people spread it.
Conclusions:
Unless some basic commercial intelligence gets added to this high-concept enterprise, I believe that the site will generate a raft of business problems.
We had reviewed the site on May 11 at 10:43am after it was created around 10am on the 11th. Our systems had not flagged it as an issue. We will have to work to improve that. (by chance I had personally looked at it becuase when I saw it go across I thought it was one of the early sign ups in that city, the picture seemed off, but I let it go)
We put alot out early to get as much early feedback as possible. As I pointed out to PK, the actual experience changes every day and even based on where you sign in from so we can test a number of different options and flows.
If you would like to take the time to help us understand the issues more clearly, feel free to shoot me a note. We learn more every day.
In terms of request a deal, you are right there is alot of work to do. Having said that, our merchants are already seeing new customers from this process. We are going to improve and expand it over the next few weeks.
Anyway, keep the feedback coming. We are a pretty small shop so we love to learn.
What I see is that you have now not only removed my changes, but completely delisted Yoga 101, a legitimate business.
The changes I made to that listing were in place for more than 36 hours. The ad that I made for Yoga 101 appeared on EVERY Encinitas search that I performed for more than 8 hours.
The picture I posted, which you say “seemed off” is a picture of Hanuman, a Hindu God, part of Yoga 101’s branding. I suppose it might seem off to someone unfamiliar with that business. Just as I suppose the thumbnail of an empty restaurant might seem off to a person interested in Bikram Yoga.
It took you more than 36 hours to remove the offending entry, in a city, that so far as I can tell, had NO OTHER ACTIVITY during that period.
You removed the entire listing — based on what criteria, I can’t imagine — so that now, because of my actions (an independent agent with no direct business connection) Yoga 101 is NO LONGER INCLUDED as a listed business.
You removed that listing based on this blog, apparently, and never contacted the owner, or me about this decision.
In other words: You acted late, arbitrarily, and without process or reason.
You took no action when the changes occurred, but only when you became aware of them through this blog.
This when one person made one change to one business in one small town, that apparently had never had any other activity at all. (I certainly couldn’t find any other Encinitas listing that had been adapted by anybody, and I looked.)
Take a look at your goal of supporting listings of 20% of a community. Your Encinitas pages, by my count, list almost 2000 businesses.
How do expect to monitor the actions being done to 400 business in Encinitas.
How will you decide who is legit in making changes?
How will you determine when a picture “seems off”?
How will you do this when you hope to address thousands, even millions of businesses? How many changes do expect to see per day?
One of the reasons why traditional local advertising is expensive, slow and cumbersome is that these methods include a human component: People make the changes on behalf of businesses, and make value judgements as change occurs.
Typically those people have local ties, and local reputaions, and have an interest in maintaining them. This makes them careful and cautious.
Your site has a very different paradigm, one that I support 100%. It tries to increase efficiencies and lower costs. It tries to provide greater information availiability, and to keep that information fresh.
But the methods your site employs are open for misuse, as I have shown. And you have no process in place to deal with that misuse, as you have shown, except on the most gross and haphazard way.
So how will your site maintain the trust of its users in the legitimacy of the information it presents? Absent a competent, knowledgeable reviewer with a personal stake in its accuracy, as traditional local advertising has by its history and the nature of its processes.
To ignore these less obvious qualities of local advertiising is a smug conceit.
Your trade off is now obvious: Efficiency vs Accuracy & Trust. You business processes and design are weighted entirely to efficiency. Do you presume that accuracy and trust will simply take care of themselves?
Do you presume that local customers (not your advertisers, but the presumed local users of your site) will be so interested in efficiency that they will simply ignore the accuracy of its listings?
At least with a phone book, those local customers can be reasonably assured that the address, phone number, and ad content were approved by the business. After the first snipinig attack, will a customer return to your site as a trusted source? After the first sniping attack, will your advertisers want to pay $150/month?
I ask these questions because I believe that they are fundamental to the nature of the enterprise.
I simply can’t imagine that there’s a $550 million fund backing this site, and these questions haven’t been asked and answered. They are fundamentall and obvious.
Again thanks for your feedback. We love it when people take so much time to work with the experiments we have out there and give us such generous feedback. You clearly know something about the business from your work with your online ad efforts and around the classified space.
As we have all seen frm Craig’s List and other sites, we believe these problems can be addressed over time. If not we wouldn’t be working so hard at it. In fact, we learned alot from Google on how to confirm the site owners indentity
We are huge believers in the competency and knowledge of Local Merchants about thier business and other businesses around them. We have found that as they engage, they use the system to correct the data about themselves (and they can do it alot easier than waiting on the Yellow Pages) and even point out to other Local Merchants opportunties to improve thier listings. They also have proven very effective ad flagging bad behavior, and we look forward to enabling this even further.
In terms of this site, our process will be followed to ensure the legitimate owner has control of the site. We place a few sites a week on hold at this point and are working the kinks out on the process to confirm. I am not very technical, but the ability to run down fraud is pretty interesting. When we had over 10 outlets of a major company sign up in a few hours, we did the same process. It ended up being quite legitimate, they had just passed the idea around as part of thier community marketing program after finding out that it worked.
Finally, to be clear this is not the only or the first issue we have seen. Yes- there has been an attend to create a busines in Nigeria for “special deals” but sense Nigeria was not available they place it in some unsuspecting town in the Southeast. We learn more everyday. And we will keep at it with the help of people like you.
In the meantime, we enjoyed providing new local opportunites to communicate with local customers to local businesses all over the country over the weekend and will be working hard to do it again next week too.
And to be clear, our goal is 100% of local merchants in fact more than are currently able to afford the overpriced Yellow Pages. So of course we are working hard on systems and processes to handle things on scale.
We may have to discuss some of the finer points made surrounding the “proper” use of Java Script and Flash (Both incredible web design assets when used correctly, as we hope it is on our platform, so as to not create the dreaded “data vaults” mentioned).
And I’m not sure “ugly” is a flattering expression here in California, but I’ll take all the publicity that we can get just the same!
Also, I do hear rumor that the big guys in this space (Cars.com and AutoTrader.com, Kbb.com, others – are offering some level of exclusivity for the Internet leads they sell, but I am not one of the first guys they share their innovations with!)
What it all comes down to for Automotive or Furniture or other local Widget marketing online is what the Clue Train fellows told us way back in the late 90’s…”Marketing is a conversation.”
We are helping our clients to raise their hands and simple say to the local consumer that they are there. Informing the shopper that they sell the widget that is being looked for and would appreciate the opportunity to engage. After all, just showing up really is half the battle online.
Thanks for honoring my beta-effort with a mention in the Local-Onliner. I have been a fan for years and will remain so, ugly design and all!
Jim Bonfield, President and Head Farmer in Charge, EyeballFarm Interactive Marketing
Ted Buerger wrote in today (May 27) to provide additional information on ATN’s claim to reach 50 percent of residents in Pleasantville. My gut tells me that if we stood at the commuter station in Pleasantville and did a survey, fewer than 10 percent would say they use ATN. But here’s Ted’s explanation…….
“I also owe you a response on the traffic levels in the AmericanTowns site in Pleasantville. Yes they (and other towns’ data) are very high. But this is because the sites are being used as the central on-line communication point in the community, so they should be high.
So yes, the traffic levels described have been verified by both Web trends and the Google system, data we show to investors. I’ll downplay the levels a bit by noting that “unique visitors” are actually “unique computers”; so some of our visitors are visiting from work and from home, so the system counts them twice. But the levels are still extraordianry by any measure.
The data is also verified by looking at the site: Go to the calendar, and click on the last month; you’ll see a wealth of events posted by community organizations. You’ll see similar content in the news and announcements. (Did someone say “citizen-generated media”?) When community organizations use the site as the way to connect with the community, you’re going to get this kind of traffic. Think “MySpace for groups”.
We have several sites that demonstrate this phenomenon, which is enhanced by the organization and robustness of other content on the site. But the most remarkable to me remains the American Towns site in Staten Island, a community of 450,000. Click on their calendar and you’ll be amazed a the number of event postings made by organizations themselves.
I am not saying this is easy, because there are so many pieces to it. But I do believe that, in five years, every town will have an online point of community connection like AmericanTowns provides. In many ways, we are just riding the wave; the underlying force – as you have said for some time – is irresistible.”
Very interesting article. It’s new news to me, as TKG corporate folks have been pretty tight lipped about the future of McClatchy and Media News, as it relates to the co-owned internet media properties (cars.com, careerbuilder.com, apartments.com, shoplocal.com & topix.net). As a ShopLocal employee, I see a very strong value proposition for including as many newspapers into these internet properties, as all of these sites continue to extend the reach of the advertisements.
Here’s a correction of the original text (already changed above). If Media News does buy into the CareerBuilder consortia, it may bring some of its 49, non-KR titles. It won’t necessarily bring all its titles. Thanks to Ken Doctor for the analysis on that. In fact, in my view, Media News would have a number of reasons not to dump its existing vendor relationship.For instance, it is already a co-owner of PowerOneMedia’s CareerSite. CareerSite has been abandoned by at least one key customer, and there is plenty of talk that the owners are very dissatisfied with it. But I haven’t independently verified this.
Being in the auto and real estate industry the questions/answers are right on. It seems that everyone wants their information and marketing messages in video format. WIth all of the attention that CNN/FOX etc give to news stories more and more people are getting used to instant information. This is great for marketers who can capitalize on this trend.
“Stubbs’ ace in the hole, as always, is his local sales channel. “You can’t get local without content, and that requires feet on the street,” he says”
As I laid out before, the Yellow pages have two basic competitive advantages that I believe will not continue in the long term. Stubbs states that you can not get content without feet on the street. That sounds like a studio saying you can not get content without a studio. I think Sundance and YouTube have shown the entertainment industry that content can be created without them. I am a big believer that Local Merchants not only can but WILL create interesting local content without the involvement of Yellow Pages salespeople. If it takes an 8-10K person sales force to sell local internet advertising, the business is never going to break out and have mass adoption. Consider what this would look . I may not understand the size of salesforce he is talking about but I tried to multiply $140K at 8K people is a bigger number than my start up calculator could do. (literally my Sharp does not do billions). There has to be a better way. We are going to try to build that better way.
I just read that again..the only way to get content is feet on the street. The whole user generated content movement is based on the idea that this is not true.
Noticed Ben’s comment. Not sure he got the point of a couple of Charlie’s comments.
On the 8K reps – yes, you need that many to reach NATIONWIDE coverage. But that doesn’t mean YP.com is going hire them all. Will probably come from partnerships. Also his $140k number is double what a typical rep makes.
On his other point, as much as we all want to believe that this self-help model for local advertiser content works, there has NEVER been any media, print or electronic, where that model has worked for more than 5% or so of the advertisers. The vast majority of these small to midsized business owners just don’t have the time, energy, or knowledge to do it. That’s not to say they are stupid or anything. It’s just that there is only so many hours in the day, most of which they are already spending on running their business.
I think this is a cool idea but there is little mention of the “800 pound gorilla” internet coupon fraud. One of the major hurdles in the widespread adoption is the $500-$600 mil dollar per year coupon fraud issue. Any coupon that can be printed can be changed, i.e. amount increased, BOGO added, etc. The fact that most fraud come from retailers and redemption houses is a major problem which the industry has not solved as of yet and prevents mainstream adoption for many higher end manufactures.
Jingle is offering a pretty compelling service for consumers and we think a possibly incredible advertising service for Local Merchants.
Getting your offer to play after someone has placed a directory request is certainly potentially as valuable for a local merchant as a Google ad after a search.
Clickz hints at some of the test we have been doing for our merchants in this area. There are so many enormous advertising opportunities for Local merchants once you get them to get engaged.
Online is actually running at six percent for Tribune. I had originally said “5 percent or so” in my post.
Here’s a comment by CEO Dennis FitzSimons at an NAA advertiser meeting, as covered in Media Post June 21:
interactive revenue is poised to grow this year to $225 million–or about 6 percent of the company’s publishing revenue–the company is looking to more than double that figure within four years. “We look to increase to … approximately 12 percent to 15 percent of publishing revenues in 2010,” he said.
The Yellow pages is definitely powerful but their tactics and failure to adopt is what is going to hold them back. I’ve pretty much exprressed my opinions on our blog.
I sometimes see folks confuse federated search with local search. Federated search makes it easier to search existing content by providing a unified search interface across heterogeneous data – which is a good thing. I think of it as site search on steroids. Local search, in contrast, requires publishers to create and manage NEW content (specifically, detailed local business profiles) that drives new traffic and thus creates new rev opps.
seems that some of these statements are being spun in the wrong direction. frist i think it’s unclear if this 8k person sales force is perhaps made up of telephone reps as well as outside reps. second, i dont see stubbs reference to $140k per rep. they have a posting on monster for outside reps and make no such claim. i was present in november when stubbs addressed some people about growth of ypc sales force and he indicated the outside reps would be 2k-3k, a very doable number in my opinion. trust me when i tell you it takes a very different skill set to sell local advertisers nothing but internet marketing and wont be as easy as using existing reps.
Jarvis and Rosen are of course entirely correct. Unless stockholders are willing to take smaller profits, there will be no real across-the-board innovation at newspapers.
What other industry would allow the providers of their basic raw material to teeter on the edge of bankruptcy for years and whine when needed price increases are attempted?
What other business spends such a miniscule amount on marketing and advertising?
What other business pays so little to the people who generate the product’s USP?
Well at least the CEO’s have kept their major conventions on U.S. soil – albeit at the most posh resorts they can find.
“… newer agents are much more dependent on the Web. Sixty-four percent of newer agents advertise online, compared to 36 percent of agents with 10+ years experience.”
This trend is no doubt repeated in other (all?) local markets. It would be interesting to see what percent of RE sales can be ascribed to each, the 64% and the 36%. What % of the agent population are those with less than 10 years experience?
“As for the Fox factor,”where citizens seek out news that is slanted to their on political preferences”? Not sure I get that. I mean they do show both sides of the spectrum…a far cry from real biased news one had to endure-Dan Rather etc.. before. Besides, It is the most watched. Thank God for the balance!
Also worth noting this Hitwise post. They say Google local domains represent .03% of Google traffic.
If all the numbers we have are correct, Google is doing a lot of geotargeting outside their local domains, or those local domains are very, very lucrative.
I added Feedblitz to my blog, and after two months I noticed that about 20% of my readers had switched from RSS to the e-mail notification, as well as signing up many more. It’s a great idea.
Former Verizon Superpages head Pat Marshall, an advisor to AgendiZe, makes a compelling (and broader) case for new distributions of Yellow Pages content in YP Talk.http://www.yptalk.com/articles.cfm?CatID=1
In related news, JupiterKagan finds that large companies are, in fact, climbing on the blog bandwagon (no word on small (local) companies). But just 32 percent use their blogs for WOM.
C|Net’s acquisition of urbanbaby.com isn’t all that odd, especially considering that the mom market represents [url=http://www.bsmmedia.com/resources/marketresearch.php]$1.6 Trillion[/url] in purchasing power each year. But the company’s buy into the “mom space” wasn’t the first. On [url=http://home.businesswire.com/portal/site/google/index.jsp?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20060706005612&newsLang=en]July 5, 2006[/url], the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel purchased [url=http://www.milwaukeemoms.com]MilwaukeeMoms.com[/url], a parenting resource site that my wife and I co-founded in 2002 to serve parents like us raising children under six-years-old. Our exponential growth –driven entirely by word of mouth advertising among metro mothers — wasn’t by chance; [b] it was by relationship. [/b] We do what the overwhelming majoprity of marketers and advertisers neglect to do: speak to mothers in a language that imparts respect for the challenges of their daily life, structuring content around the narrow windows of time they deal with in managing the affairs of house and children. As any parent knows, satisfying a toddler can be a vexing endeavor that requires Mom to fill windows as narrow as 5 minutes. There simply isn’t time for leisurely brand comparisons or listening to an array of dumbed down, stereotypic pitches for everyday staples. By necessity they will return to products, places and Web sites that make their lives “just a little bit easier.”
Whether or not C|Net can make the transition from servicing geeks to serving moms will turn on its ability to have an intimate understanding of a mom’s life and to strike up a sincere dialogue with them in the cities UrbanBaby.com represents and to impart real value into their lives. One thing’s for certain: sticking with UB’s cookiecutter design will yield limited results. To serve the mom niche, local content and local voices are required, and that’s where newspapers and local publications have a significant edge. — Pat McKenna
Pat McKenna, founder of Milwaukee Moms, wrote in to defend CNET as the owner of UrbanBaby. So I asked him: who would you rather be owned by: CNET or Journal Communications, the newspaper company that dominates Milwaukee media (and recently purchased MilwaukeeMoms).
Here’s Pat’s answer….
“Even considering the venerable reputation of C|NET, I would still want to be owned by the Journal Sentinel because the newspaper stands alongside other publications and broadcast outlets that form Journal Communications. Content reigns king on the Net now more than ever, and media companies are slowly waking to the fact that their radio, television and written content have value beyond the originating source or locality. The challenge is to devise “source agnostic” publishing strategies to syndicate locally produced content to niche sites like ours. This is especially the case with parenting content; a local TV news feature produced in Minneapolis on new ADD research at the Mayo Clinic has just as much relevance to parents in Milwaukee, Seattle or Prague, for that matter. Geography simply doesn’t hamper the relevance of the story. That station should, as a matter of course, be required to cross-publish its segment to niche channels within the company where the content has an engaged audience.
(c) “Painless Publishing:” Content is produced once and syndicated as new material across multiple sources. Production costs drop significantly.
(d) Users become more reliant on “platform access” to content, rather than general searches across the Web to find niche content of interest.
(e) Resulting niche sites can be branded as a value add for each local media source; no need to create your own niche property and local advertisers can be geotargeted into each local version of the niche site.
I said it back in ‘95 when I started my Internet career. “He who bundles content best wins.” God, I love this business. :)
Thanks for the write-up on this, Peter. Quick question on that very first sentence … are they saying the $10/month enhanced listing in Yahoo Local also helps their organic ranking? If so, I would assume just in the organic local rankings, yes? Any clarification would be helpful – thanks again!
Matt: Paul Levine is saying that the features associated with enhanced listings are so attractive that they typically double usage, and drive up organic rankings.
It has been widely whispered, of course, that people “buy” better rankings on Yahoo! While he didn’t explicitly say that there was no connection between better rankings and being a paid customer, he definitely seemed to imply that it is not a matter of paying.
There is a difference in definitions of organic local rankings and organic directory listings
When a person is talking about the local search world. There are organic website listings and there are organic directory listings (not sure if these are the exact terms)
The enhanced listing product can help your rankings in the directory listing just by the fact that you are offering more content, this content allows Yahoo! to assign your business listing some relevancy outside the category or SIC your business falls into.
As with most things in the search world more relevant content equals higher rankings. Whether that is for your website or your business directory listing.
42 college newspapers use the AD2AD Classified system, including Harvard, Columbia, NYU, Duke, LSU, Florida State.
In case you want to make this info public, Peter, let me describe the system: AD2AD is designed so newspapers manage classified print ads using an internet database. So print ads also appear on the newspaper’s website in real time (no uploading, in searchable format, formatted as they appear in print, but with web enhancements such as photos, weblinks, etc., etc.). Through the newspaper’s website, customers use the same database to place self-serve ads. Customers can choose higher cost print-formatting options (what newspapers call ‘upsells’), WYSIWYG in real time.
The system design reflects my personal view that the PRINT product is where the value lies, and that the newspaper should simply display ads online at no extra cost.
We’ve discussed this, and our viewpoints differ. In fact, I think we disagree almost completely on the point. So I’m happy to provide some some statistics about our college customers that prove that my viewpoint is right. (OK, maybe not “prove”…but certainly “suggest”.)
Colleges saw an average increase in ad revenue of 34% within 6 full months of use. Customer self-serve ad entry averaged 67% (up from 0 to 5% before AD2AD). Remember, these were college-community customers, web-savvy, PAYING for these print ads when they could have placed exactly the same ads for free on LiveDeal or Craigslist. But and there were more ads and more revenue per ad. Also consider this: 27% of theses self-serve customers bought PRINT upsells. (When internal staff placed the ads for customers print upsells averaged about 7%)
How does this behavior compare to our non-college newpapers?
Non-college newspapers saw an average 41% increase within 6 months (vs 34% college — in most cases, however, colleges told us, this YOY increase reversed several years of revenue DECREASE).
Non-college newspapers have an average 62% self-serve within 6 months (vs 67% college — practically identical).
Non-college newspapers have an average 12% print upsells (vs 27% college — college customers are MORE ready to pay more for print).
Not saying that this couldn’t all change in an instant — but for now, newspaper classifieds online and in-print work to create synergy (and I’m using the word ACCURATELY — you could look it up).
Newspapers have a tough time with their website “in-laws”, chosing to deal with them rather than inviting them to live with them. As the boomers get older, the newspapers’ marketshare also gets older and diminishes. Online newspapers, thanks to RSS feeds and Yahoo!/Google, are treading water. I think local websites that encourage an online/offline synergy will win out in the end (at least that’s what I’m banking on). I’ve got two experiments going on now in my local community and they seem to be picking up advertisers and web visitors. Newspapers will have a tough time catching up with the Craigs Lists of the world, they don’t like giving away classifieds just to get the visitors’ loyalty.
I’m glad to see Google validate the market for local online coupons. It also lights a fire under the partners that have been sitting on the fence wondering whether local online coupons are real…now they know. What Google does is it adds coupons to maps, Google maps. ZiXXo provides a syndication platform for adding coupons to everything: online newspapers, yellow pages, local search, maps, blogs, you name it. If merchants want their coupons on Google Maps, go for it. If they want their coupons syndicated everywhere go to ZiXXo. Yes we provide custom RSS and email, but our affiliate network and API for integrating coupons right into listins and other content really set us apart.
I couldn’t agree more with Pat McKenna’s experience-laden comment about success for content-and-community-centric local verticals. When done well, these services will help identify, organize and complement conversations that are already going on among local vertical communities.
Content is king in local search. Content drives traffic, traffic drives revenue. Local media companies with an equally strong online/offline presence, have a unique opportunity to create THE richest collection of local content for businesses in their markets.
Sure, Google has traffic, but at the end of the day users want content. Just because someone starts their search on Google doesn’t mean the search should end there too. Create the definitive collection of information about a local business and Google will send the traffic your way.
If local media companies truly want to compete with Google etc. then they need to make a concerted effort to become a go-to site for local business content. This means going deep for local businesses: creating and managing rich information about service details, products, brands, business hours, credentials, etc. It also means driving user-generated content like ratings and reviews. And it of course includes coupons. It’s not hard to create your own coupons (high margin) or simply distribute valpak’s inventory (instant inventory, lower margin) like Google is doing.
Needless to say this is a self-serving post. PremierGuide’s private-label local search solution can help.
The Google-ValPak deal is good validation that there’s lots to do to help local merchants. However, this deal still requires the local merchants to promote themselves online (is a bakery in Piedmont, CA or a painter in Winchester, MA going to do this?) so that people will find them in the first place… I am not sure it solves the real problem (and opportunity, which is why we’re real interested in this space) of helping local people discover local things, and vice versa for local merchants to reach out to the people within the 5 to 10 mile radius of their business that’s likely to pay them a visit.
As a number of people have noted, Google has been picking up reviews and coupons as content onto their local maps for a few months now. It was actually pointed out to us by a few bloggers that our merchant coupons were showing up on Google Local searches on the Maps.
Our merchants certainly love when their coupons get picked up this way by Google and other properties. This is why we have made it so easy with the RSS feeds. Based on the current numbers, we see the 20K unique coupon number that ValPak has provided to Google in the near future for MerchantCircle. We also have openly discussed our support of being able to syndicate these as many places as possible including Zixxo as that business develops.
Outside of the Yellow Page companies, ValPak (which is owned by Cox, which has another interesting local internet property: Kudzu) has one of the most effective channels for selling local advertising. The franchise model they have set up combined with a pretty effective local product works.
Todd has been making the rounds for the past couple of years to work how they take that distribution channel to merchants and use it for the local online market. This is a bold move and much more viable than their prior efforts with Valpak.com; and at a time where we are finding merchants are starting to “get” the internet. On average, our merchants are uploading 40 pictures a piece. That would never have happened in 2000.
Estimates are that ValPak has around 176K merchants who advertise with them. Our belief has long been that you have to be pushing to 1,2,5M merchants to really change the local game. ValPak is one approach to helping Google achieve that and frankly may be more successful than the prior efforts with the YellowPage salesforces.
Coupons in a number of ways are Content. In our analysis of the regular, non-Atherton consumer, we found over and over they see both classifieds and coupons more like content and less like ads.
A really good debate going here, Peter. My own two cents…This move seems logical for both google and valpak. For valpak it’s an obvious distribution strategy extension, and it their distribution model probably (desperately) needs an electronic involvement/retention strategy, cuz those “coupons from every atm vision sure ain’t cutting it”! Not a lot different from the YP decision to broaden distribution via paid distribution and SEO techniques. It’s critical to being viewed as relevant as time goes by.
Google is clearly using the free coupon model as a hook to increase user value and continue its relentless pursuit of trumping all others in the scope and (proprietary) value for advertisers. No surprise, and another data point on a predictable curve.
The real value and opportunity for scaling active promotion into search demands a MUCH more sophisticated connection between search intention (or personal profiling)and promotional offer. I doubt Valpak has this even on the drawing/thinking boards. Even for this to work for Google will also take enormous participation scale and/or a lot more “privacy intrusion-challenged” evolution. The real dilema is that “entry search” does not lend itself to cross-promotion, so the promotion has to be spot on in relevant or user profile match. VERY tough to get right on scale, in local.
Honestly, I’m skeptical on the user value proposition, however. The primary use of mapping services is to find a specific address and/or business. Period. The noise forming around google maps, between brand icons and coupons will need a lot of contextual filtering not to make the consumer repel from the clutter. If they can find a way to get this balance right, it’s a win-win. However, the growing bias to selling ad space everywhere we look has a real backlash potential.
Regarding this as a possible major threat to newspapers highlights the paranoia forming amongst the newspaper publishers who have reason to fear every new thing given their tough uphill business reinvention battle. However, every local media publisher has to learn how to 1) evolve into serious differentiated SEO/SEM participation, and 2) build differentiation and value into their own destination properties.
I checked with eBay. They say “the proper way to refer to the Motors local test is “‘Local Market.’” eBay’s press release, however, strongly suggests that all this happens under the “eBay Motors 2.0″ framework. Maybe “El Camino” was the pilot name?
Hello Peter and thanks for the thoughtful comments. Premier Guide’s Malcolm Lewis and I partnered with Surewest Telephone to launch Sacramento.com years ago (while I was still at The Sacramento Bee. I believe it is a Planet Discover project now however…).
My then, youthful enthusiasm and excitement at the prospect of local advertisers using our new local directory site’s self-serve advertising tools (similar to Google’s Sponsored Links) was soon tempered by the cold reality that a local pizza restaurant owner not only doesn’t easily warm to the idea of building his own ad message, but he/she may not even understand why they should even care. It was confusing. “I already have a web site Jim…” They just want to sell more pizza.
Another project I launched with Travidia and a large regional shopping center here, Sunrise Market Place, hit a similar wall by way of cutting edge tools being offered, AT NO FEE, to over 500 merchants that made up a 501c6 Business Improvement District in Citrus Heights, Ca.
We provided many weeks of training. But we still had to beg these merchants to log-in to our self-serve Adscripter and post text about sales and special events, etc. to the microsite we had built for them.
Once again, we were reminded that the pizza guy just wants to make pizza. He “already has a web site” and didn’t understand what the big deal is about, vis a vis our efforts to have his online communications actually seen.
Local directories will work. Many are working well now. However, I remain convinced that as Peter stated, the confusion that this approach causes adds to the mix in a HUGE and unanswered way. Most small business folks are just now accepting they need a web site and along comes someone like me or Malcolm and suggests in ADDITION to that, they may need to consider my call to action platform or Malcolm’s microsite. Oh yeah, let’s add a Blog, a Podcasts, and some streaming video.
“Hey pizza-maker, Can you FTP your .FLVs, .MP3s and .Wavs so I can stream them via Flash players, YouTube, Google Video, MySpace and Flicker?”
This is why we have decided to build a service in combination WITH the platform. The tech is incredible and DOES allow the pizza guy to do it themselves, but they don’t. So, we do it for them. WE aggregate their TV spots, Radio Ads, Print Ads, Direct mail pieces. WE convert them. We post them and buy THE RIGHT keyword ads on the search engines and deliver them a report at he end of the month that says “You spent $XX and made $YY.”
It is not easy. It is not a high margin business and finding people to make this work every day is kicking me in the head. BUT this approach works. The ROI is clear, easy to replicate and hard to argue with. The full-service approach ultimately serves to greatly increase client retention because in the end they get what they wanted all along…they sell more pizza! We have a LOT of learning curve ahead. “Keep it simple stupid” just isn’t going to cut it any longer. Thanks for the forum. Send your charitable contributions to PoorOverWoorkedJim@eyeballfarm.com
1) Should a local business care about a microsite if they already have a website? Answer: Yes. Their local newspaper/TV station website will generally rank higher than their stand-alone website. A microsite on a high-ranking local media website will generally get more search engine referral traffic than a stand-alone website. Even if it gets less traffic, the combined traffic is still greater than it was with a single site. And let’s not forget the 50% of local businesses that advertise that do NOT have a website. For them, a microsite is a quick and easy way to get online with a local partner they know and trust.
2) Will local businesses use self-service interfaces to create and manage microsites? Answer: Not likely. These folks generally have neither the time nor the required skills. But this has nothing to do with the intrinsic value of microsites. It simply means that local media companies have to take the initiative to create and manage microsite for local advertisers. Any local media company that wants to own a chunk of the local search opportunity in their market must invest in building unique local search content. Content has value, and like anything of value, it requires an investment to acquire and manage.
ROI of Microsites:
At AD2AD we have a system that integrates print and online classifieds for community publications. We offer a number of web-based upgrades…little icons, colored backgrounds etc. We provide for one — and only one — photo to be uploaded per ad.
We often get requests from “sophisticated” newspapers and consultants for multiple photo uploads, slide shows, image carousels…also for ‘micro web pages’ that the customer can build.
I have used throughout the ‘Mother-in-Law Test’. I show prototypes of new features to my mother-in-law, a very tuned-in and opiniated 80 year-old who rules her corner of the internet via AOL dialup. The test is simple: She has to figure out how to use the feature without help, and then not call me up with insults for wasting her time with the feature.
Several Multiple-picture upload prototypes and microsite prototypes have completely failed the MIL Test. So to date, we have KISS’ed off microsites, etc.
The MIL test has proven to be a very helpful measurement. My MIL has taught me that in the consumer/local/web world, there is an invisible factor in ROI…One must consider not only the ‘time is money’ equation, but ‘frustration is money’.
It’s helpful to think about that pizza-maker and his microsite. So you can prove that he’ll sell more pizza, and thus get some ROI on his time and money spent on his microsite. OK, but have you considered the frustration involved in that extra time? And for a small business person, whether sales resulting from that extra aggravation will actuually provide more satisfaction?
It’s my belief that the pizza guy hasn’t really finished his quote. “To sell more pizza — and/or have more fun…” His goal is NOT to sell more pizza…The pizza guy wants to own and control his life. He wants a business that satisfies him. So he will always balance the potential for new sales against the quality of the work required to gain them. The hidden frustration factor can pust up the “I” in ROI until the “R” looks very small indeed.
This discussion seems to be confusing the what with the how.
I don’t think microsite proponents are suggesting that creating and managing microsites is the local advertiser’s responsibility. Local advertisers should not be asked to create their own microsite for the same reason YP publishers, newspaper publishers, TV stations and radio stations don’t ask advertiser’s to create their own ads. It’s the same reason I don’t expect a restaurant to drag me into the kitchen to peel the potatoes for my steak and garlic mash.
i.e.: if I google pizza encinitas ca, I’d more likely to find Vigilucci’s (my local dive) if they have a microsite on KNBC39.com (my local TV aggregator wannabe) than if they simply have their own website. Did I get that right?
Isn’t that a difficult hypothesis to prove — in terms of ROI — to Senor Vigilucci?
Doesn’t he need to understand a whole hell of a lot about how search engines work, and how aggregate sites work, and how it’s better for him to be in “Restaurants>North County>Encinitas>Italian>Pizza” of KNBC39.com than to be at Vigiluccis.com…or in addition to having his own site? Doesn’t he need to be able to define the scope of his involvement of creating the microsite (which you say” a microsite is a quick and easy way to get online with a local partner they know and trust”…in other words someone they spend time to talk to and to review, and redo, and of course, eventually pay) and to optimize it for searching, and to compare that work and effort to the work of creating an independent site, etc., etc., or no site at all?
Just thinkinig about the problem, IMO, pushes the Frustration Factor of the ROI equation up very, very high.
Does Senor Vigillucci even need a website for his Pizza? I haven’t ever checked if he has one, and yet I’m a pretty good customer.
Perhaps we need to consider the ROI iincluding the Frustration Premium for the local advertiser to figure out:
Benefits of a microsite in a conglomerate local site vs independent site
Benefits of local search with microsite vs benefits of current local search
My experience is in the small newspaper industry. My classifieds program generally incrreases a new paper’s ad volume by 40% and reduces labor costs by 70%.
HOWEVER — Just THINKING about what it takes to switch from current mode of business to my new system — despite its efficiencies, despite its better revenue — gives the potential publisher Such A Headache that he needs to lie down and put a cold washcloth on his forehead.
I’m sort of thinking that this type of response might be the same in the microsite world, the typical response from a small-business owner.
You talk about spoon-feeding the website creation — I’m saying that the problem isnt the website — it’s spoon-feeding the CONCEPT of the microsite. THAT’s where the frustration comes from. That’s the sales hurdle.
What Jim Bonfield’s comment says is that even with Elaborate Handholding and persuasion, the small-business honors couldn’t maintain the motivation to continue. In other words, they didn’t see the return on their investment vis-a-vis frustration. THEY DIDN’T SEE THE VALUE of the microsite.
You’re asking the small-business owner to make evaluations of somewhat subtle alternative internet strategies, and guess the net effect in his personal businees environment. That’s a tough order.
If a huge amount of Sales Effort and Customer Reinforcement is what’s required, can the Microsite concept be cost effective?
I couldn’t agree more re saving the SEO mumbo jumbo. To sell the concept, regardless of whether they have an existing website or not, just show them a Google search results page.
In this example, Greiner Buick’s microsite (on yellowpages.vvdailypress.com) is the #1 result on Google for “Victorville Buick”. Greiner’s stand-alone company website, http://www.greinergm.com, is nowhere to be found in the top 100 results.
J. Schauer is right. Malcolm is always right ;-) and I am too, sometimes.
BUT…the bottom line is that each company in each industry responds to this information in different ways. Just because the horse doesn’t know it’s thirsty we still need to make the water available. (stupid analogy, I know). BUT this is really about survival for these smaller companies. I bet our Pizza maker found his POS system details confusing too, but he buckled down and learned it because he had to.
The single most compelling tool I use is a search engine ranking report. I hear this often… “I am already on Google. Just type in my name…see?” BUT when we type in their industry type with more common terms like “Sacramento restaurants” (which according to ReachLocal’s traffic estimator tool, was searched for over 100,000 times last month with “Sacramento Pizza” contributing nearly 18,000 searches of its own…) they don’t come up. SOMETIMES their competitors do. Either way, at that very moment they get it and they usually ask “how much will it cost for me to be page-1?”
I have had similar experiences to Malcolm’s by way of organic rankings success. We ran a three month trial for a Hyundai dealer in Vegas. The platform was linked page-1, Google PPC everyday. The impressions were huge, CTR over 4%. We had confirmed sales of three cars in month one alone. We brought in nearly 100 leads (Fully filled-out lead forms on the site. Samples linked from http://www.eyeballfarm.com) and produced and tracked a large number of incoming calls (can’t remember the actual amount). By the end of the third month, our landing page had ORGANIC page-1 position on Google, Yahoo and MSN (free baby!). Even though we had only spent money with Google, we were getting leads from all three networks because the microsite was now better ranked than their own gazillion-dollar web site that had been up for over a year and built on a content management system from ancient days, locking all of the viewable text in Flash and JavaScript vaults with the Meta tags spammed to the brim with 50 or more terms, none of which was written with the city name in maind. These are leads they would have never had.
Here’s the kicker… the program cost them only about $56 a day AND THEY STILL CANCELLED!!!! (I am laughing through my tears… No, that’s just tears I am pretty sure)
It’s all in the success reporting in my opinion. Selling page-1 Google is easy. Reporting it in a way that makes them understand the ROI is the hard part.
Isn’t the lack of interest in self-provisioning symptomatic of the classic reasons small businesses tend to make the most difficult advertising customers — whether in newspapers, broadcast, Yellow Pages or direct marketing?
Small business owners:
1. Have very little free time to manage their own marketing.
2. Have very little marketing money.
3. Expect more hand-holding and iterative services for their investment (especially if account executives do a poor job explaining the limitations of an advertising agreement, often the case).
4. Often wind up being the worst business credit risks.
5. Have the least sophistication in their thinking about marketing messages or message delivery refinements.
6. Despite all, often have unrealistically high expectations of return on marketing investment (again, especially if account executives do nothing to mitigate it).
With all that said, I believe strongly that finding realistic marketing solutions for local businesses will be the foundation of long-term survival and growth strategies for local media.
I just don’t know what those solutions are. Self-provisioning alone definitely won’t do it.
I HAVE BEEN A RECYCLER CUSTOMER SCINCE DAY ONE DIDENT MIND THE PRICE GOING UP OVER THE YEARS BUT THE MOVE TO GO TO FREE PAPER IN A FEW STORES JUST DONT WORK FOR ME. THERE ARE STILL TO MANY PEOPLE WHO DONT HAVE A PC TO LOOK FOR ADS. I HAVE ONE NOT GOOD WITH BUT GOOD ENOUGH TO FIND WHAT AM LOOKING FOR, BUT YOU R ONLINE MOVE I CANT FIND ANYTHING.GOOD LUCK WITH YOUR ONLINE BUT I MSS THE PAPER.
StepUp is a powerful idea and product. Getting product information, especially product inventory information onto the web is a further step in changing the local search experience.
Why should I have to drive around looking for a replacement cord for my laptop ?
The issue with the product was for it to have an impact possible, it needs to have large numbers of merchants signing up and then actually uploading the inventory information. The combination of Intuit to acquire customers and Google to provide listing capability and local ad inventory will make the powerful idea and product that Stepup has have a powerful market impact.
I think the question that I left unanswed is:” how big a deal is Intuit-Google?” My answer is: It is a “3″ on a scale of 1-5. It isn’t going to cause a revolution, but it is a nice bulding block. Intuit will undoubtedly deliver some SMEs that haven’t focused on buying keywords. Is it more meaningful than a major Yellow Pages sales channel deal? In some ways “yes,” because it will be nicely driven online. The IYP assignation is sometimes obscured.
Looking at Hilary’s career, she has a lot of impressive titles, but not a lot of impressive accomplishments. At Times Mirror, she headed the nearly formed interactive unit that was in study mode when Tribune bought It. She parked at Tribune Interactive for awhile until bought out. Then she went to Red Herring, where she ran that publication into the ground. Then went to Knight Ridder, where the entire on-line space was rising at a double-digit pace — not much to do with her arrival. Then on to KRI corporate where — well, you know. Smart woman, no doubt, but better at marketing herself than producing results.
Donna Bogatin writes favorably about the promo, with good detail, on ZDNet.http://blogs.zdnet.com/micro-markets/?p=466. Of course, she lives in New York and can actually use the cursed coupon!
Thanks for some helpful introduction to the field. As we have discussed over some excellent Dandan Chicken, we have different views of this market. I hope you won’t mind a little riff on your first point;
I was interested to see that GoogleBase was going to Kill Classifieds. I heard the hype.
Here’s what: GoogleBase isn’t going to Kill Classifieds.
A. Try to find a 3 or more BR 2 or More Bath single family house between 500,000 and 1000000 in La Costa Canyon School district of North San Diego County (Encinitas or Carlsbad). Go ahead and try.
B. I clicked on the Products link. Here are the first 20 listings:
UpperHand Adult Batting Gloves
Crypt Master Costume
Toshiba MK6026GAX ATA-100 (60gb, 5400rpm, 16mb)
In-StockRear View Mirror Parking Permit, Size: 3 1/2″ x 2 1/2″ (SPP1)
Zoya Nail Polish – Elise
Sweet & Sexy Monster Bride Costume
Pirouline Box Rolled Wafer Cookie, 1.2 oz. Box
Casio Men’s EF306L-3AV Watch Black Leather Strap
2 x 2 Plastic Holder, Dime
Sechel Lever Set (Full Dummy)
See thing about “classified ads” is that they are “CLASSIFIED”. You can quickly find a category (like “Seasonal Items”) and a classification (like “Halloween Costumes”) and hey-presto, the ads there are for those items and ONLY those items. What a concept.
In fact for the most part the items above are better suited to E-bay than to GoogleBase, or for that matter to a newspaper classifieds page. They are commodities, being sold by retailers.
The Classifieds Page of a Newspaper (or a Shopper) is the Marketplace of the Average Human Being.
It is:
* Geographically defined, and identified by buyers and sellers
* Up-to-date
* Easy to view and navigate
* Easy to buy an ad – over phone or on web
* No contracts, no commitment
* Inexpensive
In contrast to Craigslist, etc., newspaper classified ads
* Typically are NOT free, so advertised item is meaningful
* Advertiser leaves footprints through ad placement process so
* Not anonymous AND
* Some level of advertiser integrity assumed
For sale items being advertised are:
* Local
* Benefit from actual physical contact (a test-drive, etc.)
* For sale items are One of a kind, typically
* For sale items are Used, typically
Jobs being advertised are:
* Local
* Jobs are one-offs (small offices, businesses, restaurants, etc.)
* Managed by hiring individual, not by some HR department
* APPLICANTS will be LOCAL
Housing being advertised is:
* Local
* Local realtor, or FSBO or FRBO
* Located in Newspaper-distribution-defined Neighborhood
* Descriptions geared to Neighborhood usage
These ads are IDENTIFIED as local, and hence there is a degree of Local, tribal trust. You KNOW where the advertisers live, for example.
Look at the above, and tell me how any aggregating website or search engine matches those items. Look at the above and tell me how GoogleBase will kill classifieds. The items listed above are hgih-value items established by business processes over a long time, and they will take a long time to kill.
I compare the Death of Classifieds to the Paperless Office of the 1970s. (Note: Offices now use 10 times as much paper as in 1970).
The rise of Local Internet might reasonably cause local classifieds to grow, not die. IF newspapers stop trying to compete on on the Internet playing field, and INSTEAD force the internet players to compete on their turf. Few newspapers do this, however. Everybody is so Forward-Thinking and Hep-To-Modern-Trends and With-It these days.
In the 1970s, some smart people invested in paper factories.
I got the same automated call that John did. It caused me to explore the site and claim my listing. I like what I see in the free service and I appreciate the exposure. I don’t understand how people will find me though, I can hardly find my listing and I’m looking. Is it expected that prospects will go to merchant circle like they go to the yellow pages? If so I would love to hear it promoted more.
excellent rebuttal; presumably we’ll end up somewhere in the middle with a vendor that has successfully figured out B2C, C2C & B2B. Munging together the best of a shop/newspaper classifieds marketplace with the best of a IYP directory offering. TBD
Great article, I think YP is in trouble. Their brand has been diminished somewhat because of competing print publications, not so much because of online local listings. Print is print, and people that use YP generally don’t think “hey, why am I pulling this out of the kitchen drawer when I could run upstairs and search google local listings to get the same information?” I’ve found this with my own print publication which is a monthly newsletter that is mailed to residents. Our online newsletter attracts a totally different crowd, beyond the mailing list. People either trust print or online, not typically both. That’s why I think online classifieds are important. To Meg’s point, classifieds are “entry level e-commerce”, but they also help in the web’s adoption by older, YP, consumers.
The Internet dream was to score through venture-capital financing and by raising cash in public stock offerings. Now, people with creative ideas can get rich relatively quickly by permitting advertisers to piggyback on any Web site that attracts a lot of viewers
I caught up with Neil Salvage, CitySearch’s new head of sales, at SES Local in Denver Sept. 29. Salvage says it is silly to talk about “$300 million” annual revenue, which is way too high. But he notes that advertisers in some categories are, indeed, budgeting in the $350-$500 per month range for the pay-for-click advertising. This figure can be further watered down to account for multiple location advertisers.
House of Cards. Gatehouse’s debt is so high it eats up any profits they have and they will actually lose money, which is why the IPO is so important. They are trying to find suckers to bail them out, and this line about what a great potential they have with local online media sounds like the internet hype of 1999. Anyone who believes it is an idiot. Check out their wickedlocal site. It is so weak. It’s all hype. Anyone who buys this stock is an idiot.
I made some mistakes in this piece and slightly revised it. Basically, I threw all the commenters, legit or otherwise, in one pot. That wasn’t right. I also took Merchant Circle at face value.
Verticals. I hope so. Consider: any newspaper, say a Thursday. There is the weekly Gardening column. Who does that appeal to? How many such folks are there in the circulation area? Where do they get their info on soil conditions, sales on shovels, cool planting ideas, and other items? Not in the Gardening column.
Good call back in April of 2005, addressing the challenges Amazon’s A9 would face as a Yellow Pages business.
It is pretty amazing that A9 did not focus its attention on developing an actual Yellow Pages business or some type of partnership, especially when it was in such a great position to do it. The high cost of a nationwide sales force may have had something to do with it, and they may not have been thinking along the lines of a YP partnership.
I think what A9’s Yellow Pages could’ve become is exactly where MerchantCircle is currently heading today. Not only that, MerchantCircle is becoming a networking destination for a group that is commonly ignored, the local independent business without a corporate infrastructure behind them.
Most sites are focused on consumer traffic, while MerchantCircle focuses on providing tools and services for merchants. I think of MerchantCircle as Myspace for local businesses and exactly what A9’s Yellow Pages could have been.
On 13 May, I described in this blog how I had registered with Merchant Circle and changed the entry for a business I knew, Yoga 101 in Encinitas. Got a lot of comments from the CEO about how such a thing would never happen, security, processes, etc.
The credit card companies are already forefront of this movement, they are teargeting college student for their credit card and expecting parents to pay the bill.
These fees will probably help eliminate a lot of the bogus or spam postings as well. This is still a deal for the advertisers. Recruiters have driven up the pay per click advertising through Google etc. and will gladly pay the fees. I wish Craig would charge a minimal fee for all postings (1-25 cents) just to clean it up and get rid of the bot postings and spammers.
Vin Crosbie says the NAA’s combination of print and online is useless — and he makes good points.
“Monthly is the big caveat there. Slightly more than 54 million Americans purchase a printed edition daily, but 55.5 million visit a newspaper website at least once per month. Conflating daily print and monthly online figures makes it appear that the American newspaper industry isn’t so much losing daily print readers as gaining equally frequent new readers online. That isn’t true. But look closely at the NAA’s NAD data, which is downloadable as an Excel spreadsheet. How often does the average user visit a newspaper site each month? There’s are no numbers about that in the NAD spreadsheet, but we can calculate an indication.” Read his full post here: http://www.digitaldeliverance.com/blog/2006/10/oh_which_conference_to_attend.html
A newspaper exec, who wished to remain anonymous, wrote in to suggest that the reason why local ownership is important to The LA Times is…simply because Tribune Interactive has such a “top down Internet strategy that totally devalues local.” He also noted that “the problem with The LA Times isn’t the local staff.”
As always, good insights. I think the other problem Smalltown will encounter is the lack of web adoption and understanding by the very advertisers they are depending on for their revenue model. With local portals, defined by town limits or zip codes, the fence gets pretty small for advertisers that a) understand the value of PPC or Internet advertising and b) have a budget for such things. What I’ve found with most of my local advertisers is that they appreciate the web, like it, but don’t really want to buy it. In the towns that Smalltown has started, they might have a more receptive audience than Indianapolis, but expansion will be a problem. The digital divide will be their biggest obstacle.
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:
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.
I just spent more time than usual browsing through Smalltown San Mateo. The design is far, far ahead of anything else I’ve seen: clear, precise and fast as lightning. Having so many logically-linked actions packed right there around each card is high convenience. Exquisitely done, really. It also delivered better, faster results by far compared to InsiderPages, when I used my usual search phrases (soccer equipment – bicycle repair). I wonder if the whole thing is done in Flash.
I like the webcard device. It is getting close to what I’d ultimately like to see, which is to give users the same kind of position in the buying dynamic that they now have in the content dynamic. Being able to trade webcards with coupons looks like a start in that direction.
But from the other direction, as Tom and others have observed, is a great yawn from behind the counter at local local establishments. Nothing a tipping point won’t overcome, wherever it is…
Bob Kempf, developer of Gatehouse’s WickedLocal, wrote in to tell me, “hey — it is a two way street.” Kempf, a longtime Ottaway newspaper exec before joining Gatehouse, recently crossed back over the tracks to become VP, Product forThe Boston Globe’s Boston.com. The Boston Globe has made a lot of noise about reaching into the SME market, so it seems that Kempf was the logical candidate for the job.
Thanks, Peter. It’s been a great run, and I’ve appreciated your insights for and commitment to the news business. This would be my opportunity to thank all the smart people in the NAA’s New Media Federation for my free education. I can only aspire to make them proud. Er, and to any great innovators and technologists out there who want to light the way for community newspapers, don’t be a stranger! [:D] I won’t be actually in NY until Oct. 23, so feel free to use melindag@aol.com or request a connection via Linked In.
Looks like CitySearch is jumping off of a sinking ship. Newspapers are struggling. They are doing one thing they don’t do well: spread themselves and their resources thin. Dot coms like CitySearch are much more adept at changing with the times. Good for them.
To get at your question (why would a VC invest millions of dollars in a local concept company that hasn’t hired an executive or consultant without any kind of local experience, or even exposure to a local media company?) – why is an executive important? Even more importantly – why is a consultant important?
As I see it, VCs are out to invest in projects they believe will make them money. If Grayboxx can really do what it claims (and also gain traction) – a lot of money could be made.
To wrap it up – local is so disintegrated (and still so immature) that an executive/consultant is even less important imo.
” (Why would a VC invest millions of dollars in a local concept company that hasn’t hired an executive or consultant without any kind of local experience, or even exposure to a local media company?)”
Exactly. It’s all about SALES. Who is going to hire and manage –let alone compensate–the Yellow Pages-type sales force required to extract small amounts of money (pay per call/click–whatever), from large numbers of very small businesses, all of whom need personal attention? Judy’s Book has already thrown in the towel on that part of the equation, Insider Pages has let their CEO go.
We’re back to the “If you build it, they will come” mentality. But the small businesses are not going to come (self-provision). You have to go to them. In order to make sales that will only generate a tiny amount of revenue from each business. There is a massive disconnect between the VC’s/CEO’s and the mom ‘n’ pop market they have identified as easy pickings. None of these titans of industry has never sold advertising, and they have no understanding of the small proprietor who is bomarded daily with sales pitches from print, radio and TV, most of which they have least heard of.
The other problem is, it’s “LOCAL”. Most of the VC’s projections are based on rolling out some kind of national model, whereby lots of small markets each providing small amounts of revenue, begin to ad up (like Google AdWords). But each local area is finite–there are only a certain number of plumbers, restaurants, etc.
These companies need more than a consultant. They need to go out in the field on a daily basis, get in the trenches and try pitching their idea to Joe’s Shoe Repair and get him to commit to paying hard money, i.e. $200/month or thereabouts, because that’s about all they are ever going to pay. Good luck with that!
This is a corrected version. I had originally noted that Belo might switch from CareerBuilder. In fact, as Jay Small pointed out, Belo has been using Adicio (formerly CareerCast) as its recruitment vendor.
Chicago, run your mouth. Blog till ya can’t see straight. It won’t change the fact that the best information on new homes Chicago comes from http://www.newhomesdirectory.com.
I think most of these projections deal with ROP advertisers, when a larger threat looms with preprints. Can you imagine how rapidly Sunday circulation will fall when preprint users migrate fully to the web?
I find it also ironic that there hasn’t been any meaningful discussion of the movement of public notice advertising out of newspapers. The lack of discussion no doubt stems from the fact that metros don’t carry much public notice advertising. The politicos hate newspapers and they are changing legislation as fast as they can to reduce the amount they are required by law to spend with newspapers. And that revenue doesn’t go to the web, it just evaporates.
Well, here’s one way to look at it: if print revenues fall off drastically in 10 years at your “tipping point,” then online revs may make 50 percent of the total at that time, 10 years ahead of LRF’s projection.
Two ways to get to that split: online grows or print declines. Both are happening.
Actually, the more pertinent “tipping point” to look for, if it is even possible (and many say it is not), is the point where online makes enough money to support newsgathering, sales and its own operations, while allowing publishers to cut out the high fixed costs of printing and distributing paper products.
I would like to start a blog about local travel and travel in general. How can I get started creating my blog? Any tips or information wold be helpful.
Peter, I think it’s also important to note the low overall percentage of newspaper online revenue that’s from direct sales. The majority of most newspaper’s online revenue continues to come from what’s called the “upsell.” When I say the majority I mean close to 80% or more.
That upsell is in fact a forced buy. When a person places a classified ad their sale into online is considered “assumed.” When an advertiser purchases a contract or a retail display ad the online portion of their buy often isn’t disclosed to them and/or is merged into their rate.
I think it’s going to be eight years or less, but it won’t happen without all of us selling online advertising building the value of what we sell.
what if at some point, there is a tipping point, a point at which a wide swath of audience realizes, ‘I like online better.” Are we prepared for that scenario? How much money do we need to make online to keep the business afloat?”
The cool thing is that people are attacking this from both sides. That is, both traditional media companies and the new media (online only for the most part) independents.
To be honest, I’m not there yet, but I can see it as a possibility.
I do think independents need/want to have some kind of print product weekly for the next decade or so. These print products will be based off the web counterparts, though, and not vice versa.
I am prepared to take bets on the success of this venture, if anyone cares to define the term “success”. Let me suggest some wagerable metrics:
Google will make money and increase Google business.
Newspapers will decrease business.
Newspapers will lower their prices in an effort to make a success of their Google offering. This won’t help.
The nwespaper’s labor costs associated with managing these ads will be much bigger than expected.
Newspapaers will in a year declare the initiative a great success, despite the fact that they are bleeding money trying to maintain it. Actual sales figures will NOT be offered.
In 18 months, these same newspapers will build their own DIY portal, and pull out of Google.
In 2 years, both initiatives will be as much in the forefront of internet buzz as “Go.com”.
Thank you so much for your comments about Greg. Greg was my nephew and we miss him dearly. It is comforting to know he touched so many lives in the same way he touched ours. Your thoughts and prayers are greatly appreciated.
Peter,
Thanks for the post. A couple notes. First, our self-serve advertising system doesn’t imply that we may “go solo” as you put it. The system is integrated with our search/content product, and will be deployed from Q1 with our media partners.
Second, the Miami Herald is a McClatchy property, not MNG.
Note from Peter: My mistake about the Herald’s ownership. I’ve corrected it in the text.
Peter, you say, “also in the marketplace, albeit in a broader, non-local context.” Eventful has a strong local focus — how could we not, given that events are inherently local. Could you explain the “non-local context” comment?
Note from Peter: Boy, where was my mind when I wrote this one! Vis a vis Brian’s comment, I meant to say “Extra-Local,” not “non-local.” Indeed, Eventful has all kinds of events, online and offline. They’re my hometown site, and I root for their success!
They are going to have big problems pulling this off. While they want to appear to be more local and “community focused”, their business model is still heavily reliant upon classified ads and subscriptions, neither of which pay real well on the web. While they are at least realizing what needs to happen, their feeble attempt to turn the ship won’t miss the iceberg.
Hey Peter, a few comments on Yahoo Local! receptivity in the local market. Our team is giving quite a few face-to-face pres’ns these days due to the complexity and diversity of local brands and solutions. Whereas Ggl is a more than a buzzword with many, the Yahoo! brand is really strong, and their Local featured sponsorship product with scarcity (limit of 6 per category) carries a lot of weight at the merchant level. Merchant really like the consistency and “persistency” of the fixed featured ad appearing every time…seeing is believing, it seems. (Full disclosure: Cornerstone is Authorized for Y! Local in mid-Atl and Northeast.) Thanks, Jeff
Very interesting – the question is, are the advertisers getting their value? Or I guess more importantly – do they ‘feel’ they are getting a good enough return?
Remember that your loss is shared by many friends who care
and that you’re in our thoughts and hearts and in our every prayer!
Greg touched our hearts and left us with memories to last a lifetime.
Sincerely,
Danielle & Melynda Milligan
British Columbia, Canada
Normally love your column, but you’re going to lose a lot of credibility with me for reading Bogatin “religiously”. She grossly misrepresents facts and clearly has some personal bone to pick with Google. This is just another example where her theories are way off.
Mike Orren from a new site named Pegasus News has this to say on the Kelsey Blog, which syndicates Local Onliner.
“Currently, we have a relationship with Google that not only sends traffic to Citysearch.com but to our customers’ websites as well. This product directly connects our customers’ websites to consumers searching for their type of business across our partner network. ”
Err. As someone obsessed with local market media and advertising, I’ve seen lots of the google ads they refer to coming up on our sites. They are ads that purport to take you to a broad category of info and instead take you to a tangentially relevant single-business page on Citysearch.
“As you know, we offer our customers a broader reach than any other local advertising provider in the market and we are committed to continually expanding that reach.”
Peter, there is a huge difference in quality of content in the “moms” space. Local sites like MilwaukeeMoms.com are sites that were founded by moms in localities where there was a true need. National sites like ParentsConnect and ClubMom are really just another iteration of city guides.
The difference being appointed city info/reporter types that are employed by the national sites vs. the growing number of mothers who feel marginalized by marketers and feel it’s their obligation to inform others in their own community.
I don’t think anybody’s particularly close, although I’d like to think that we’re heading in the right direction here at backfence, but gaining an engaged local audience takes a tremendous amount of genuine outreach. That can only be done by locals in small local geographies, or in very specific verticals.
“Moms” is simply too big, but it sure will draw lots of ad dollars.
A few years ago, verticals were not even on the radar. Certainly different now. With everyone after the local holy grail, local and vertical is the icing on the cake.
Is the how much Google is getting paid for placing adsense on CitySearch pages or how much CitySearch is paying Google for itself and on behalf of its customers ?
If it is how much is being paid, that would either make CS very large or very unprofitable. I don’t think it is that large at all and no way IAC has it that unprofitable.
Excellent post – more changes in the executive. Perhaps the investors are simply getting fidgety – grassroots approach is nice and all, but the business just isn’t bringing in the dollars.
Interesting you mentioned a meta-review site, been working on one. I know Google tries to do it with local sources, but imo comes up very short.
Yawn. I think this deal has been talked about for four or so years now and I have to wonder how long it will take to fully execute. Will newspaper execs get lost in the details? Will the technology integration move at web 2.0 speeds? Will Yahoo find innovative ways to leverage newspaper content?
I listened to the conference call live and felt that the newspapers were giving away the farm. The newspapers should be the the primary source of local listings, but they ceded that position awhile ago. And they gave away their most valuable strategic asset — local salesforces with “boots on the ground” relationships with SME’s. Not only are they not leveraging that asset in the deal, they are using their salesforces to build up a dangerous long-term rival.
Yahoo, like Microsoft, has a history of cutting “strategic” deals only to turn their back on their partners when they are no longer needed. The newspapers have fallen into a trap here and they only have themselves to blame.
Individual papers cashed checks, I doubt there was really much serious interest in developing anything more than a captive software bureau to serve the papers. Certainly, in typical newspaper software style, not much support was given to CareerSite and company.
This is great coverage. I’ve a small business in the DC area and have been approached by backfence with regard to advertising. I’ve been looking for commentary, evaluation, etc.
Thanks for your insights. And as one commentator noted….are the advertisers getting value.
Just thought I’d give you the heads up about momready.com’s unique partnership with the Geffen Playhouse Saturday Scene by searching for Kid Reporters to review their 2006 – 2007 season of plays. momready.com, a leading online parenting magazine that offers tips and topics for busy parents, with a bit of humor mixed in, has partnered with the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles, California to launch the momready.com’s Kid Reporter for Saturday Scene at the Geffen Playhouse program.
This is a unique opportunity for children 6 years and older to be selected as the “Kid Reporter” for an upcoming performance during the Geffen Playhouse Saturday Scene 2006-2007 season. momready.com editor and CEO, Elisa Taub says, “We are extremely excited about our collaboration with the Geffen Playhouse. My two children have always enjoyed the Saturday Scene and I can’t think of a better way to engage kids in theatre. We look forward to providing great Kid Reporters.”
For each show, momready.com will provide a Kid Reporter to be randomly pre-selected through a “contest” that will be announced on momready.com. To enter your child, log onto momready.com and fill out the “momready Kid Reporter at the Geffen” form. Parents may enter more than one child and need only sign up once, as names will be stored for all future momready.com Kid Reporter at the Geffen drawings. Subscription to momready.com is free, with informative, bite-sized articles delivered directly to your e-mail box, Monday – Friday. Subscribers are eligible for unique giveaways, contests and special sales.
momready will provide the “Kid Reporter” with fun questions about the performance they attend and/or the world of theater. The answers will be “lightly edited” as their article will be published in the next Geffen Playhouse Saturday Scene Performances playbill and in a designated section on momready.com. For safety and confidentiality, no last names will be used, just the child’s first name and age.
Grubisch’s article has a couple of following insightful comments from folks at work in the local community space that are worth reading. They reinforce the experience in online community settings since the days of 300 baud. The ratio of posters to lurkers is about 1 to 10; don’t depend solely on user contributions for establishing a flow of useful content.
Earlier this year for my own edification I looked at how a specific neighborhood keeps itself informed via online connections. it is the area of Washington called Chevy Chase DC, stradding Connecticut Ave. running up to the Maryland line at Western Ave., bordered roughly by Rock Creek Park and Friendship Heights. The format was a simple mailing list. In the two weeks I was a member, there were a couple hundred emails sent by several dozen individuals. They warned people to watch out for the guy selling bad meat door to door on McKinley St., and to avoid the well dressed, but panhandling woman at the Metro, among about 40 other subjects that were then active. Two weeks.
These residents are all highly educated, have a lot of money and enjoy the latest broadband gizmos. I don’t know if they frequent other local DC-based sites. But for tracking the stuff of their neighborhood, this list would be hard to beat. This kind of community self-informing is what Backfence and others are trying to create platforms for and business models to support.
As Peter and his readers have noted here, the SMEs that local community sites will ultimately depend on for financial success (to say nothing of paying staffs), have been exceedingly slow to adopt the web. And according to pals in the search optimization business, when they do get into it, is often just to get a top ranking in organic search results listings.
Taylor Walsh’s comment about the listserv for the Chevy Chase neighborhood of Northwest Washington, D.C., that he discovered reminds me of what I found when I visited the listserv for nearby Cleveland Park on Yahoo! Groups, http://groups.yahoo.com/group/cleveland-park
The site’s content is also built around emails — scores of continually fresh ones that point out neighborhood hazards, offer concert tickets for sale, do grassroots politicking, etc., etc. Of course, both Chevy Chase and Cleveland Park are very settled neighborhoods, so there’s a strong community base to tap into with a hyperlocal site.
What is sad is how PowerOne and its constituent newspapers had the hubris to believe that they knew better about how to structure and integrate the recruitment application than those that had been on the leading edge of the technology while the PowerOne constituents were poo pooing the whole Internet “thing”. The result of this being that CareerSite has been mismanaged, initially by the MNG Interactive people and then more aggressively by the POM people.
The surprising thing is that CareerSite has survived this long, the product being basically unchanged for over three years. But everything you attribute to a recruitment application was initially developed by CareerSite. It is sad to see it pass.
Note: Owen Medd was a cofounder of CareerSite and had served as CTO/System architect.
The rumor is that CareerSite will continue to run for 18 months, ostensibly to give the current customers time to unwind out of CareerSite and transition to HotJobs.
The PowerOne management has, in my somewhat biased opinion, pretty much gutted the ability of CareerSite to make any significant progress advancing the product the last three and a half years. Initially they tried to use the CareerSite technology base to advance their own C2 platform attempting to rectify it’s significant technology issues (cost and poor implementation decisions). Subsequently they froze any technology development or maintenance as they tried to get a handle taking over the CareerSite technology. The final death knell was when they elected to outsource a rewrite of the CareerSite platform to India without much understanding of the feature set and with no input from the system architect (that would be me… myself and Ed Farrell conceived CareerSite as I was exiting from the original Online Career Center prior to it’s purchase by Monster). This failed and the end result was the release of a skunk works internal project to address performance issues. I’m not sure how widely that was deployed to customers though.
CareerSite was pretty much doomed when Advance left, as Advance is very much a technology/platform buyer. Advance leaving meant that they didn’t see a future in the platform and that they were better served dumping their rather large investment (millions of dollars) in CareerSite and moving to a completely new vendor.
Owen’s facts on PowerOne Media aren’t 100% accurate.
But the bottom line is that PowerOne Media’s investors were never really ready to embrace the commitment and investments needed to build a national brand. And they were never strong enough to mange their local newspapers. PowerOne Media was caught in the middle of this struggle. Perhaps Yahoo/HotJobs, with its stronger brand and deeper pockets will have a better chance at success.
As someone that has been involved well beyond Owen and Isaac’s involvement, I have a few clarifications/comments.
There have been no layoffs for months, we (CareerSite) have actually grown and hired in several functional areas as we have continue to mature. Any layoffs or reductions have been with the POM corporate structure as products have been sold. CareerSite has grown and became the center of Enterprise infrastructure and development for the three remaining products.
Owen’s characterization of the current technology platform is somewhat inaccurate. While it is true that there was an attempt to outsource a rewrite to India by individuals that did not have any concept of what they were doing, the actual rewrite was completed in house and all of the customers completed migration earlier this year. The current technology platform is extensible, scalable, suitable, etc. The ‘legacy’ platform had become a little long in the tooth given its late 97 birth and lack of qualified oversight at the code level. The real problem has been a complete lack of strategic direction from the investors to define, fund, and build a product and brand as Isaac stated.
In terms of Advance, I would agree that their expectations based on the unrealistic promises of when the platform would be ready combined with the fact that it was status quo in terms of feature/function were the nail in the coffin.
The last year has resulted in completion of several internally initiated significant feature/function improvements for candidates, employers, and newspapers with several others ongoing at the point of the plug pulling. It was obviously too little, too late.
It is a sad event given that CareerSite has always had talented people wanting to make a difference but lacked investors with a strategic plan beyond acting as a low cost ASP that would answer to whichever schizophrenic newspaper group was currently screaming the loudest.
The author’s name is a pseudonym.
TV is in the cat’s seat when the convergence of media finally happens. Newspapers’ role is diminishing over time as their readership 1) erodes to the Internet and 2) gets older and older. People are inately lazy when it comes to getting their news. We watch television to get our packaged news by attractive anchors with full-color moving graphics. Newspapers require work, er, you have to read it.
I’m not a Curley fan myself. Where is the revenue model? It’s easy to spend someone else’s money to do cool, “cutting edge” things at the newspaper, but it’s quite another to have a legitimate business model that adds revenue to the bottom line. I’ve never seen someone put up on a pedestal so high that worked for someone else like this guy has. He’s a zippo lighter salesman at a caveman convention.
It’s hard to stay current with trends in any industry these days, but POM didn’t seem to know what horse it was on or how to ride it. That and the drearily common types of jackass hires for upper management – people more concerned with textbook management theory and ‘comtrol’, than with facing up to their own inexperience or lack of ability – seem to have sufficed for the K.O.
c’est la morte. Y’all will get better work somewhere else.
CareerSite is an interesting case study in terms of the politics and spin of corporate mergers. Certainly at this point the goal of all concerned is to put the proper spin on their involvement and move on to, hopefully, bigger and better things.
Information flow, the control of it, and the ability of a group to adequately analyze that information play an important role in any group’s perception of a set of events. CareerSite has had quite a number of groups involved, it has always been humorous to see what each of those groups is fed about a particular event and how they react.
I was just reading how the popular axiom “the winners write history” is slowly fading away as those who witnessed events first hand can easily share their viewpoints.
As I’ve talked with very small businesses around Burlington, Vermont, where we’re developing Front Porch Forum, many do not have a website, AND do not want one. However, they are interested in advertising on the web.
So, we’re developing our sponsorship program with that audience in mind (in addition to the web savvy types).
Front Porch Forum provides online forum to neighborhoods. In our first two months, word-of-mouth brought 10% of local households to our member rolls. People are eager to connect with their neighbors and FPF helps meet that need.
PowerOne Media’s CareerSite, like most legacy job boards, relegated itself to a state of irrelevance by neglecting to satisfy and engage its users. Show me a job board (or search engine) that fails to deliver exceedingly relevant job search results, and I’ll show you a job board that will never reach its intented potential.
Yes, the Yahoo! (HotJobs) partnership will generate revenue for all stakeholders.
I think it is still to be seen whether yet another legacy job board (Yahoo! HotJobs) will produce revenue for the new set of stakeholders. After all, what is new or different about the HotJobs platform? Or Monster? Or CareerBuilder?
The primary differentiator is not whether a recruitment solution is “legacy” or not (witness Monster, HotJobs, et al, all of which are spawned from the Online Career Center/CareerSite “legacy”) but what sales and distribution organization is promoting the solution and how much content and and eyeballs they can gather. Who would have guessed in 1997 (hmmm… well, pre-TMP buyout) that Monster would be in the position it is in. Or that CareerBuilder would actually have survived to be where it is today? A well-organized sales/marketing/business organization with a crappy solution trumps a superior technical solution with lousy sales and marketing every time.
I meant to mention that it is my belief that a reasonable recruitment solution, with all the web 2.0 bells and whistles, integrated into the existing distribution networks and doing a reasonably good job of tracking where individual responses come from (and ignoring the myth of “relevant” job searches, as none of the existing job boards do a good job of producing relevant searches) is relatively straightforward to produce.
Properly targeting and promoting such a solution is the tricky part. Can you target a market segment that gets you critical mass on a local level and allows you to leverage that into a larger network play? Inquiring minds (and wallets…) want to know.
Relevancy requires engagement on behalf of both the employer and candidate to produce the necessary data points. Short of writing the killer app to read the employers mind based on a usually poorly written job posting or chaining them to their chairs to fill out a RedMatch style 10,000 question form, it usually degrades to keywords, occupations, and location. Particularly when newspaper ads are involved.
Clearly almost anyone can write a job board given that there are now over 40,000 of them out there. The lure of $400 job postings, $1000 resume searches, and tens of thousands of dollars in Google Adsense has created a porn site like frenzy to find a way to cash in before employers stopping wasting their money on the advertising PPC model and start paying for results. While distribution can be considered free given the Craigslist’s and Google’s of the world, effective distribution to engage a targeted set of eyeballs is not. Particularly when the passive job seeker is taken into account. Who wants to hire the people that are always looking for a job? The eyeballs you really want probably aren’t actively searching the job boards – local, national or otherwise. Social networking (SimplyHired, Jobster), resume mining combined with career progression prediction, targeted advertising placement (Dice), etc are all being tried. I agree with Jobster CEO, Jason Goldberg, in that the solution that gets HR to stop sorting resumes and start recruiting again will win.
Of course I am over simplifying and the argument could be made that for a significant percentage of job postings (especially newspaper listings), it is only about getting the position in front of as many people that are looking as possible. Something has to explain why the local oil change place paid a significant chunk of change for ‘priority placement’ on the local job board, mlive.com/jobs.
Finally, it has been interesting to see the latest commentary on CareerSite being broken, an anchor, etc but not one finger being pointed at the MNG, Hearst, and Advances for running into the ground through mismanagement. Despite it all, the product was profitable and continually signing new business. (Despite) CareerSite’s lackluster marketing/sales effort – it was obviously a viable product for providing private label recruitment sites. It would not require a ton of investment to effectively own that space with a superior product that delivers results.
Peter: I wonder a couple of things related to this newly engaged recruitment battle:
1) Whether this move, which effectively breaks apart any hope of newspapers collectively working together on recruitment, is a harbinger of things to come. It’s easy to see the same kinds of splintering — with the aggregators picking off news chains in small groups or onesies. We can see apartments, cars, and traditional display/exposure ads following the same path. How fast, I wonder?
2) How fast the inroads of social networks in transacting people business — classifieds — will happen? We can count in the tens of millions of dollars the craigslist effect, especially in the Bay Area, as the site has sucked at least that much out of tradtional newspaper pockets? My sense is that the recruitment companies and their aggregator partners still have at least three years of high-margin revenues, as the craigslist effect and other similar phenomena deepen.
As the SES conference sections are dominated by representatives of various advertisers the SE’s still generate the most leads to most businesses and well optimized businesses benefit. I have one and have dominated my local field with strong optimization.
G sees this in their analysis of searches and is smart to stay ahead of the game. I’d keep an eye on what they are doing to attract more sme’s to their fold.
I was surprised by some of Mr. Perry’s competitive claims. Based on my own personal brand awareness, I wouldn’t have guessed that AutoTrader was that dominate over some of the other competitors.
Just for fun, I did a search for Chevy Suburbans within 25 miles of Philly (19019 zip actually). I only came up with 162, which is much different than Mr. Perry’s claim of 425.
Suddenly, I doubt all of the other metrics he sites as well. Is there an independent source for comparing traffic levels? It would be interesting to see if his claim to have “four times” the traffic of other competitors fails under similar scrutiny.
It appears that Kim did not use either Google or MapQuest. This from CNN’s report on Kim’s tragic death:
“Officers said the couple used a map to choose the road they were on. “They got the map out — a regular highway map — that showed the route,” Anderson said.
However, it wasn’t clear whose map the couple used. The 2005-2007 state highway map distributed by the Oregon Department of Transportation has a warning in red print, inside a red box: “This route closed in winter.” A Rand-McNally map did not have a similar warning.”
I was surprised to see business ratings and reviews by sources in addition to CitySearch.
From a user standpoint, there’s one thing I really like. I did a search for events at a place called “First Avenue” here in Minneapolis, which doesn’t carry your mainstream music acts.
I was able to look at their events, separate them by date and genre, and could purchase tickets online. It was not through IAC’s Ticketmaster, even though they are a TM venue. This was all without leaving the AskCity site.
You are right, JackOfAllTrades. The numbers don’t match at all…I checked Compete.com for some traffic estimates. They show AutoTrader at 5,564,966 UV/month and Cars.com at 3,603,126 which is hardly a 4:1 ration, if I am doing my math right..it is possible that Mr. Perry might be referring to Page Views or Searches or some other metric, which are extremely susceptible to differences in site design and web tracking methodology. Alexa is another free tool which gives some directional information. There data also doesn’t agree with the presentation (http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?site0=cars.com&site1=autotrader.com&site2=&site3=&site4=&y=r&z=1&h=300&w=500&range=3y&size=Medium&url=cars.com)
Peter, if you have the slides from presentation, do you mind posting it?
“Search engines sit horizontally across the rest of the Web – over commerce, content, community or communication—they are not content, but get you there. On the other hand, Citysearch is the leading vertical content site for local information. Combined together or used separately, both serve their purpose.
Citysearch already gets a huge amount of traffic from search engines. Even a site like Wikipedia gets 70% of its traffic from search engines each month. Should you go to directly to Wikipedia or should you go to a search engine? It depends where you are in the process of investigating a topic. Your usage of a general search engine, like a Google or Ask, probably differs from your usage of a deep vertical, like a Wikipedia or a Citysearch, yet they are all part of the same ecosystem. And they blend well together in the middle of the spectrum.”
Additionally, 10% of Ask’s queries are ALREADY local–Ask is just trying to do a better job of managing those. To do that, Ask wants to give you as much information as they can in a reasonable amount of space, and if you want more, you can go to a content site, such as Citysearch. Or if you want to write a user review, you would go to Citysearch.
Strange that this article doesn’t mention the best of the free DA services: 1-800-free-411. It’s no surprise that 411Metro is in “financial straits.” I’ve tried both and 1-800-free-411 is the faster, more convenient of the two.
Pat: Actually, Jingle Nets is the producer of 1800 Free 411. Glad you’ve had a good experience with them…. Me too! PK
Peter, I can assure you that every statement I made at the conference was entirely factual.
Regarding the question about the number of listings I cited, our search results pages diplay on the first page the number of “matches” or listings that fit the consumer’s search criteria. The number I cited at the conference was the number of actual vehicles contained in the search results, which is greater than the number of “matches” that we show at the top of the page. The difference comes from the number of actual NEW VEHICLES that are included in the search results along with the used vehicles that match the consumer’s criteria. For example, when you do a search for “all” (new and used) Audi A8s within 10 miles of zip 30309 (where I live in Atlanta) you will see we display 11 “matches.” You will also see that the first “match” actually contains four individual new A8s from Jim Ellis Audi. We are the only site that presents new vehicle inventory this way. We call this kind of listing a “New Car Aggregate Listing” because we aggregate all the new vehicles from a dealer’s inventory that match the consumer’s search criteria into one listing. We do this to present a more easily scannable search result list than if we listed all the new cars individually. This type of search results presentation has been very well received by our users in both surveys and usability tests. So if I had used this example in Philadelphia I would have said we have 14 Audi A8s even though the top of the page says 11 “matches.” I probably should have made this clear during my presentation, but I hope this clears this up and I hope you agree that the comparison I made was indeed fair. By the way, we have a change in the works that will display the total number of vehicles, not matches, at the top of our search results pages. And you may also be interested in knowing that this unique way of displaying used and new inventory (we are the only major automotive site to do it this way) is very well received by our audience which is made up of 33% new vehicle intenders and 67% used vehicle intenders. Many consumers bounce back and forth between considering a new or used vehicle during their shopping process, and many consumers like to see a new car dealer’s actual new vehicle inventory before visiting the store or generating a lead.
Regarding the question about our traffic levels compared to our competitors, the data I cited came from a publicly available October 2006 Comscore Media Metrix report, which does indeed show that our users’ average monthly time on site is about 2 and 1/2 times higher than cars.com and 4 times higher than most of our other competitors including KBB and Edmunds for example. During my presentation I cited comparative statistics only about time on site, not unique visitors or any other audience metric.
I don’t dispute the Alexa or Compete numbers but in the audience measurement game there are many different sources and you know as well as I do that they all have their various and sundry strengths and weaknesses. We are very confident that among the automotive shopping sites we have by far the largest audience of in-market car shoppers and we are in fact facilitating by far the largest number of actual vehicle transactions. We have a large amount of anecdotal feedback from our dealers that supports this, and to prove the point more broadly we’ve just completed a major study on this which we will be releasing at the NADA conference in Feb 2007.
Don’t hesitate to ask if you have any other questions and feel free to share this with your colleagues in the blogosphere.
Worthy of a Greek Tragedy… Regardless of what anyone can criticize, it is absolutely unimaginable what James Kim would have felt in his heart as he fell for the last time. At the moment, he may have felt that he failed in his quest to save his family. How truly horrific! Immense contrition should be extended to all those involved. Likely, he is in Heaven now so he knows his family was rescued. This is extraordinarily painful.
Great Site. I continue to see more of IDT in the local space and understand they actually have an entire division named IDT Local Media with a variety of local assets. Does anyone know all of them? What else have they invested in? At Kelsey I heard about http://www.localpull.com, http://www.click2talk.com, and HopStop. Looks like a roll-up strategy of some kind.
The interesting part of Chip Perry’s defense is that it seems similar to a shady dealership trying to explain why all of the sudden the price of the car just went up because of a trade. I can’t seem to find those “new car vehicles” even when I search using the “all” criteria.
Moreover, cars.com has always been easier to find a new car with it being one click away from the homepage. Whereas AutoTrader actually sells much of its new car traffic to Dealix which is a pay per lead format . . . something Mr. Perry says they don’t do. Here’s the path straight off the Trader home page:http://autotrader.dealix.com/step1.asp?refid=88888&detid=50000
Clearly he was caught fudging some numbers and spouting unsupportable statements. One doesn’t present data such as the number of Suburbans in Philly and actually expect someone to do a search and find far less than 400+. However, I found 193 to be exact compared to Car.com’s 105 based on Center City Philly Zip 19101.
The other part that Chips neglects to explain is that from a consumer standpoint Trader is far more cumbersome to use compared to other auto sites. Thus longer time spend on site trying to wead through their pay for better placement listings. When you look the Nov.06 Comscore Data, Trader shows 4.95 mm uniques and Cars.com has 3.86mm. 28% difference in audience not 400%
The way I see it, AutoTrader probably has the largest used inventory base (may be because they let dealers post vehicles for free…) and the largest audience (except for eBay motors, which has other categories too- parts/bikes etc.)…I guess they don’t need to “work” the numbers in such an obviously misleading fashion.
Nevertheless, I commend Chip for being so responsive to bloggers. Its a welcome trend in business leaders of today.
Metro D.C. media veterans will remember Washington Technology’s glory days when it was run by its founder, Esther Smith, who earlier started the Washington Business Journal. Esther, who today is a founding partner of Qorvis Communications, threw a spotlight on the then-nascent but promising technology industry of metro D.C., in the mid-1980s. By the time the WPost acquired Washington Technology, the D.C. technology boom was basically a story of contractors lining up at the federal trough. That made a lot of people rich, but it didn’t produce much entrepreneurial innovation, or interesting stuff to write about. How sexy can you make an article about a local company winning a “contract to configure commercial software solutions for billing and accounts receivable operations within the Defense Department?” Earlier this year, the Wall Street Journal drew up a list of the “Top 20 Inventive Towns,” based on the number of patents registered. Nowhere on the list was Washington or surrounding tech-heavy suburbs. Tthe list included 11 communities in Silicon Valley, which owes its existence to its proximity to Stanford and Berkeley. When the D.C. tech boom was gathering steam, Northern Virginia’s George Mason University set a goal of becoming the “Stanford of the East.” But that required a lot of money, and, beyond financing a handful of high-profile chairs and throwing around some scholarship money, the area’s tech titans kept their wallets in their pockets. Stanford’s endowment today is $15.2 BILLION; GMU’s is $41 MILLION. Now, that might be a good story for Washington Technology to look into.
Pretty funny and VERY accurate. As a long term member of the DC business community and one that serviced some of those companies….its a very unique world and one that doesn’t travel to other regions/markets etc. very well.
Is there a content aggregator out there that could provide reasonable recruitment tools, decent distribution (eyeballs) *and* a compelling story for newspaper properties? Even better if there were tools across the major classified categories in addition to recruitment…
The song says “two out of three ain’t bad”… My scorecard says that one out of three is the average score.
Is it possible to develop such an aggregator? Or does the politics of the situation make it impossible.
CareerSite marketing and sales has always sucked, it has never been the strong point at any stage of the organization. Despite the fact that product development has languished, the basic software premise continues to be viable and salable.
Passive job seeker, stop HR from sorting resumes… It is kind of spooky to see 1994 business plan common sense being sucessfully recirculated. Good to see it all coming back to light again.
Given that the CareerSite software experience has not been dispersed widely beyond Ann Arbor, I suspect we will see an equivalent software platform emerge for those customers that value a networked, brandable recruitment solution.
Regarding a good heat/ac man in San Diego, why not try Yahoo! Answers? They’re celebrating their first anniversary today — maybe you’ll be lucky. http://answers.yahoo.com
My only beef with autotrader is the inability to sort results by distance. IIRC, this functionality was previously available on autotrader a number of years ago.
IMO, cars.com is much more useful for that reason alone.
Peter, I think that there’s also the factor of online communications systems such as Skype, which combine messaging with audio communications. Vocal and person-to-person communications are still key, but these can now be combined with online content relatively easily.
The other factor is the power of implied endorsements from content. Personal communications are certainly the most powerful form of endorsement, but emails and messaging, a form of publishing, provide a different kind of endorsement than verbal word of mouth. An online message is something that can be repurposed easily for audiences large or small. So it’s a different kind of power.
I also wonder about the sample. Obviously it’s a very wide base of data, which implies that it reflects the relatively slow penetration of broadband Internet capabilities in the U.S. Certainly amongst the broad range of consumers the leading role of TV makes sense, but if you limited the sample to people who had access to both the Internet and TV, I wonder what the numbers would look like.
Perhaps the difference between print and online usage is that print measures are done by asking people what they do, and online tracks what they actually do.
That’s why the ability to track consumer behavior makes Internet advertising so much more accountable than traditional media.
Perhaps it is because, instead, it is basically a flawed model? I looked up my wife’s business, one of the only full service interior designers in our town, zip code 55391…she came up on the 5th page. Others came up that were 20 miles away.
you are obviously one of those lame coffe cafe’ peep that think life is about sitting in some trendy lounge,reading some lame barnes and noble book,while yahoo’ing or google’ing,all the while sipping your over priced,bitter,multi worded trendy latte’ and waiting for the next episode of friends to air!!!….i’m from boston, and grew up with dunkin donuts…the crap they call coffe here in ca is a joke!!! maybe some day you can gas up your volvo wagon, and drive your dockers wearing ass to oceanside and have a real cup o’ joe and try the blueberry cake donut…it’s really good. oh and unlike lamebucks…it won’t cost you more than 3 bucks…and it will taste good for once……..
Peter, this Onliner post is one of your best, in my opinion. It’s full of insights that I’m going to suggest my team members read and review. A few tough points for startups to digest…but some opptys described, too. Thanks, Jeff Tadie
Interesting post. I just accepted an invitation to participate on behalf of Front Porch Forum in a session at Harvard later this month focused on the internet’s role in local politics. I wonder if OhioElects will attend?
This just goes to show that even great local content sites need a solid sales and revenue plan.
It’s a shame that these folks were let go, but unless there is a meaningful amount of revenue coming in, any property can’t expect to survive long term.
Without more information than this, it’s hard to say much about this development. But, in the spirit of citizen journalism, let’s give it a shot!
Perhaps BackFence isn’t aiming at the right target. Stories that appeal to an audience across a 50,000 to 100,000 population (e.g., “city council enacts smoking ban in restaurants”) may best be reported by professional journalist, as has been the case for generations, and supplemented by bloggers. Stories that appeal to residents of one neighborhood (e.g., “utility work closes Maple St. and Birch Ct. to through traffic this week”) are not of interest to the other 49,000 people in town.
So, a BackFence model runs the risk of combining (A) stories with broad appeal that may not meet professional journalistic standards with (B) lots of micro-stories that are each only interesting to a very small slice of their readership.
This brings to mind Cathy Resmer’s piece yesterday about local news and community newspapers.
For comparison sake, after four months, Front Porch Forum has about 6% of metro-Burlington, VT signed up while in early start-up mode.
Michael hits the nail on the head. I run/own a local site in a resort town (Sun Valley) where we blend a modest professional journalism team with an army of bloggers. Way back, I was a part of the early team at Microsoft Sidewalk (later rolled into Barry Diller’s citysearch) so I learned how it’s easy to hemorrage money with local websites :)
In the 2+ years since we launched the site, it’s become the #1 source for local information reaching a broader audience than the local papers, TV, radio, etc. and we are profitable (barely) but on a nice trajectory. We run very, very lean so there’s a hundred things I wish we could do but the top of the list is serving our community and making money and we are a bootstrap operation so some of those things will have to wait.
We’re always appreciative of feedback if you want to check out the site at sunvalleyonline.com. The thing I’m proudest of is how we’ve ignited the community to contribute news, pictures, personal stories, classifieds, etc so 80-90% of our content is created by the community. You can reach me at dave – at – (sunvalleyonline) – dot com if you want to provide me feedback.
Frank Barnako notes on his site that much of Backfence is of little compelling value, and sounds slightly “corporate,” which I found interesting, and responded thusly:
It is interesting that the content on Backfence, all of it the creation of its users, could be considered “corporate.” The neighborhoods Backfence serves in DC (I live in one of them) are not filled with people ready to disparage their neighbors, lay down accusations, or otherwise needlessly “ruffle feathers.”
It turns out that the content/community model adopted by Backfence carries with it the natural social communication constraints one finds at a local art show, along a game sideline or other public settings where people mingle.
The way to actually find out whether you can create an online audience that cares about this, of course, is to put something in place like Backfence. It is always good in this day and age to find a place that encourages civil behavior, but it’s hard to sell.
To my mind, the model to watch is Baristanet, serving the hyper-hyper neighborhoods along Bloomfield Ave. by Montclair, NJ (I once lived there!) The lead on that site comes from the Baristas themselves, who carry personality and point of view up and down the avenue.
I can’t tell how quickly the ad revenues are filling the Barista’s tip box, other than by observation there are more ads. And they are doing more cheap and useful things (a mashed map of coffee shops).
As has been observed about “hyper local,” and as Baristanet and many neighbrohood listserves demonstrate, when you are working a very dense local market like those around any metro area, it is tough to get sufficiently hyper and build a business model around it.
If Mark Potts can assume a Barista-like personna, he’ll still need to isolate the neighborhoods within say Bethesda, which has scores of them. He could do worse than to go to centralized Starbucks and put up a 3×5 card that says “B-town Baristas wanted.”
One of the things I think they’re missing in the equation is that you do need trained editorial staff. They’ve had a ‘hands-off’ approach since the beginning. It’s not working. The other, imho, is their clinging to ‘online-only.’ There’s still a little money to be made (in the short term anyway) from print sales. This could fund a small news operation (editor, reporter, sales, interns) for each of the regions, I believe. They’ve gone through a lot of funding so far. Best of luck to them, though. Hope they take these words to heart.
I had contacted backfence with regard to some potential advertising. I’ve got a local business in the DC area with very strong serps on a regional basis and am fairly savvy with regard to taking advantage of local visibility and seo.
The backfence salesperson with significant costs. Frankly the content wasn’t great for our audience. maybe we contacted them too close to this change in direction and the handwriting and pressure were already in existance.
BTW they never gave me a feel for traffic. So how could they justify advertising rates.
Its awful tough to make something like this work within a community.
I agree with you about the “crowded” mom’s space on the web, however the Modern Mom’s website really offers an organized approach to much-needed information. Thank you for sharing this site with us. I’d like to share our site with you, http://www.ForHerInformation.com ; a site for the conscious-minded woman. Our national PBS TV series and quarterly publication are also featured on our site, along with our new radio show and online newsletter.
It’s all about “community” for women; sharing ideas and solutions that fit into our busy lives.
Enjoy,
Beth Aldrich
Founder
For Her Information Media
I never understood how backfence planned to make money (which is ultimately what publishing is about. Editorial is simply there to stop the ads bumping into each other.)
How was backfence ever going to sell advertising? No plan, no experience. They recentlly bragged about having 500 advertsers in ALL their properties. The average Big City paper has 5,000 adverters!
The minute they did start making money –if they ever did– their local monoploynewspapers (the San Jose Mercury News, Washington Post, etc) could have taken all their advertisers away overnight simply by creating their own “backfence’” sites, then offering backfence advertisers free ads on that site, plus disocounted ads in the main paper. Newspaper ad reps are hardcore, and they have a great product to sell. Backfence would have been gone in less than six months, once their local papers took serious aim at them.
It’s taken the well-meaning, but naive founders this long to find out out that there was no future in this ill-conceived venture.
When it comes to being local – the old saying applies – Think locally – act globally – Her only problem was that she was to slow to obtain cities…you have to have numbers on the internet…Like http://www.DiscoverOurTown.com operates with 2000 USA cities..as everything cycles, some cities are seasonal on the internet while others are year around destinations…it takes girth to be successful!
The biggest problem in Backfence.com’s thinking was believing they could generate sufficient funds simply from advertising. Small-town/suburban hyperlocal paper publications often have to supplement their ad revenue stream by providing other services–or are parts of companies that have other revenue streams besides advertising.
Even with the best content and great blogging personalities, sufficient online revenue is *seriously* difficult to generate–unless you’re a crafty splogger gaming the search engines, or participating in some other kind of click fraud. Odd how online revenue seems to work in favor of the dis-honest than the industrious.
I’ll agree with Jeff’s initial comment… wow! Lots to digest in this one Peter… thanks! I’ll see if I can reflect on any of this on the Front Porch blog.
No surprise here. I feel bad for the folks that were let go, but again, they drank the kool-aid. Local portals relying strickly on banner ads and some google adsense revenue will fail no matter how much money is thrown at them. A “community” is smaller than 50,000 people. We already get enough news at this level from newspapers.
If revenue, much less profit, remains elusive in local online efforts like Backfence.com, let’s not give up on the idea of connecting people online based on local geography.
At E-Democracy.Org, we’ve been hosting very active online local Issues Forums for over a decade with extremely limited resources. We are now in seven communities in Minnesota and England. Our model starts with the low low cost “forum” at the center including a local volunteer forum manager and steering committee (think Rotary) and builds out from there. See: http://e-democracy.org/if
I think the starting point for local citizen media should be what can you do online for almost nothing that is sustainable and engaging. Then build up from there as your grow your participatory audience.
I’ve seen millions, and in some cases tens of millions, pumped into cityguide sites. AOL Digital City almost got it right…but overextended the cost side by deploying discrete market-based and self-contained teams…very few centralized efficiencies. However, Digital City did have deep rich local flavor and passion in its core 10-12 markets…in fact, “chunky and sticky” was the mantra for all the content staff. There was real opinion and editorial. Ad packages were ROI-based…with decent renewal rates. Sounds like Backfence was missing most of the passion, depth and thus, value…I hope they can survive and revamp…perhaps go narrow and deep in limited markets.
(Is it acceptable to comment on our own comments? )
The quality of the content on BF sites is a function of the commitment to go only with user-contributed-material. So far as I know, this was a deliberate effort to put in practice what all the proponents of citizen journalism were promoting. It was born amid the clamoring about WE MEDIA after all. (And clearly in some neighborhoods, we be boring.)
The experience thus far offers some important lessons for others out plowing the local online garden (I’m one), some of which Local Onliners have noted here. That is all good. And maybe BF itself is adjusting the model based on that experience.
To my mind, thhe BF story should put into the grave at last the notion that a local online content business can ever depend on its users alone for content. Neighborhood listservs maybe.
I, for one, loved the name Backfence, even if I wasn’t really interested in the content. It may have been another story if there were a Backfence/North Vancouver, but I’m not sure. If the communities served by Backfence are anything like mine, they are served by three local community newspapers that are delivered free to the door. They all make money in a “community” of about 150,000. They also all have unremarkable online presences that could benefit from citizen reporting. A blend of local professional journalism and citizen journalism may be a more likely model. As someone who sees a lot of citizen reporting on http://www.orato.com, I agree with the comment that citizen journalism needs to be backstopped by professional editors who are respectful. You also need to have at least a few stories that are simply great fun to read.
This article has been posted more than once I see, but I’ll leave the same info here that I left elsewhere. About that #10: the Jingle service is called 1-800-Free411. Just in case anyone wanted to try it out after reading your post.
While I can certainly understand GMT’s fears, this seems be another example of “not-invented-here” syndrome from old media and it is likely to increase the probablity that GMT’s fears are realized.
“According to Borrell Associates Inc., National ads make up about 50 percent of overall newspaper ad revenue, but 75 percent of newspaper online revenue.”
They’re not even close…
Chris
(I had messed up the research. Borrell’s actual data is now in the article, corrected. Thanks Chris. Peter)
When there is credible, often exclusive content on a local news Web site, it will attract an audience. WestportNow.com, the 24/7 news and information source for Westport, Conn., has been at it for almost four years.
We get thousands of visitors a day who know they’ll often find content here they will see nowhere else (of if they do, its second-hand info days or weeks later).
Our stories and pictures are often cited and reprinted by others, ranging from the local cable news operation to The New York Times. Our package of 2006 Year in Pictures included 360 photos from more than 50 photographers.
When the content is good, credible, and presented in an attractive, professional manner, local Web news operations can succeed.
No one leaked this story to the Journal. It was based on statements made during an analyst meeting, according to my contact at Gannett. She specifically mentioned comments made by Craig Dubow, but I’m not sure exactly what meeting or what comments.
The fact that two of the three publishers don’t want to talk about this is yet another indicator that it’s very premature. And though the Journal story provides great context and insight regarding the industry, I can’t help but think it’s got a lot of people making much ado about (yet again) not much. Front page news? Hmmm…anybody remember this story (front of marketplace section if I recall) which also amounted to nothing?
I disagree with Taylor – you can depend on users to provide content. But if users have no drive/reason to contribute, they won’t.
Look at the plethora of message boards out there with experts helping newbies – do they gain anything? There are reasons for their motivation in helping the newbies, and you simply have to tap into that same motivation.
Backfence news may not appear to be the most interesting nor the most relevant unless you actually live in one of the towns it serves. As a resident of one of their communities it was a good place to get all the local information, find out who had eaten in a restuarant down the street and what my local politicos are saying… and yes they were all active on the site. Sure its not Hollywood simply a small Northern VA town and yes I do care about the dog park and the school playing fields.As for advertising well at least I can findmy local stores there not the big flashy big box retailers. I hope it survives all the speculation and continues to serve my communityregardless of its internal upheavals.
Here is the key….the best sales force in the nation maybe in the world. You don’t throw that away easily. The Telco sales teams are well trained, experienced and motivated.
This local ad “troika” and partnership stuff is starting to sound a little too much like the old “New Century Network” from a decade ago. http://www.businessweek.com/1998/12/b3570103.htm where there was too much “Us vs. Them” and giants being pushed together out of fear rather than trust/mutual value.
but then again, it could work like the other GMT ventures such as CareerBuilder and ShopLocal.
Will be fun to watch.
Major metro areas get the press, but don’t forget the “Wal-Mart” effect of succeeding in smaller cities with less competition.
My previous company published 390 directories, all but a handful were in suburban and semi-rural markets. I have no doubt that we would not have been able to compete in major metros. We didn’t have the skill sets necessary to be compete at that level.
But in our smaller markets, we were very successful. It’s the same online. You have to be committed to a strategy. The Big Apple may have the bright lights, but there are just as many opportunities in Peoria.
Up and down we go, but I think Lisa Monaco’s ratings misplace the notions of best places for print publishers. In fact, as you point out McClatchy evacuated the Twin Cities because of its “slow” growth. Curiously, the Twin Cities has always been slow growth, well-known in newspaper circles for its slow but steady growth and ability to withstand recessions better than the rest of the country. That used to make it an enviable newspaper market. Now, I think the whole Northeastern/Midwestern tier looks problematic to newspaper companies. Why? They need high population growth markets in the South and West. There, the growth mitigates and masks to a degree the growing disfavor of print advertising. So they’re countering structural downturn with some short-term local market growth. It’s a good strategy in the short (2-3 year) term, buying some time until they can deal with the larger issues.
An understandable strategy, but it fails to recognize the long tail aspect of local search. The combined searches of all the second and third tier MSA’s collectively outweigh what we call the “power metros (Miami, NYC, Boston).” In print, it’s not possible to chase the long tail efficiently. Online, the rules are different, if not inverted. As Dick Larkin said above, “there are just as many opportunities in Peoria.” Our experiences online bear this out as well.
Mark — ValueClick doesn’t provide its advertisers with targeted media on a geo/behavioral basis. It’s a shopping. That’s what we’re defining here. I like ValueClick (sort of).
Interesting…from another Curley….my brother is Robert Patrick Curley, a very good labor lawyer in Philadelphia. Check out my blog and concact me if you want.
The worst part, by far, is the number of newspapers left hanging by this. Most of these online editions STILL seem half maintained, if that…just stuck in limbo I suppose. Not a good time to see that happen, surely.
This is a pretty appropriate area for these guys (incumbent local media companies) to be investing and a good way to monetize their existing market position. There’s pretty good demand and a large market that local media has a distinct advantage in selling to. It also isn’t clear that there’s an easy way to “craigslist” away this local advertising revenue stream as there are still reasonable back-end costs involved. It will be interesting to see how this shakes out. Can the local media companies organize their go-to-market efforts with appropriate focus and resolve?
It’s silly to think that web dollars will shore up print dollars and I wish that our trade media would stop even writing about the print / online paradox in those terms. Similarly the Barrett / Sappell debate should not be “debilitating” both strategies are valid on the web and both can and should be implemented with a few dedicated resources. My guess is the the real problem is The Times inability or unwillingness to go forward with either strategy if it doesn’t provide an immediate payback in the current budget cycle. Both the Washington Post and NYT are under similar cost pressures but are more willing to try unproven models in order to sustain a leadership position on the web.
People used to say how the Internet will enable the little guy to compete against the big guy. I have always taken the opposite tack: the Internet enables the big guys to pursue the smallest niche that previously was not high-margin enough to pay attention to. If the newspapers produce something at the local level that works really well, there’s nothing to prevent Y or G from devoting just a small fraction of their total resources to steal the market from that niche player. The newspapers have lost utterly; they just haven’t fully come to grips with that fact. Also, it’s fairly common knowledge that Google uses human editors to flush spam out of their search results on “head” queries on the long tail curve, so I don’t know why these guys think that their human editors give them a qualitative advantage over G.
Mark, the newspapers for years have produced something at the local level that works really well — the printed newspaper. Yes, key metrics are in decline, but it is still a good business. The reason newspapers have been so defensive against a wide range of local online products all these years is that they have traditionally had such a good business to defend.
Pure online plays seem to do a good job of chipping away at newspaper market share of data in a given category (jobs, cars, homes, retail, community news etc.). But they do so on an order-of-magnitude smaller cost and revenue structure. The outcome is value destruction in the advertising economy — less money to be paid and made overall.
No technology, no automation, no user-provisioned content initiative I’m aware of fully overcomes the change in ratio of content cost to advertising revenue when content-driven businesses move online.
Stay with me a moment here. You are correct that the big search companies use a variety of human-operated methods to improve the perception of match quality in search results. But those people are not placed in local communities for the purpose of management and enrichment of local data. They are hired to improve perception of their core products, where advertising revenues are derived from that match quality.
I get your point that local editors are a competitive advantage only as long as a global brand chooses not to invest in them. But I have not observed much interest from the Googles of the world in putting people in local markets to deal with local listings or even customer support. So far. I believe that reluctance has much to do with the comparatively small advertising market base for these products as they exist today.
The search portals’ investments in technology development and acquisition are indeed daunting — but those are economy-of-scale investments, not commitments to compete against local media with people in local markets.
True, all that could change if the economics change. Right now, however, we have more competitors fighting for leadership in the online local search world than the money generated in that world supports.
While that competition plays out, the newspapers already have good human resources in their local markets, should they choose to aim some of them at enrichment of searchable local data. My point is that we still have that advantage, derived almost entirely from the continued profitability of the print business, and should use it to grow competitive and enduring local search products.
It may be in your best interest to believe the newspapers have “lost utterly,” and in mine to believe we have not. I would not be quick to assume, however, that the whole industry is just ostrich-heading against some inevitable outcome.
Peter, thanks for the report on this. One thing I’d like to clarify is that our website is http://www.tristatehomeshow.com not the Evansville Homes 4U, which is a competitor site.
Also, I’d like to clarify the revenue on enhanced listings. Rate card rate is $29.95 and we have sold several at that, but there are also discounts bundled with several programs that, at least for the first year, would drop the average rate down into the lower $20s and bring that revenue down to more like $33-35k. It is still all new revenue and we expect that we may be able to bring that average rate up in year two. We have several other advertising revenue opportunities with the site.
“Can’t someone find it?” Sure! People can. Ask the neighbors. That’s Front Porch Forum’s approach.
It’s not uncommon in our neighborhood forums for a member to ask the few hundred households around him “any recommendations on buying a new fridge?”
He’s likely to get several responses, some by email, others back to his forum, some in person when he’s walking the dog. He’s almost sure to hear about the local version of Pacific Sales and to “wait until their June sale,” or to “talk to my brother-in-law who can get you a deal,” etc. Neighborhood stories are piling up here, here and here.
So, yes, use the local shopping sites for research, and then ask your neighborhood forum to help hone in on the best local option.
At least those poor souls at POM won’t have to deal with the cheap nickle and dime jack-asses in the newspaper industry. One of the biggest reasons POM was not profitable was the fact that they did everything for free. If a newspaper cried a little bit then POM would create whatever enhancement they wanted, free of charge. That is a dictionary-perfect example of how not to run a successful business.
The candor that Andy Sack brings to his blog is astonishing and admirable. But the problem with candor is that it’s a bottomless well. As Andy Says, Yelp out-maneuvered Judy’s Book by focusing on younger (25-34-year-old) demographics and cultivating them with age-savvy tone and substance. But Judy’s Book owned the older (35-49) demo, and those soccer moms, and much more, represented 23 percent of of the total U.S. population compared to Yelp’s 14 percent slice. Not only was the Judy’s Book demo slice thicker, it was more rooted — more into what I call nesting than networking. Advertisers love young networkers, but they also love nesters, who earn more money (if measured by median household), are more likely to own their home, be married, have children and be generally more settled, and thus likely to spend money on all the things that nesters do. Initially Judy’s Book seemed to understand that it owned, or could own, this huge demographic slice. But it made no serious effort to exploit what it had. What it might have done is build local communities around these nesters. But the site’s bizarrely counter-productive rules prevented that from happening. Members were driven to become “City Editors.” To achieve that title, members had to raise their “Trust-Score” to 8 or higher. To do that, they had to maximize their “Friends,” postings and responses to their postings. So hundreds of members pulled out all stops to become City Editors, and get the gift certificates that went with the title. The easiest way to raise your trust score was to mindlessly seek out Friends from among members, regardless of your likely compatibility with them and to ask questions that you sent to all your Friends. It didn’t matter how dumb a question was, if it got asked of your Friends, and you had 250 of them, you could push up your Trust-Score. Not surprisingly, the quality of postings went down as the desperate competition got more desperate. Members appealed to JB to do something. Initially, JB managers said it was up to the members to hash it out. Many members, frustrated by the decline in content quality, either quit the service or went into hibernation. The result was a huge vacuum of content on JB — when it could have been building nesting communities across America. Finally, JB’s management discovered what many of its members had long since concluded, and went to work creating an entirely new mission — finding Internet deals. But there were already too many deal sites on the Internet. Plus, deal sites need the right kind of scanning software more than they need bargain-eyed Internet browsers. So that’s where JB is today — one more deals site that has alienated its huge resource of nesters, who, contrary to what Andy says, are active Internet kibitzers, and, in the bargain, have fatter wallets than 25-34-year-olds. If only Judy had been around to chart a sensible path.
This is interesting, Google seeing value in offline advertising. Many folks think that print is dead, and I for one disagree. I agree with Google saying to “stick to your core”, but newspapers are too enamoured with the Internet now and think they can outsmart local portals. Good luck with that, and take Google’s advice.
As an internet manager at car dealership, i can say hands down that autotrader is the 800lb guerilla. 50% of our used car sales come from them. we’ve begun using cars.com as well, but so far we get about half of the leads/contacts from them as we do autotrader (with a lower closing ratio).
The comment about autotrader aggregating all of a dealers new car results as a single match is 100% true – and VERY frustrating for the dealers. I guess it doesn’t matter though, as autotrader is nearly worthless for new car sales.
“Marchex’s reasoning is simple: people may prefer to go to something as appealingly titled as newyorkdining.com than NYPost.com or SuperPages.com when they want to find a good restaurant.”
Appealingly? Man I could go on for days on this one.
1. What trust is there in newyorkdining.com? um, none! So why wouldn’t I go to NYtimes.com and trust them.
2. So Marchex is scraping content from the web and mashing it up as their own…oh boy that hasn’t been done before. They are walking a legal tightrope on this one.
Here’s what I think happened.
1. Marchex figured out that type in traffic off these domains is declining.
2. They are trying to figure out how to get search engine traffic and NOT have to pay anyone to write quality review content.
So the Marchex solution is to scrape content in the hopes of building SE traffic and branding…this is SO lame, and about 5 years late to the game.
Webmasters: Ban Marchex’s spider from your site and if they ‘use’ um…steal your content file a DMCA complaint IMMEDIATELY
Will we get a follow up to the ‘Un-Yahoo/Monster’ piece in terms of this deal’s impact to Adicio’s recruitment product? Combined with the loss of Freedom, Belo, et al, as well as the apparent impending loss of Advance to HotJobs, it would be interesting to hear your thoughts on how they might adjust their strategy. The NYTimes certainly didn’t ‘lack alternatives’ as Terry Baker said those that aligned with HotJobs did.
The five years too late Web 1.0 solution is what the newspapers deserve given their foot dragging on moving forward in the digital world. While they align with the brands, products, and strategies of yesterday, the rest of the web is moving forward into the decentralized Web 2.0 model. The definition of local will not be synonymous with newspaper but will be captured and monetized much more effectively.
Peter, love ya, but I gotta tell ya, until a site from the get-go stops sucking on the tit of category disambiguation and get me to some search results immediately, I am not going to label something Web 2.0. Type in Paintball in Vancouver and I get a disambiguation page – Paintball Sports or Paintball Supplies. Cut it out. Just give me the listings, I’ll figure it out from there.
Mousing over and scrolling down is just common sense, not really innovative. No find nearby on the flyouts for the the icons doesn’t give me the gigglies. And the ability to narrow down to those restaurants that take Visa and AMEX (all of them) ain’t enriching my life.
It’s an insightful vision for sure. However, it feels a bit like the classic “if you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail” syndrome. To me, the real challenging user experience and information product design dynamics cannot assume IVR to be such a silver bullet. DA services have been working to get consumers off the phone for decades, and stripping down the service model to name and number lookups, but the gap between IVR word recognition and “consumer intent in a localized context” is just plain enormous.
To me, there is a rich future in “conversational techniques, service models and technologies” that blend voice, mobile and, internet and employ search, browse,lbs and speech techniques.
I won’t pretend to know how this will look in 10 years, but it’s really clear to me that it is no more about putting Google as is on the phone than it is about 411 elegantly morphing into a super search tool with abilities to discern intent by the tone of your voice…
It’s a wide open space, yet to be invented, and-imho – incrementalism rarely wins in this kind of a challenge/race.
Selling a safe, smooth model to the carriers may be a smart bus development model when the carrier is worried, but the consumer market is highly unlikely to emerge without major disruption and reinvention.
OmniVisionLive keeps creating partnerships!
With Smalltown.com fast becoming a leader in local content web cards, Omnivisionlive has been building the video content in these markets for years. The products that we produce are much more than just video. After we produce the video products for http://www.Yellowpageslive.com and http://www.Restaurantslive.com we begin the process of marketing the websites to insure a Return on Investment for our advertisers. Through media partnerships such as ABC7news, KCBS, and Comcast to mention a few, we are able to drive substantial traffic to our sites to support our clients. Finally, there are packages out there for the local business person to get the exposure they need in their own back yard.
Best of luck to them, but I doubt they’ll have any success if they’re trying to get a toehold on the market beyond San Diego. The rest of the country has been happily using 1-800-FREE411 for so long now that it’s almost second nature to use it for info when you can’t be near a computer.
“It’s about independence,” he says, going to a company that has fewer legacy ties to old ways of doing newspapering. With Philly’s large regional market and potential to innovate more quickly — a website redesign is on the way — Grilly also says it’s an opportunity “to be first.” First in innovating new solutions to what have been intractable problems in advertising revenue and editorial value for many newspaper companies.
Why is it always called “hyperlocal”. Hyper means “over” or “excessive”. Excessively local content would be a complete guide to my living room. It should be “microlocal” if anything. Calling it “hyperlocal stuff” implies being vague about the superfluous.
A thousand apologies — this changed in a big way the end of last week, and while my head was spinning, I forgot that this was coming until it popped up in my feed reader.
Short story is that after the partnership began and was in progress, FOX pulled the rug out from under us and now the whole thing is off. I’ll be posting on that on our site presently, but I’m calling you right now.
I met Mike at the We Media conference in Miami a month ago. He was one of the few people at the conference who “gets it,” and his site is one of the best implementations of local content that I’ve seen. Fox blew it on this one. As Pegasus solidifies its position as the #1 online news source for Metro Dallas, the local stations will be needing a partnership with him.
I just got a call saying I had a negative rating. Not a good way to start the morning. Every customer that walks in my door receives top-notch service and I carry excellent merchandise. I have never had one complaint, only praise. It’s unethical for them to place calls like this.
I, too, received a call this morning telling me that my business had a negative rating with my customers. After checking it out, I found that no one had rated my business. How is that negative? The only negative thing I can see from this is that no one knows anything about merchantcircle. I hereby rate these jackals VERY NEGATIVE!!!! Anyone who would do business with these people doesn’t care Who they are associated with. BUYER BEWARE!!!!
Along with each of the business people listed here, I do agree that these schamers are out to force businesses into registering to see their negative comments, which I can say for our business, is highly unfounded. We have always strived to give the customer our utmost attention and 99% leave extremely satisfied and with high recommendations. We monitor our own ratings through mailings done every three months and have always had good results. I wouldn’t believe anything you read on their website. I do not appreciate the negative phone call and it upsets me that even one of my employees should here that on our answer machine!
Thanks, Judi, Diane & Mike! I know now that they’re back in their ill conceived business. March 13, 2007 seems to be a common thread here. Fake complaints referred to in an answering maching message (some of you might have gotten email notifications instead), nothing to be found at the website. These skunks want MY business? I think NOT!
Thanks for the heads up.
Rich
When I read the title, I said, “Ohhhhhh!” loudly enough that people at nearby tables looked up. I was really enthusiastic about Mike getting a shot like this and it’s too bad it’s not going to happen. Nonetheless, I think Pegasus is going to do great things.
Merchantcircle.com uses deceptive advertising and unethical marketing practices. Below is an excerpt from the letter I just sent to the Silicon Valley BBB:
“My business was just phone-spammed today by a company representing merchantcircle.com — the prerecorded voice message said “a customer has left negative feedback about your business” and to “visit merchantcircle.com to view this feedback.” There is no feedback on my business; it’s a bait-and-switch scam, baiting business owners with non-existent negative feedback and switching to a sales pitch for their services.”
Other hallmarks of a shady company such as no phone number posted and having to hunt for an email address (questions@merchantcircle.com) would indicate to me that this is a company to avoid ANY dealings with.
After receiving several emails and comments that Merchant Circle was at it again with the phony “you show negative” whatever, I looked into the situation. A Merchant Circle spokesperson confirmed that the company has a new ratings system (like Judy’s Book former system). Companies start out with a negative rating. The clever people at Merchant Circle apparently used this as the basis for a new telemarketing campaign, scaring people to go to their site to investigate. Merchant Circle would not provide me with a transcript of the actual message. My speculation is that Merchant Circle got its best results from the scummy negative review telemarketing campaign, and decided to rev up a similar effort when it fell short of its goals (but I do not know this). You know — they make one bad decision after another over there. If more local companies were like this, I would quit the industry.
Same deal here…Received an automated phone call this morning telling me my business got a negative review. It was obviously a scam to get me onto their site and register my business so that I could “manage” (delete) my reviews!
Mended their ways? More like changed their deceptive marketing practices!
Beware!
Now, in Feb 2007, Monster.com has a similar arrangement with New York Times company newspaper group (includes Boston Globe). so there seem to be 3 big groups: Careerbuilder, Monster, Hotjobs. I would like to see a chart that lists the newspaper affiliated with each group. but right now, it seems that to search for a job online with the national job boards, one would have to search all three of these groups.
The little guy is getting screwed in this internet age. What happened to the mom and pop shops that took care of you. I use these guys for all my rentals on the South Jersey Shore. They’ve been around for 70 years (before television or the internet) and know the area because they live there. I’ve been using them for years without a hitch.
Based on the screenshots provided, the Yellowpages.com’s IPTV experience was quite compelling – the interface seemed quite intuitive for those accessing information using a remote control and no keyboard.
I could definitely see SMEs being interested in reaching consumers via IPTV – especially with the rapidly-decreasing cost of producing high-quality video (as was discussed so frequently during the conference)… And by 2011, self-service should be a well-established and effective sales channel.
Matt’s presentation was very informative, and I believe the company is well-positioned to succeed as consumers increasingly turn to the net, interactive TV and their mobile devices for information on local businesses.
Looking forward to the Kelsey Group getting the presentation materials online so we can check out the presenters’ PPT slides in greater detail… :)
Hi Peter. One of the points we made in the presentation was that individuals, for the most part, are better served by working with aggregators rather than doing PPC by themselves. On the organic side, individuals have a better shot at doing better for themselves — but they’d have to work pretty hard at it.
There remain many categories out there where SEM’s can still show well within logical searches in the SE’s. It’s possible with or without aggregators and should include ppc.
I’ve done it for 3 years.
Most businesses will be found off of an enormous variety of phrases that include a wide variety of business terms and a wide variety of relevant geographical terms. In this manner businesses can be found both in organic searches and off of versions of SE local (or google maps).
In one example my regional business gets about 1,000 SE/visits month from a variety of logical queries that combine logical geo phrases and variations on our main business terms. Of interest, typically within any one month, no one term will show more than 20 visits.
The long tail is a great way to attract business and convertable business.
From what I just saw today, they haven’t cleaned up much. I just got done ranting about them on my blog – sites like theirs give local search/review sites in general a bad name.
Nick’s presentation was extremely impressive… Looking around at the audience as he was explaining Spot Runner’s service, you would be hard pressed to have found anyone who was not completely sold on both their business model and self-serve system…
When Nick listed some of the per-spot prices (ie. the $10-12 you have quoted above), several people around us literally gasped…
I am definitely interested in using Spot Runner’s platform to run creative produced in-house, and could also see reselling their service to the SMEs we deal with through one of our other companies.
The one issue that immediately came to mind was that as this system takes off, the $10-12 in Santa Barbara could quickly become $1,000-1,200, negating much of the benefit of the service for the SME market… Unlike Google’s AdSense platform, the ‘real estate’ in the TV market is fairly limited and is not expanding at double and triple digit rates…
Spot Runner’s ease of use and degree of control would definitely still appeal to those larger organizations (as it obviously already is), who are less interested in cost-savings than small businesses…
Spot Runner is definitely a company to keep an eye on, and after hearing Nick speak, I wish I would have been an early investor in the company… They are destined for success!
Nice site, much better than the yellow page site which can be very frustrating to use…try searching for a Vancouver Restaurant and you get Fast Food joints, Restaurants in Calgary, Penticton, Victoria, Furry Creek and some Catering business…that’s not what I asked for…the Canpage site gives me what I requested…Restaurants in Vancouver with maps & text messaging…very cool….Good Job
Sam Zell says news has to be relevant.Just who decides this question? I don’t consider crime reporting relevant to my life. I got so tired of reading it I cancelled The Tampa Tribune for over a year. I like to read about things in life that are useful. The BBC gives a news report tyhat last 30 minutes including the sports on TV. Our nightly news takes up 6 hours a day or more. Why? The English say “keep to the path” instaead of “keep off the grass” See the difference?
I will be watching Mr. Zell to see what he thinks is relevant.
The Big G’s been sniffing around Cheap-TV-Spots.com and their sister online TV ad agency BareNakedAds.com also. Both place quality ads on TV nationally or locally for less than a click-thru budget. BareNakedAds.com produces a TV commercial, in 24 hours, for free, as part of their inexpensive air time package. With dozens of international awards, and as little as $15 per nationwide airing, Cheap TV Spots and BareNakedAds.com are making it hard for any media company or any other discount agency to compete directly with them. They also make web and e-mailable versions of their ads for unrestricted distribution.
eBay’s growth is slowing because its maturing. Reports of eBay’s demise are overblown.
That being said, I want to point out that eBay is far from perfect and has plenty of huge challenges.
By the way, you are welcome to respond to my post.
if you liked hopstop, then check out two more of our investements in Qoof (www.qoof.com) and TripCart (www.tripcart.com). You can find a list of our portfolio companies on our website http://www.idtventures.com
The most likely scenario in which the Hearst paper would shift to online only status is if this move would be consistent with the provisions in its contract with The Times which enablie it to collect 32% of The Times profits after shutting down the paper.
After all, an online local news site isn’t actually a newspaper, since it isn’t printed on paper.
Aside from allowing Hearst to possibly have its cake and eating it too, this would allow them to fire fewer employees, and gain valuable experience with an online-only local news operation.
I just got the 2007 version of the San Diego Entertainment Book (I always wait several months into the year to get 50% off). It is a real disappointment. Many favorite merchants and restaurants previously had coupons, but they seem to have dropped out.
The book itself is about half as fat (maybe by design?) But it is still populated with less relevant coupons, some from more than 20 miles away.
These days, Entertainment.com makes you do an online activation before you can use your coupons. This allows them to update their coupons throughout the year. That’s good. But the “fresh” ones were just schlocky. I can’t imagine signing in to see what other schlocky things they have for me — a 2 for 1 foster freeze? I bet I won’t buy the book again, even at 70 percent off (that’s next month!).
Our goal is to bring communities together, and make them more locally and politically engaging. People will be able to make new friends right in their own neighborhoods. We are taking careful steps to ensure privacy while protecting the power of our platform.
To this end, we have retained Tara Lemmey (Homeland Security Internet Privacy Committee and former President of the EFF) and Lauren Gelman (Director of Stanford Law School’s Center of Internet and Society) as Strategic Advisors. They are helping us develop a strong privacy policy while protecting the power of our platform. Fatdoor, we hope, will be a site people love because it will make their own communities more engaging, friendly and approachable.
Note: There will be no information about kids on Fatdoor. Also, telephone information of residents will not be exposed unless users voluntarily choose to publish it. We are taking very careful steps to ensure that the site delivers a very positive message.
Also, one note : Sanjeev Agrawal is early strategic advisor, but is not an employee of Fatdoor. He is still with TellMe, post acquisition by Microsoft.
Here’s what I’m hoping: I’d like the service to allow people to complain/praise their neighbors as far as how loud they are, party-throwing, inconveniencing, etc. I have a *crazy* upstairs neighbor that had I known about in advance, I’d never have moved in…
OK, “online only” won’t happen. On 4/17, the two sides made their deal, and the P-I will be kept alive for at least nine more years. Under the agreement, Seattle Times Co. will pay Hearst $49 million, and Hearst pays $25 million to keep the JOA going until at least 2016. The deal gets rid of the need for The Times to account for “losses” and allows for more normal operations. It seems like a good deal.
Regarding MySpace’s failure to pull the offensive ads….. Peter Zollman notes in Poynter tidbits that airliners have a three day rule that any media org that takes their advertising is required to automatically pull it whenever there is bad news impacting them. Clearly, My Space and others have got to develop a similar system, across the board.
How many of these broadcast sites are in the top 10 classifieds sites? Is it not better ensure your core business is strong and secure than to venture in areas where there are giants dominating the space such as Ebay’s Gumtree, Craigs List etc.
Do not appreciate having Canpages left on my doorstep. DO NOT NEED THIS !!!!!!. When travelling we pay to have our mail looked after and then this useless item is dropped on my step and lays there telling the everyone nobody is home!! Even when we are home this would be IMMEADIATELY taken out to the recycling. What a waste of trees. If you want to continue this nonsense then you should have home owners permission to leave or you will open yourself to litigation if that home is invaded because of this useless info laying around on front step.
I saw the ad on another site this morning. Regardless of the tragedy this week the ad is offensive. We all know about the shootings over the years in the Rap community. This ad should have never been made in the first place. It’s very disturbing to have an ad poke fun at violence. The ad should be banned period.
“the paragraph is dead”?
I presume that statement is just for shock value. Watching video is just one of many modes that consumers of media can be in. Reading (and writing) text isn’t going away anytime soon, or ever for that matter. If a user wants to comment on a news story, do they have to upload a video to do so since the paragraph is dead? C’mon.
One looming challenge which concerns me is that thing can get a lot worse.
I sold a house recently, and the broker said she advertised in the newspaper because traditional clients expected it as a part of her commitment to ensure the property was visible wherever possible. However, she went on to say that the ROI was just not there, and at some point she hoped people stopped demanding it because it was the poorest return on her marketing dollars.
Her best ROI was on Craigslist, of course, followed by the vertical engine, Move.com, then various traffic local direct marketing tools and then the print newspaper.
If this is a looming “finger in the dyke” problem, it could get a lot worse as the general consumer usage patterns teach them that print placement may not be “needed” anymore.
the “shoot the rapper” add would actually bring up a camera to “shoot” the rapper with, not a gun like one would expect. The desired affect was to make the person think a gun would come up, but have it be a more acceptable image when you actually went to the add. Not saying it’s appropriate, but really thinking it was in reference to a firearm shooting would be the viewers own contribution and prior conditioning. A paparazzi photographer viewing the page might thinking of shooting the rapper with a camera first. It’s definitely an underhanded advertising tactic regardless
It’s nice to see this story getting picked up by an industry pundit outside of the Twin Cities. It’s extremely entertaining to watch the ongoing saga. This was a blog I wrote on April 13th….
One of the great things about writing a blog that includes some commentary on the daily newspaper industry is the endless supply of material. Every sufficiently large city has a daily newspaper, most are inept, and they provide a perpetual stream of things to write about. It’s not unlike The Showbiz Show With David Spade, where the primary issue is how to reduce the mountains of humorous celebrity fodder into a weekly 30 minute show. Like Spade and his writers, I don’t have to work too hard to come up with things to write about because I can just pick up my morning paper and, with an amazingly high degree of frequency, I am generously provided ample material. And it happened again this morning with a story about the paper itself and its new publisher Par Ridder who are being sued by Ridder’s former employer, the St. Paul Pioneer Press, for sharing sensitive information with Star Tribune colleagues.
While the story has been in the news for some time, new details are beginning to emerge about the specific information that was shared (customer lists, strategic plans, financial data, and advertising rates). But the best part of the story is Ridder’s claims about what he was actually doing when he sent emails to his colleagues with Excel attachments containing the information. When the Pioneer Press found out about the emails and the files that were sent, Ridder claimed he was merely showing the Star Tribune executives the format of the reports, which he liked. The communication then would have been, “When you open up these Excel files, please ignore the P&L data, the long list of customers we can go after, and the ad rates we can undercut. Just focus on the Pioneer Press’ masterful use of the Times New Roman font, their brilliant use of Microsoft’s color palette, and how they have built these tremendous charts and graphs. That’s the critical stuff we need to emulate in order to compete against these guys.” It’s as good as one of Mel Gibson’s drunken tirades or Britney Spears’ psychotic haircuts. You just can’t make it up.
Newspapers are certainly facing their share of challenges in the years ahead.
As per your previous post on IBM’s report that traditional media will continue to dominate throughout 2010, I think the business model of newspapers does still have some wind in its sails, though the sails are becoming more ragged and hole-filled everyday.
While newspapers are well-positioned to form community hubs and vertical engines, I question whether they will be able to successfully make the transition from their legacy business models to community/UGC-focused internet companies.
It’s been my experience that there are very few execs willing to cannibalize their revenue streams to capitalize on opportunities that are still just on the horizon and much more difficult to monetize. Their natural inclination to cling to these profitable but unsustainable business models will likely be their downfall as smaller, swifter and more tech-savvy companies with more focus, fewer legacy ties, the freedom to experiment with innovative revenue streams and little need for gobs of capital launch and begin to eat their lunch.
Companies that see the light and tackle the net with a ‘damn the torpedoes’ approach will likely do well as they already have a sales force in place, existing revenues and infrastructure (though much of it will likely have to go, as well as many of their employees who are not from generation net).
The local papers in this area (Metroland, Osprey) seem to be doing a fairly good job of making the transition, with Metroland definitely taking the lead by securing valuable domain names years ago, launching lots of web-only initiatives, etc.
It will be interesting to see how it all plays out. I, for one, would prefer to tackle the local opportunity from the position of a web-only startup than an entrenched player with lots of legacy ties – it’s much easier to be aggressive and push boundries. There’s a lot more up-side for the Davids in the industry than there is for the Goliaths, that’s for certain.
Shawn Riegsecker, CEO of Centro, put up his own thoughts on the NAA New Media Federation board.
I’m sure most, if not all, of you have read the press the last couple of days (a link from MarketingVox below) regarding how the revenue growth rate is dropping for online newspapers at a disturbing rate. All the trades are using this to further their assertion that the industry is hurting. There are two things to be said about this press:
a) I believe it’s misleading and is masking an incredibly strong growth in online advertising for the online newspaper industry; and
b) The chickens have come home to roost on a problem the newspaper industry created for itself when it didn’t separate forced classified upsells from “true” online only revenue
In a few conversations I’ve had this year, it appears print classifieds are down so far, specifically Recruitment, that it’s dragging the ‘attributed’ revenue down so far it is severely impacting the online financials. I was told by a couple of properties that their upsell classified dollars are doing so poorly that year-over-year first quarter revenues may be close to flat. Conversely, these same properties are reporting significant growth in online only ad sales…specifically banners, rich media, sponsorships and national advertising.
I guess if this industry lives by the sword of print classified upsells, it should get injured by the same sword (according to a Gordon Borrell posting in this forum, anywhere from 76% to 80% of mid-to-large newspapers’ reported revenue is in classifieds—mainly Recruitment; Gordon, please correct me if I’m misrepresenting your post). However, it’s my belief this press comes at an inopportune time and is masking an incredibly positive story for online newspapers. Here are the reasons why I think online newspapers, with the possible exception of Google, have the best story in the online industry to tell to Wall Street and the press right now:
- 11.5% increase in time spent Q1 2006 versus Q1 2007 (NAA/Nielsen)
- National online display revenue is approximately 300% higher in Q1 versus last year in the same period; this is a great sign as national advertisers lead regional and local advertisers when it comes to online spending; if national revenue is this significantly up, it means regional and local will be soon to follow
- Although maybe not statistically significant, I’m assured these numbers are directive and indicative of the overall online newspaper industry; according to the campaigns Centro placed with online newspapers since 1/1/06:
o Online newspapers increased their rates 16% from Q1 2006 versus Q4 2006
o Online newspaper CPMs have increased, on average, 32% Q1 2006 versus Q1 2007 (nice work)
- Brand advertising, for the first year in online, is expected to outpace Direct Response spending 18.5% versus 13.5% (eMarketer, 2006); this is great news for the industry as brand marketers look to associate themselves with premium content and editorial versus remnant networks and/or mail sections or technologies on portals; the brand dollars are already arriving at your doorsteps from national advertisers at a breakneck speed and the velocity of this is increasing
- Competitively, the page views are flat or declining in “content” sections on portals according to Comscore MediaMetrix (and I hope no one attempts to say its because of AJAX as our entire system is developed using AJAX and, having audited the amount of AJAX in the “content” areas of the sites whose page views are declining, it’s our assertion AJAX has nothing to do with declining page views); more likely, it’s because once users migrate to using Google as their starting point, they don’t use the content areas of other portals as they once did; also, as users become more sophisticated online, they gravitate to the source of all news and information which, as we all know, is online newspapers
There are other factors contributing to this but, suffice it to say, the online newspaper industry has incredible mojo and momentum in the overall industry than anyone else (once again, possible exception Google). However, the need to prop up its financials years ago using print classified upsells to show top line revenue and ‘profitability’ is now hurting the industry at a time when it has one of the best and brightest stories to tell. I’m assured this industry’s online only revenue is incredibly strong Q1 this year versus last and, over the long-term, this is all that matters and where we should try and take the conversation to.
Just keep in mind Austin Powers when he said, “That’s why right now is a very groovy time, man”. Have a great week…
What do they have in common? All of the communities on the list are densely populated near suburbs or outer boroughs of major metro areas.
Why would outer boroughs/near suburbs be more “bloggy” than major metros, exurbs, or smaller cities? My theory: the nearby major metro daily soaks up the ad revenue that would otherwise support the local, usually weekly, paper that covers the near suburb/outer borough. The result is a metro daily that provides inconsistent coverage of their area, and a local news source with shrinking newshole. This creates an ecological niche for a placeblog or online community site for that neighborhood to flourish.
It’s true that they’re all in areas where house prices rose dramatically during the last decade, but you can say that about the near suburbs/outer boroughs of all of the top 50 metros in the U.S. So it’s not house values that are driving the creation of web-based local community sites: it’s shrinking and inconsistent news coverage in the tight band around major metros.
Outside.In’s Top 10 Bloggiest Neighborhoods was very interesting today. How inspiring to learn about the level of online community going on in these neighborhoods (including some former stomping grounds of mine!). I wonder how our little Five Sisters compares? I’d love to see the data. (Does anyone know if that’s available? I couldn’t find it.)
The Five Sisters (Burlington, VT) was named a top ten neighborhood in the United States in 2006 and many residents credit Front Porch Forum, a kind of neighborhood blog (to stretch the term), for contributing to the incredible sense of community here.
The Five Sisters forum has an astounding 340 members out of the 350-household neighborhood. Another 20 local officials (city councilors, state reps., school commissioners, police lieutenant, etc.) participate. In the past six months, 50% of the members have written… 630 postings total. Since these folks are actual nearby neighbors, a vast majority of the follow up occurs offline on the sidewalk or over the fence (that’s the point!). In this model, only residents of the neighborhood may read and write postings… it’s all about helping neighbors connect and foster community within the neighborhood.
The Five Sisters is the flagship of 130 contiguous neighborhood forums covering all of metro-Burlington and hosted by Front Porch Forum. In its first six months, about 20% of Burlington has subscribed to this free community-building service. Everyday folks, not just heavy web users, are making wonderful use of it. Front Porch Forum garnered a couple more community-leader awards last month and will be featured at the Personal Democracy Forum in New York City on May 18, 2007.
While this study is nearly 2 years old, I seriously question the interpretation of the results.
I’d love to see the details on this study and the data. How were the questions phrased, where people were pooled from.
It’s apparent that the results are subject to subjective analysis given that 22% of American “strongly agree; which was likely just one of the 5 choices that could have been selected. I wouldn’t be surprised that 51% weekly usage stat was based upon those that answered that they “frequently” used the YP.
It’s been said that this guy is a good speaker. Doesn’t mean he has the model right.
These pre-made ad templates are the true opposite of economical branding. Who wants to share an ad with your competition, in your same market, as soon as you stop airing the ad? Who wants to be be baited by a seemingly low production rate only to be forced into a long term contract for overpriced air time?
I think the end user will eventually catch on to this sham and abandon all these unoriginal template companies in favor of inexpensive custom-made ads like those produced by the world’s first global internet-based discount TV ad agency, Cheap-TV-Spots.com. They offer a smart combination of award-winning, flat rate custom ads and honest, targeted air time that is significantly less expensive than any other online ad agency. Try them out to see. They also do not restrict regions for airings, so one ad, at one price, can air anywhere in the entire world.
Here’s the kicker: Their sister agency, BareNakedAds.com , produces custom TV ads for free and airs them nationwide for less than spotrunner says it could air in your example of Santa Barbara. Honestly, $10-12 per spot isn’t unusual, and real discount agencies often have an even better deal than that. It just shows how little most people know about local TV advertising.
I suspect that the template companies have a chink in their armor – that the end user becomes informed enough to see that these companies really don’t have anything significant to offer, and that it’s all a strategy for the purpose of posing for potential acquisition suitors. If you listen, you can just hear the self-service media bubble starting to burst.
A Smalltown Webcard (www.smalltown.com) costs $40 per month and supports many features, including the ability to play video. Smalltown Studios, our internal professional services team, will produce a custom video up to 3 minutes long for $300. If a customer wants a broadcast quality video, we put them in touch with a local video production resource.
We’re finding that the “home-made” low budget videos on our sites are much more compelling and informative than the professionally produced segments with high production values. Stock photos and videos don’t convey the unique qualities of a truly local merchant or service provider. When a local burger joint uses stock video or expensive production houses, they end up looking like McDonalds.
I’d love to see the new CitySearch design, but every single link I click to try to get there–including specific city links (e.g. sanfrancisco.citysearch.com) take me to WashingtonPost.com’s entertainment guide, which is powered by CitySearch (I’m a regular Post.com visitor but have probably only looked at their entertainment section a handful of times). That’s one powerful–and obnoxious–cookie!
The plain text (except for links) email done right is still the best traffic driving tool around.
We just got our weekly missive out late on a Friday afternoon when our traffic generally starts trailing off (about four hours off schedule). Roughly 4,000 opt-ins. We screwed up the first thousand (one of those weeks). And we STILL got a 7% clickthrough and a 50% bump in pageviews over the rest of the day.
Yeah, the gearheads want RSS. But most folks still respond to an email. And linked text works on any computer or handheld.
I have been working online real estate space since 99…saw so many people come and go. Zillow loaded with $57+M and most talent people you ever can met, I’m very doubtful they will succeed any time soon…they may figure out eventually…the reason is very simple : they do not have “the feel” for real estate…just not yet.
I met a FatDoor lead engineer in mid-Feb for a job at FatDoor…very smart, and decent guy. I still own him a demo. :) There are few reasons I did not deliever the demo…main reason I sensed that FatDoor soon or late will be in real estate space…so I am not suprised to see Peter’s post today….since my own startup ZeuPa will be in real estate too…
Social network provides the freedom in respect to space and time in people’s daily life….FatDoor sort of takes “space freedom” away….will be interesting to see how they will handle it.
I wish the best luck to FatDoor… ZeuPa and FatDoor will meet one day.
” A new site, FatDoor, however, hopes to look on the brighter side of having neighbors. The startup crawls the Web for publicly available info (College, job, church, clubs, blogs) and is being designed to help neighbors establish commonalities from the getgo, rather than sitting in the isolated silos of today’s typical “Bowling Alone” neighborhood”
it sounds to me that if you get to know your neighbors in such a virtual way- you will still end up having an “Alone” neighborhood. Sitting in front of the PC and learning about your neighbourhood- isn’t exactly interacting with your neighbours, you need to get up and out in order to do that..
A number of comments came in that were negative on Buffalo Rising. I have taken the comments down, since I don’t really know what the motivation for them were (competition, jeolousy, bad checks etc.). I do know that I find George Johnson to be an interesting observer and analyst of hyperlocal, and that the team has built a very good hyperlocal site.
I’m not sure how much I really like that site. It has a nice UI and design but as far content, I’m not seeing much that is unique or different that would draw me to the site on a daily basis.
Raj Abhankyer provides more detail on his fatdoorblog.com blog, May 12: ….
“As part of our private preview launch, we are in the process of energizing the city of Cupertino, California. Since we have deep roots into the local community here, we thought this would be a good way to test our product in Cupertino in preview mode. To our delight, there seem to be more use-cases than we could imagine, here are some of the active communities we have seen form in Cupertino on fatdoor:
· Cupertino Block watch: Users have created block watch groups and signing-up their neighbors.
· Members of Veteran’s memorial at Cupertino Memorial Park: Users have created this group on fatdoor and are in the process recruiting funds for this effort to recognize soldiers from Cupertino/Sunnyvale who have died in the Iraq War.
· Political activism and fundraising: A few candidates are already recruiting new supporters and identifying lawn sign volunteer homes through fatdoor. In a couple of weeks, we expect to see all of the candidates for the 2007 Cupertino city council elections will have a community group on fatdoor.
It’s exciting to see that the Cupertino community is already fully engaged with fatdoor and finding new ways to connect with the next door neighbors! Look for our national launch – coming soon! “
This is a change in direction! Good luck! Glad to See that you joined the million unique visitors club! That traffic level makes a difference…Keep the traffic coming and that can cure all problems! I want to follow the success of the coupon looker – maybe a affiliate realtionship potential?? Call me!
We know why Judy’s Book threw in the towel on being a review site (difficulty in selling advertising to mom n pops), but to become just another one of several hundred coupon sites? And now the name “judy’s Book” doesn’t make sense. Judy’s Big Book of Coupons?
What am I missing here?
Judy’s Book’s leadership took decisive action to get out of the site’s rut. Hyperlocal sites that got no direction — none at all — produced a mosaic that had nothing in common. The sites were driven almost entirely by members seeking to win gift certificates or, at least, the city editor honorific. That didn’t produce useful or interesting content, but, too often, dumb questions designed to produce reponses. It was a perfect self-defeating model. Yet, Judy’s Book, despite all the bad modeling, had a fairly large audience of active users who, given direction, could have helped develop rich content across many hyperlocal communities. These folks were smart, passionate, articulate and willing to dip their oars. But then Judy’s Book decided to appeal to coupon clippers — the virtual variety. As others have pointed out, there are already a lot of sites devoted to coupon clippers. The original JB members, for the most part, are not devoted clippers. JB will have to attract new members to do the snip-snipping. In the end, you have to ask, would the original Judy — Andy Sack’s mother-in-law, a successful Seattle businesswoman — like to be memorialized as the inspiration for10-percent-off coupon clippers?
Brilliant article on what I have heard was a terrific conference. Solving for local in the auto industry is very much so a hot topic right now. This is very useful. Thanks.
Interestingly, although they had a “commercial investment” category where they planned to take an equity stake in a for profit company, it looks like they didn’t do any of those. (We were a candidate and made a couple round of cuts before being eliminated.)
Congrats to all the (well-deserving) winners. I’m a little baffled at why MTV needs a grant, but otherwise, my hat’s off.
Hey Peter, loved your coverage of the Centro event. It was great meeting you. (I’m that new guy they placed in OHIO of all places! haha). I was finally able to get over here and sign up for my RSS feed.
Thanks for the work you do! It’s extremely useful and insightful.
Great post for those of us who could not attend the conference. I’m wondering how the economics will pan out. So if I own a store front in the real world, what kinds of entry point will I get to my web site in the virtual world. Also, the mapping provider that develops the easiest APIs and gives financial incentives to the development community will have the advantage in this technology race.
that would be some technology and promotional campaign. The line will have to be drawn for those that don’t want to get bombarded with txt messages from their favorite retailers though.
I am an advertiser with Canpages in Calgary, and I read these comments and it makes you wonder. Some people have nothing better to do but “WINE” about the stupidest things”.Like don’t leave a phone book on my door step or I my sue.”….Get a life ! I personally love the book and it’s information and easy to read (larger print) format. Thank you Canpages for giving us advertisers a Great product at a fair price unlike the Yellow pages. Ps. Your new web site is the best!! Thanks
There are a couple of points that I would like to add for those of you who were unable to attend the conference.
Overall, I think the unintended but obvious theme of the Where 2.0 conference was that “Location cues are the key to unlocking the human spatial experience.”
Peter reflects this notion in his Takeaway #1. I am not sure maps are at the top of the data pyramid. Instead, it might be useful to think of maps as the representation of the data pyramid. As the base of the pyramid becomes broader and more detailed (more specific coordinate detail on world geography) more attributes can be added to the framework, making the entire dataset more useful for solving a variety of spatial problems.
It is clearly the case that maps and MLOs (Map-Like-Objects) are ascendant in the online worlds of mapping, digital earth representation and local search.
Peter’s comment # 5 resonated with me. It is clear that the big search engine companies are providing free tools and data to developers to push them to extend to boundaries of the known dataverse. It is likely the use of these tools by “local” teams will uncover new levels of specific detail about people, places, history, travel, economics, demography…you name it. But whatever it is, it will be crawled by the search engines, become part of their index and seen on their SERPs.
What is less clear is the influence these mapping and spatial display tools might have on the nature and structure of social search. Some companies are snapping up social networking companies in hopes that local search will meet social search and, as a result, the owner of the network will be advantaged by groups acting as “trusted authorities”. Other companies seem to feel less need to “own” the social search network, but want to supply the tools that will be used to pursue local knowledge and in the process create a “knowledge community”. While I do not think the tools were designed to be a “back door”, they may have the same advantage without the cloak and dagger. How these two trends play out will have a profound influence on local search.
Next, Peter hit the nail on the head in #10. Where2.0 has mutated into a kinder, gentler places. Unfortunately, it’s just not as exciting as it used to be.
Finally, something map-geeky. While listening to the speakers at Where 2.0 I found myself fidgeting and groaning. More tools, more capability, more mappers and a more examples of cartographic illiteracy. Examples include point data shown with area symbols, area data shown as point symbols and volumtric data shown by both point and areal symbols.
However, in the face of this pain, I have just one small request. For a start, remember that when using choropleth symbols (color or pattern to show classed data values by enumeration districts), the classes that you use to represent the data SHOULD be mutually exclusive. In other words, when you have a legend value for one class that includes the data valued from 1 to 10, the next larger class should start with a numeric value that is not included in any other class (so, you should not have 1- 10, followed by 10 – 20). Doing so makes the map much less useful to the viewer. Think about it.
I had the opportunity to attend Where 2.0. This was a great event (even for marketing types like myself) and there was a huge amount of energy around the show overall.
Tooting my own horn here, but we had an explorer-like system over a year ago with the same idea (at least for businesses) – select a category, and go browsing over any area to find the x nearest points. ‘The Explorer’ it was called :)
I wonder if you saw my presentation at Where 2.0 on Tuesday at 11:05 on our Quakr project (http://www.quakr.co.uk). It is an attempt to do the 3d world using user generated photographs (currently pulled from Flickr).
The biggest hole in all the current mapping technologies is that they believe they are dealing with a single absolute set of data. There is no time based information inherent in the view of “THE Google Earth” or “THE MS Virtual Earth”. When a building is built, a shop changes hands or a public space is re-developed, the model is out of date and shows no historical references once it’s updated. Our project aims to use the fact that people are doing the photography already, are geo-locating their photographs already, and can pull all that data together to show any place in the world as it is AND was.
The major hole in the StreetView product is that it is entirely based on places that the immersive media video car can go. It will never be able to answer questions like … What’s underneath the Golden Gate bridge? What happens when you Bike/Walk down that lane?
It seems to us that these are important questions in order to properly orientate any person within the world.
When Mr. Cerf was at MCI, he had a website
called “Cerf’s Up”. Which was a great site on
the history of the internet and his vision of
where the Internet may go.
Some of the links were very good.
Since his move to GOOGLE, did the site go also.
Is there a BLOOG ?
There’s nothing shatteringly new about post.com’s Local Explorer, but it’s so well packaged, and new layers of open-source content can be added. The only disappointment is that the news links are to stories that aren’t hyperlocal. That’s because the Post doesn’t, yet, have local-local contributors, staff or “citizen.”
I got a phone call today at work. It was a recording that “claimed” I had a review posted by one of my customers about the service at my barber shop. The recording went on to say that all I needed to do was log on to MerchantCircle.com and type in the business phone number. Then I could read this “review”. Well, I typed in the number. Then the site told me that I had to register to read the review. This was free registration, or so it said. I will soon find out. So, I registered. There was no review. I had been tricked. Then I found where to “unsubscribe” and did so immediately. I tried to find a way to contact MerchantCircle.com. I found nothing in the way of a phone number or e-mail address. I found this site.
Your report sounds very interesting. Any chance a non-member can get it?
What might be a good match up for newspapers is NearbyNow and their mall search thing. Maybe this is what you meant by #7. I know my roommates look through the newspapers before going shopping at a mall to see what might be on sale. I’m sure NearbyNow/the malls would be happy for teh traffic. It’s all local.
Wow! I used to work at PowerOne Media when they were simply AdOne in NYC. I’m with a new software company after freelancing for a while and wanted to just call them to get my old 401k rolled over, but now… I doubt they would even have the information anywhere for me. It’s a good thing that it wasn’t a big chunk of money anyway.
Still it’s sad to hear this happen because I liked the people I worked with there and I thought this company had a chance to last. When they merged and then left there was a lot of issues with trying to make all the software work because we were moving forward with things like XML and Java at the time and the other company wasn’t even close to that technology. Still I never had a good feeling about the merger and look at what has happened.
$12m of stock in an OTC stock doesn’t seem to smell right for an online classifieds business that ‘grosses $5m a year’. Do you know if that is ‘grosses’ as in gross merchandise value or actual revenue (i.e. 3-5% of that number)?
Nice read but I have a few corrections. I worked at cars.com for 6 years….they do not send leads to 10 – 20 dealers. The site user can select up to 3 dealers they would like to do business with for a New Car product and used leads go directly to the dealer.
I am now with Web2Carz.com a Used Car listing site with New Car Quote service and Car Loans. In my experience with SEO for Google and Yahoo I found that having keywords or a link or two is just not enough in this very competitive space (Automotive). Without high ranked SEO friendly links to dealer sites which are not offered by any major player in the Auto Classified space and SEO optimization of the sites this effort might simply not gain much ground.
Jim, I think Web2Carz.com can help you gain some ground in your uphill battle. If you are interested feel free to email us.
Same sort of thing happened to me just now, Brian, and we are listed on the Do Not Call Registry as well. Decided to check up on them first and I’m glad I did. If they lie about access to that first review then imagine what else they may lie about. The reason they don’t post better contact info is that they would be beseiged with irate calls or messages most likely! Wouldn’t trust these guys if they were the only reference on the web.
Sprocket Entertainment’s Stan Simmons, who I didn’t get to talk to before writing my post, wrote me an email about Sprocket’s newsletter. Sadly, he says the comedy nights may not last, and the newsletter has probably been more of a mixed success than I presumed.
“Currently our list is slightly over 1000 and the only advertisers are those we barter with (both hotels Carlsbad Inn & Tamarack) or the ones that purchase our business sponsor package http://sprocketent.com/become_a_sponsor.htm,” he says.
” Since we were emailing our list of upcoming shows on a bi-weekly basis, we decided to advertise our sponsors and maybe drum up interest in advertising in the newsletter which we thought would be a minimal charge per month if we got any takers. We haven’t really aggressively sought out advertisers due to the Carlsbad Theatre being up for sale and it appears that after 5 years of high quality comedy shows we may be seeing the end of the ‘West Coast Funnies!” in Carlsbad depending on the new proprietors.”
good to know that websites are now considering travel as part of their portal… travel industry is the worlds most promising if not the most profitable industry on earth.
It sometimes amazes me how these patents get awarded in the US. What is new or innovative about crawling a website for local information? More to the point how can it be claimed that there was no prior art?
This is definitely a strong case for hindering innovation. Most innovation tends to stem from startups and as Clark writes “you go after the small guys and establish a track record.” The long term damage these exercises pose to US tech should not be underestimated.
I am deeply saddened by these sort of activities and I for one will not be using local.com (which isn’t even that good anyway) anytime soon.
It turns out the announcement of The Verizon trials were a prelude to a five-year contract with CallGenie, which was announced June 26. It is likely that Verizon will plan to deploy CallGenie’s technology in a number of its markets.
What a bunch of hooey. Good luck proving you “invented it.” when there are a ton of sites and open source projects that have been doing this sort of thing for years. How about this one…definitely one of the later local search developments since it only goes back to 2002: http://www.google.com/programming-contest/winner.html
Not even worth the paper it was written on! Good luck getting acquired for that “wonderful” patent/IP! Someone should fire the person who cam up with that brilliant idea!
I’m not a particular fan of the sentiments Heath voiced, but they are a busienss reality given today’s litigious environment. Yes, there is substantial prior art, but it may never be heard by a jury.
Patents, like laws, are considered binding until they are legally disqualified. Having a patent means that you are obligated to protect your rights in and to the IP by enforcing the patent. In general this means either threatening to enforce the patent (usually to accomplish some market strategy) or by actually enforcing it through claims of infringement and damages against a specific business or group of businesses.
Unfortunately for smaller businesses, claims of patent infringement can be devastating, since it will cost approximately $1 million to mount a significant defense. What usually happens is that several smaller players cave and the owner of the patent moves on to try and fry bigger fish.
From a legal perspective, this is where the game gets interesting. Bigger fish can afford to mount a defense. The biggest fish may even attempt to have the patent invalidated. It is at this point that prior art, anticipation, etc, become critical parts of the process. Until then people can argue about validity, but doing so accomplishes little except raising your blood pressure.
Next, remember, patent infringement is really not about what’s right (although we could all wish it were so). It’s about some lawyer standing in the courtroom with a jury composed of people who watch the Jerry Springer show, opening a laptop, showing a local search application and then pointing to the defendant and saying “This software from (Insert the Company name here) is exactly what my client invented and they stole it from him and have made billions in the process.” In reply, the defendant’s experts are going to explain how the algorithm really works, how computers really work, how databases really work and as the eyes of the jurors start glazing over, the plaintiff starts counting his money.
If you want to consider a real nightmare in patent law, look at Markman Hearings, a critical part of any patent lawsuit.
The Patent process is the U.S. is broken ! We need to find a way to fix it, not to complain about it being screwed-up.
Oh, that’s just lovely – a business model based on “go after the small guys” who can’t afford the lawyers. Have we lost all perspective here? In what respect is that an ethical or honorable or productive way to think about business?
If people can find loopholes in the system, be it the patent system or the search system or whatever, in a way that allows them to make money legally without actually contributing anything or having a real idea or working for a living, well, whatever. It’s up to us to change the laws. But let’s not pretend, Mr. Clarke, that there is anythin
I think Backfence is moving in the right direction. Very similar to what they are doing in Bakersfield with Bakotopia.com
I was interested to see the statistics you quote re: Live Deal.
I am involved with Newspaper Classified software, on line and in print.
Recently live deal barraged my customers (and potential customers) with marketing materials suggesting that Live Deal would add signficant revenue if newspapers only uploaded their entire classifieds sections to Live Deal.
They prepared a “potential profits” chart that showed how a newspaper could be making as much as ONE MILLION dollars A MONTH!!
The way a newspaper would make a million dollars a month, it turns out, is if they managed to get 500,000 of their customers to create car ads on LiveDeal, every month. And if each customer bought additional livedeal upsells, etc., etc.
It’s interesting to see that currenly ALL OF LIVE DEAL is getting (by their count) only 500,000 VISITORS each month. Not 500,000 ads, let alone 500,000 car ads. As for their current 200,000 ad, does this mean if 1 out of every 2 visitors was placing an ad. If so, that’s a lot of sellers — how many are buyers? In fact, Live Deal appears at this point to be cutting and pasting ads found on non-affiliated classified websites suchh as Craiglist to goose their ad counts.
To buttress their stories, the brochure points to a cars for sale website: “Silconvalleycars.com” or some such.
Live Deal points to this portal with pride, and says in the brochure that this portal alone “hopes to clear $2500/week”.
I think that hope is sincere and righteous, but as always, scratching the surface reveals more: his portal, it turns out, is owned and operated by (drum roll please): LiveDeal.
I’ve just returned from a newspaper convention in Kansas City. LiveDeal gimmee caps and T-shirts being handed out by booth bimbos. “They said we could make a million dollars a month”, glossy-eyed conventioneers could be heard muttering as they passed.
I can’t get over how dot.commish this is.
LiveDeal is serving Koolaid by the bucketload, IMO, and drinking their own urine. God knows what they served to the folks in Toronto.
Especially in cases like these quiet local directory sites, I’d love to see that unique visitors number show instead the number of uniques this month who spent more than 5 minutes on a site 90 days ago.
Peter,
I think that the Press Release for the pulse points is easily interpreted as something that it is not – this is not a “google-scale” effort to carve out a niche in the WiFi world.
Rather, it’s an experiment in online content – where the content is not universally available, but provides incredibly deep content about a specific place – whether it be a cafe, neighborhood, or city. The real key to this concept is the incredible speed with which this content is available. Because the content is so close to the edge – the transfer speeds are only limited by the speed of WiFi (20-30 mbps max in the real world).
An example: the pulse points use iTunes Music Sharing to provide access to 1200 tunes from local artists – not in a “click and download” interface, but in a stream-on-the-fly interface. The performance is unlike any experience on the ‘net, because the content is so close to the edge. You can literally flip through songs as quickly as flipping through LPs in a record store… Suddenly, it’s easier to find and narrow in on the content that you want to hear.
The pulse point is more of a technology experiment – the ’skunk works’ project you talk about – that will take WiFi and combine it with geocaching, podcasting, videocasting, mobile phone interaction, and who knows what else.
The Globe will not end up putting out 1000 of these – but they will learn something tremendously important from them: what happens if content is suddenly available at 10x current speeds…
That’s my take…
Mike Oh
Pulse Point Creator
To add to my comments on that all-too-quick panel (geez, we could have talked about newspapers all day, I’m sure):
First, I’m sure Belo folks would tell you the e-mail marketing successes alone are more than enough to justify registration. We’re happy with a similar program at Scripps, as well.
I also don’t want people to get the impression that Scripps will move away from content-access registration. As fast as the conversation moved on the panel, I may have left that impression.
But we are looking at easing the thresholds for when consumers see the registration prompt, and at what we ask for in each stage of the process. Lots of good reasons to do that:
1. It eliminates the profile records created by “grazers” or “drive-bys,” the people who come to a site to see just one article one time, and never return. Those profiles, whether entered with valid information or not, are not “addressable” and therefore just clog up the database.
2. It eliminates most of the reason for the BugMeNots of the world to exist. See above. Drive-bys can get the occasional article unfettered by a heavy registration requirement, so they don’t have to troll for bogus log-ins.
3. It allows us, as you noted, to focus registration efforts at points in the customer experience where registration makes sense. Want an e-newsletter? Give a valid e-mail address. Want to enter a contest? Give valid contact info so we can notify you if you win.
4. The profiles that remain in the database are more likely to be “addressable” for e-mail and Web advertisers, with valid data for geo-, demo- and interest-targeting.
FYI, neither Belo nor Scripps sites, to my knowledge, saw the negative traffic growth reported by Houston. We saw a blip downward for a period of a few months on each site when we first added registration. But sites typically rejoined their old organic growth curve after that.
Hope this helps.
Reviews are here to stay.
It’s what consumers want and we’ve been surprised by how well many advertisers have accepted – even embraced – them.
But, reviews alone won’t cut it.
Frankly, we’re more happy about our 10,000 business-built profiles than our 20,000 consumer reviews. And I doubt any of us thinks “review syndication” is the next big business.
To be a true “decision enabler”, you need a three-part data formula:
- Deep information provided by businesses, including photos
- What customers are saying (reviews)
- And third party bona fides (e.g. business licenses)
On top of that, you’ve got give users the ability to narrow down their search — and give businesses the ability to self-publish so they can add information at anytime.
Focus counts too.
It’s tempting I’m sure for Judy’s Book to stray into movie and product reviews. But LinkedIn is my model. Look at how well they’re doing through focus.
Of course, this being the internet, the pieces above very soon
will not be enough.
The big guys have upped the ante on maps. Pricing is important in a number of places. Video portfolios are next. Online scheduling where it makes sense . . .
It’s the guys with the audience and the advertiser relationships — not the reviews — that will win.
Not an eBay front? That’s pretty funny if you’re not hopelessly naive.
eBay is a substantial minority shareholder and that gives it some rights that will (prediction) be used to yank Craig’s chain one day and remind him that he has greater obligations to his shareholders than he has to his so-called community.
For now, Craig’s role is “useful idiot.” Anyone who believes otherwise simply doesn’t have a grip on how this game will be played out.
Thanks for this valuable reporting, Peter. But for local news producers, isn’t Yahoo’s disinclination to get into our business a _bad_ sign? A sign that they’ve realized that’s not where the money is?
Here’s my point: news outlets aren’t newsgathering operations. That’s never been where the money is. They’re information collectors, audience managers and content organizers. They earn their keep by from matching people with things they’re looking for (whether they know it or not).
You make a good point that local sites may never be the generalist portal, like Yahoo. But (regardless of “home page” settings) don’t they still have hope to become the niche portal, for the niche of people who care about, say, Gadsden, Alabama?
If Yahoo becomes the place people go for _local_ content, it won’t matter whose byline is under the story.
If you’re interested, I’m trying to develop these ideas further on my own site about local papers.
The roll-out of yellowpages.com has been largely successful although there are reported to be ongoing adjustments to fine tune the new format. Local searches seem to be more cumbersome than the realpages.com format however the greatly expanded content gives users more choices nationally. While the present format looks good I would expect the format to improve even more in the coming year.
I agree with the fact that Yahoo may not need to keep a Chinese wall up between their advertising efforts and those of their telco partners. While Yahoo is the portal partner to AT&T/SBC/BS and Verizon, it may find it more profitable to crank out their self-provisioning model and alternative sales channels to go after local advertising….since the thousands of feet on the street may not be 100% tied to the old RBOC’s. Yahoo enjoyed a nice run with SBC and Verizon as their portal and co-marketing partner. The telco’s growth in DSL has been very good….much faster than the cable providers…using aggressive price promotions and making a commitment to strong marketing. However, once people are online for a while, the need to have their hands held by a Yahoo portal provider falls
I think we can see the end of the portal deals by the end of the year. Yahoo’s development of compelling original content has not been that hot (ie…stuff that could go on their IPTV deals). However, Semel is a sharp Hollywood guy. It could work out soon.
Interesting stuff.
I’d like to make a mild correction to your numbers for McClatchy’s and Knight Ridder’s online revenues. They were $55.7 million and $164.5 million, respectively, in 2005. We track these numbers very closely because they are extremely important — more than most companies seem to realize — in terms of being a gauge of how well these companies might be positioned to become “flatlined” or to represent good investments. For instance, Knight Ridder generated 5.4% of its gross revenues from its Internet operations, while McClatchy generated about 4.5%. It would seem, then, that KR was doing a better job of “seizing” the opportunity and that McClatchy, for all its Internet brilliance, was comparatively behind.
There’s an important lesson here. Knight Ridder wound up with a very vulnerable company by owning newspapers — and only newspapers — in very large markets. That’s were all the print erosion has been occurring. Unlike Tribune, which also owns large-market papers, Knight Ridder wasn’t unsulated by broadcasting or other assets. The lesson for the future should be that the new McKnight-Ridder, to survive, should be a company that rapidly grows a layer of insulation around it by becoming more and more aggressive with its online ventures. I am wondering, then, who will lead the effort — the Knight Ridder Digital hierarchy, or the McClatchy hierarchy. We will continue to watch the numbers very closely. If they grow beyond 7% of revenues this year, and perhaps beyond 15% by 2010, we’ll know they chose the right team.
We have been using http://www.Topix.net feeds for a while on http://www.merchantcircle.com becuase of the ability to get local feeds on our local merchant pages. As we prepare for the launch of our actual beta product in May, we have taken this further with the use of the combination of thier local and category feeds. The real opportunity we see with the topix feeds is the user generated content. It will be interesting to see how Yahoo pursues this given Yahoo’s leadership on social computing issues.
What a difference a year makes. In the last election cycle, there were still many complaints that Internet communications were only for national or state wide campaigns because of the lack of ability to target small groups of people. The E-Voter Institute event last Monday revealed a different attitude.
My decision to invite Dave Morgan to speak was a deliberate attempt to broaden out the understanding of targeting by the political strategists in the room. With a contentious race for the 50th Congressional seat here in San Diego and buckets of money being spent on television and direct mail, it seemed to me there is a chance for some innovative use of the Internet to persuade voters and get out the vote. Perhaps we can call it the Randy Duke effect.
I just read Gordon’s comments regarding percentage of digital operations versus offline operations. Although I don’t necessarily disagree with his assertion that KRD did a better job than McC at driving online revenue, displaying only percentage of offline revenue as a metric doesn’t always give a full and accurate story. With as much “funny money” being thrown around in annual reports from newspaper companies, its virtually impossible to tell how successful or unsuccessful their digital operations are. When upwards of 70% of all online revenue for online newspapers is a charitable “handout” from the print classified department of the newspaper for all classified liners that go online, its impossible to get a good read on how unprofitable these sites may be. Hence, without knowing what “percentage” or “how much per line” KRD is attributing to its online properties versus McC (in which a small offline percentage could greatly influence the overall online percentage), it’s difficult to say, with certainty, that KRD’s web operations are more successful at driving revenue than McC’s.
If there’s one action that could be taken on the part of the industry, it’s to begin separating the numbers of what was ‘earned’ versus ‘given’ to them. It’s understood that, if the print property didn’t exist, the local sites could never monetize their current online classified sections to the level being reported.
Hopefully this information will become more transparent soon.
Hi, Peter. I’ve known Chris for many years now (McClatchy was one of the partners in the old PAFET, which is where I first got to know Chris.). I’m not sure I would characterize him as a “notorious nickel-and-dimer.”
If he sees strategic value, he invests. And I sense he takes pretty good care of the people in his division, in terms of compensation and facilities (have you seen the McClatchy Interactive offices in Raleigh?).
He is definitely a realist, however, and won’t throw good money after bad. I find him to be someone you can count on for a candid view of our industry’s future, backed by experience and real-world metrics.
I’m not writing a fan club letter here, nor do I have aspirations to work for Chris or McClatchy. That characterization just raised my eyebrows a bit based on what I know.
I’m not at all surprised that RealCities is perceived as a dusty jewel in the Knight Ridder plunder. While RealCities’ performance over the past decade has been lackluster, the idea was right on target. We are absolutely entering a time when the major portals and access providers (Google, Yahoo, AOL, Earthlink, Verizon, Cox and MSN) have begun pondering local affiliate relationships. As Internet household penetration slows down — a predictable phenomenon with any technology as it hits 80% — the pressures from Wall Street to maintain double-digit growth will force all of them to seek alluring partners. RealCities offers a very attractive option: Good local news content, free local marketing, and feet-on-the-street salespeople…packaged in a network. All McClatchy needs is a terrific marketing and salesperson, and that dusty jewel just might look like the Hope Diamond to growth-hungry portals.
Chastened by Jay Small’s comment, I have deleted a reference to Chris Hendricks as “a notorious nickel and dimer.” Earlier in his career, at Nando, Chris used to frequently brag at industry meetings about getting rid of inefficient “bodies” that didn’t result in revenues. But that was a long time ago.
In fact, Chris is a pretty gracious guy, and I know he is highly regarded throughout the online community (NAA New Media’s Lifetime award etc.)
Ah, Real Cities. I go back to the days of its invention at Knight Ridder New Media and agree with Gordon’s view of its potential and potential value in the emerging marketplaces being born. It will take more than an energetic marketer to move it to that potential, I think. Real Ciites does bring together more than 100 markets, many large ones, around one central purpose: a national ad sales network.
But a national ad sales network is looking like too little, too late, given all the challenges. The potential of Real Cities though is far greater, and requires a wider vision, coming from Gary Pruitt at the top.
The industry needs a real network to engage in the major tasks ahead of it:
—-surely, national ad sales;
—-network representation and negotiation with the major traffic players, from Google to Verizon and all in between;
—-standardizing and interoperable platforms to make the cost of publishing cheaper and to add the ability to move ad, editorial and community content around as quickly and seamlessly as the Web requires.
Real Cites could be such a network, a latter-day New Century Network (maybe a decade later than it should be, but we are now approaching 2010 rapidly). Somebody needs to take the leadership, and McClatchy’s new standing in the industry positions it to make the effort, as does its roles in Classified Ventures, Career Builder (prob), NAA and AP.
On the subject of moving to McClatchy Interactive’s platform, I hear that much of its technology is fairly dated; what do we know about how up to date/flexible it is?
On staffing, I’m hearing that few KRD employees want to make a move to Raleigh, and that McClatchy is unlikely to keep a expensive San Jose tech base, once any transition ends. McClatchy is prob hoping for Google and Yahoo recruiters to help it avoid severance costs, as the KRD empties out ahead of the 7/1 or so closing.
Sebastian.
When was the last time a nwspaper picked up a portal or search engine veteran?
Here’s a comment from a reader who didn’t want to be identified. I got a few like this!
“Sam Sebastian could spill all of the details of all of the classified initiatives of all of the CV papers in about 3.8 seconds, including time for taking a deep breath at the start.
Google gained a talented guy who was much too good for CV.”
Thanks, Peter! Just a clarification so everyone knows that I won’t be running premium services – I’ll be part of the product development team that dreams up and executes new ideas.
And hey, NAA will find someone great to join the Federation team (yes, the hunt for a replacement is on). There are still plenty of reasons to hang with the NMF!
rob
Thanks, Peter, for giving Rob some of the recognition he deserves. Aside for being the industry’s repository for everything innovative (what we call “best practices,”) he’s the nicest, most thoughtful human being I’ve ever worked with, and he takes competence to a new level. Big shoes, brother, big shoes.
Couple of additional backgrounders:
– “Gimme the Mike” is a package that is offered, syndication-style, to many local-market stations with both an on-air program and online voting component. When I worked at Belo, a few of our stations carried it, and that was back in 2004.
– That “Health Connection” idea also is common at TV-based sites operated by WorldNow, and was also tried at several Belo sites in 2003 and 2004 as a way to drive new revenues.
I was a party to the operations of several Belo TV-based Web sites for a few years there, and I can tell you they did much more than pay lip service to the Web as a new business development opportunity. At the same time, I believe we had (and Belo still has) some of the best local TV Web sites out there, offering news and information well beyond repurposed on-air segments.
It can be done.
I evaluated some of McClatchy’s technologies when we at Scripps were looking for content management solutions.
I wouldn’t call them “dated.” The CMS platform, for one, has undergone a total reengineering and offers very good flexibility and a number of modern new features for newspaper.coms.
Again, I’m not a McClatchy shill. We ultimately went a different direction for a variety of reasons, but McClatchy’s offerings were strong enough to make our final round.
Somebody, apparently at Classified Ventures, wrote an anonymous comment regarding Sam Sebastian’s move to Google Local. I don’t like anonymous notes, and/or personal attacks. But here is the gist of the comment:
“Sure Sebastian could out every classified initiative at CV, but the details aren’t that hard to divine….Uh, aggregate newspaper classifieds and leverage national online brands.”
Can CV’s classified initiatives really be so easily summed up? Is the danger of Sebastian’s spilling the CV “playbook” to Google as relatively unimportant as Johnny Damon spilling last season’s Red Sox playbook to the Yankees?
I used to work at CV, and you had to sign a non-disclosure agreement that stated you wouldn’t company secrets once you left. Don’t know if Sam had to sign the same thing, but it’s likely.
Last year (according to CMS) there were 323 Billion coupons distributed in the US and almost 5 Billion redeemed. Clearly consumers ARE looking for coupons. The fact that over 50% of Sunday newspapers are purchased FOR THE COUPONS is further indication that consumers are looking for them. The fact that consumers pay $30-$50 in droves for Entertainment Book of local coupons is further proof that consumers love coupons. 79% percent of all US consumers use coupons. It isn’t hard to get them to look them up at all.
In terms of our initial iteration, we made a strategic decision within a month of launching our free classifieds+coupons to carve off the classifieds and focus on online coupons. You can see our classifieds (which are 95% completed in a similar revamp) at http://www.southland.la. We are doing this for another company, and a few newspapers have mentioned an interest in this powerful classified ad solution. (Note also our coupons were $30/month originally)
I believe the self-service aspect of coupon creation is very powerful, as you note, but equally powerful is our multi-faceted syndication. Coupons are available through our website, affiliate websites, email, RSS and MOST importantly through an API such that coupons can be integrated through mashups into Internet yellow pages, local newspaper websites, maps, mobile phones, etc.
Of course, combining any form of advertiser content with user-based ratings is risky, but in the end, advertisers go where there are customers and customer go where their voice is heard. Not including user-ratings and reviews is more risky than including them in this current era of a read-write web.
online couponing has always had a financial model issue. Until Zixxo (or any online couponer) gets enough traffic to make it worth a business’s time, they really can’t charge for their services. Also, the Gen X, Y, Z etc. ‘kids’ don’t coupon as much as the boomers, which coincidentally are not bigtime internet users. The first online couponer that can couple coupons online with coupons offline will win this race I think. Bundling this service for an advertiser gives them a revenue model AND distribution.
Fox is apparently doing much more on the Web for its 25 owned-and-operated stations than I had seen. A good article by David Goetzel in Broadcasting & Cable (via PaidContent.org) reveals that Fox is relaunching its O&O’s in May.
According to the article, Fox’s redesigned sites will “offer extensive video streams (they offer hardly any now); content from corporate siblings FoxNews.com, FoxSports.com and Sky News; an entertainment section anchored by News Corp.’s movie portal RottenTomatoes.com; and significantly upgraded local news and weather sections, including opportunities for user-generated content.”
http://www.broadcastingcable.com/article/CA6325124.html?display=Feature
There are two critical pieces to the online coupon puzzle: content and consumers. ZiXXo’s model is based on hyper-syndication. Instead of trying to be a destination site ith the challenges of uilding content and traffic ourselves, we tap into the existing traffic of partner sites. Our affiliate model makes sure everyone profis accordingly and our various mechanisms, including an API make it easy.
Regarding the kids not couponing, that is largely because they shun inefficient paper-based solutions. These same kids don’t subscribe to newspapers, they want to get their info online, they want to share their opinions, they want to be able to share deals with friends, they want their local deals to come to them in the form of custom RSS feeds, etc. ZiXXo addresses all of these things.
Mistake. Backfence can’t create enough revenue in SF to make this a worthy buy. How many banner ads do they need to sell in SF to make up their money? hmmm
No surprise here. Hard to sell online advertising anywhere, let alone in a local market, with part-time people, with the overhead of commissions on top of that. The dot come bubble bursted 6 years ago. Local ads sell better, but not good enough to subsidize anyone’s income.
This will be interesting to follow, especially newspapers using Google Base.
Nice blog and information! I have it bookmarked for regular visits.
I like the way Backfence has built up a nice community feel with some useful local tools. It reminds me of the early years ‘98′ of citysearch when each city had it’s own editors and unique content at the time the cost of creating that unique content outwayed the spend SME’s were willing to invest in on-line advertising. I think that tide is turning as more and more local businesses are trying to tap into search marketing. Plus with the success of user generated content in the San Fran market there is a great chance at creating a terrific product.
This is great data…I wonder how aggressive newspapers will get in this space? Up until now, all they have done is advertise in their print mediums for their websites or classifieds. What if they actually bundled their online ads as part of a print ad campaign?
The YPA show was criticized by the (5) people I contacted, who have probably “been there and done that.” But some people found it useful to be there. It all depends on your perspective.
Here’s a positive note from someone who had not previously attended a Yellow Pages event.
” I really enjoyed the YPA conference. It was a whole new world for me, and I learned a lot about the way the business is currently set up – the various channels, their partnerships, etc. Quite an eye-opener. It wasn’t a sales opportunity for me, quite the opposite – but …. I can see how search is impacting all the various fringes of advertising industry. Chaos, confusion, new money, old money – it’s still sorting itself out, I’m afraid, but it does look like progress is being made. I saw that some folks were really creating new opportunities for themselves and for advertisers.”
Ted Buerger, a co-founder at American Town Networks, wrote to tell me not to jump to conclusions vis a vis the departure of two key execs. American Towns is healthy. revising its business plan, and remains a major contender in the social network space, he said. He also said that American Towns has penetration of 50 percent in his hometown, Pleasantville, N.Y.
I don’t doubt Ted’s veracity, but I’d like to know about the methodology for coming up with that figure. Most social networks are lucky to get above 5 percent. Here is the text of most of Ted’s note.
“Following is an update of the last few months:
1) On February 15, 2006, the AmericanTowns board turned over leadership of the company to Ed Panian and Jim Maglione, who had led the technology and community efforts of the company for the last several years.
2) Operating with the streamlined authority of a development stage company and employing technology and processes they had refined in the previous $1 million financing round, Panian and Maglione have in less than three months:
a. Launched 2 new regions (New Haven and Hartford) with a total of 56 towns, increasing AmericanTowns footprint by over 60% to 140 towns in 5 states;
b. Revamped content and processes for the existing 84 towns, with a traffic increase of 30% in the last three months and an increase in revenue from Google AdSense of over 45%.
c. Created a technology plan for a new technology platform and user interface with even stronger “social network” components, and a business plan to bring AmericanTowns to virtually every community in the nation by year-end.
3) In a meeting of April 13, 2006, the American Towns board fully endorsed this plan and a new financing round, and made available the funds necessary to support it. (The round closed effective May 1, funded entirely from current investors.)
4) All of the above was possible because of the founding vision of AmericanTowns, its dedication to connecting communities, and the hard work of Panian, Maglione and others testing different approaches in building effective community websites, including:
a. AmericanTowns’ first community site, in Pleasantville NY, is now believed to be the most successful community website in the country, with over 50% household penetration and a total of more than 2 visits per month for every resident household.
b. AmericanTowns’ MyStatenIsland.com, a partnership with Time Warner Cable, has proven that citizen-generated content can be successfully achieved in communities of up to 500,000. (Virtually all content is driven by the community)
c. Ten other AmericanTowns’ community websites, with enriched content and community building tools, have market penetration averaging in excess of 20% of households. (Management will be including these capabilities in all AmericanTowns sites as part of its national roll-out.)
Ed, Jim and the team still have much to do. But the best news about the above is that AmericanTowns now has in place a business and financial plan that, during 2006-2007, brings its organized but citizen-driven local websites to every town across the nation.
You of course have my permission to share whatever you think will be useful to your readers. I should also mention that, as part of our national launch, we wil be interested in working with others in this space – building on one of your thoughts, there is no need to duplicate what others are doing if we can better serve local communities by working together. “
This is an interesting move by a local data provider. It seems they might end up a competitor to who they license to.
4info.net which was originally funded by Tim Conner from USVP (who founded http://www.spoke.com with me) and DFJ recently had a significant stake taken in it by Gannett. Under Zaw Thet (who is the best intern I ever hired at Spoke and now runs 4info) they are getting alot of traction on SMS search via the phone.
The fact that a phone knows where you are makes mobile search naturally local. We are placing our merchant ads on 4info going forward because of the value we see in thier search base
As part of our bundles for our merchant we are included
PK
Thanks for the comments. Glad I was able to get it across a bit. As I said there is alot of work to do. Like alot of others, we see the Yellow Pages as wasteful. interesting post We also see the channel it provides to small merchants as not working as you mentioned.
One thing we need is more local inventory and more local content for our merchants to leverage. We are looking for lots of both, so BD people, send us a note.
We’ve been using merchant circle since they began and every time they release a new feature, we think, “Yeah!, that’s what we need!” We’ve been in business for 20 years — there are few marketers that can give us the value that Merchant Circle can.
We saw this blog today and it made me happy for those guys who deserve it for the work they’re doing for the litte guys like us.
Did you see the Ingenio pay per call deal that was announced on May 11th? UpSNAP partners with Ingenio to offer more mobile directory listings. Ingenio provides pay per call listings to AOL, AOL mobile and infospace…now they are going to provide pay per call listings on UpSNAP. I think this reinforces your point.
Checking out what Merchant Circle has been up to is always fun.
The difference from the first time I logged in to now is crazy … they’ve come a long way; From both the look & feel aspect to the offered features.
This is cool stuff
Current Merchant Circle implementation raises lots of significant questions.
1. Sniping.
Just for fun, I wanted to see what would happen if I identified myself as the owner of a business listed in merchant circle. I picked a yoga studio where I know the owner (my wife is a teacher there, and I take classes). You can see the results by searching Yoga in Encinitas, CA. The business in question is Yoga 101.
With no verification, Merchant Circle put me in charge of the listing. I changed the title and content, and made my email the contact email. I could have also changed phone number, address etc.
I was nice and only added nice info. Because I did this, Yoga 101 is now the FEATURED business.
But if it HAD been my yoga studio, I wouldn’t have stopped there. I could have just as easily sniped ALL the yoga studios in the area, and changed their listings… From Soul of Yoga to Joe’s Suckypants Yoga, etc. Changed or removed legitimate phone numbers and addresses to confuse potential customers. I could spend a few minutes giving all of them multiple negative ratings. (Clear your cookie and vote as often as you want!!)
There is no method for the REAL owner of Yoga 101 to repossess her listing.
Maybe everybody will be honest and nice. Maybe it will be only a few moments before some merchants decide to change whole cities of listings to suit themselves.
Guarding against such sniping seems an obvious business process. But my guess is that it is prohibitively expensive and will not be done with this free, viral paradigm.
But unless there is some sort of verification, Merchant Circle listings will quickly degenerate into doubtful garbage.
2. Request a Deal
Boy, is this an odd feature.
User can “Request a Deal” of any listed merchant.
If the merchant’s email address is known, the form sends the user’s email (for example Yoga101’s email address has now been set BogusMerchantCircleEmail@hotmail.com so this form sends an email there).
If the email address is not know, the form “saves” the email.
The actuall email received by the merchant is “xxx@yyy.com requested a deal”. That’s it. There’s no place for the user to specify the deal request, nothing.
I suppose, when I get this email, I can respond to the user:
“What deal are you proposing?”
And then the user can respond back “I want free yoga” or some such.
And then I can answer “We don’t do those kinds of deals”.
And the user can then reply, in a snit: “Well if you don’t do deals, why do you have Request a Deal as part of your listing.”
To which I might respond: Because Merchant Circle doesn’t allow me to remove that function.
Anyway, what’s the point of all this? After 2-4 email exchanges, what: Somebody’s going to request a deal of a dry cleaner? Press my pants for Fifty Cents?
Clearly this feature is designed to suggest that someday there will be online commerce. Shopping carts, auctions, god knows what. All the buzzwords that VCs like to hear.
As built, it’s a cumbersome joke.
3. Those God-awful Picutres.
Bikrams Yoga College of India has a picture of an empty restaurant.
Coast Athletics has a picture of an empty beauty parlor.
Yoga 101 (”my” business) has a picture of something; liquor bottles I think.
(a) I spent 20 minutes trying to change the picture. I am a computer geek. I had no luck.
(b) What sort of goodwill comes from putting a picture of an empty restaurant or beauty parlor next to yoga studio listing. God knows where these pictures come from, or how they are selected.
Suppose I created on my OWN a website a page listing “info about people”. I suppose the bio of Ben T Smith IV on that page — his info is on the internet; I suppose I can copy it to my page. Then next to it I put a picture of say Chuckles the Clown, or Stalin, or Nick Nolte’s drunk mug shot. Why not? It’s my page?
What sort of legal difficulties will MC get into when Bikram’s yoga gets wind of the empty restaurant pic?
4. Attractive, yes. Easy, no!
Remember that 90+% of internet browsing is done on Internet Explorer, guys!
That site is wonderfully legible when viewed using a mac with Firefox or Safari. On Internet Explorer for the PC, however, the type is so small as to be practically invisbile. 8pt Gray type on basic instructions, like Here’s how to sign up?
Us middle-aged guys shouldn’t need magnifying glasses to figure out how to be part of the viral marketing campaign that will make merchant circle a success. The virus won’t spread unless people spread it.
Conclusions:
Unless some basic commercial intelligence gets added to this high-concept enterprise, I believe that the site will generate a raft of business problems.
Appreciate the feedback on the early work.
We had reviewed the site on May 11 at 10:43am after it was created around 10am on the 11th. Our systems had not flagged it as an issue. We will have to work to improve that. (by chance I had personally looked at it becuase when I saw it go across I thought it was one of the early sign ups in that city, the picture seemed off, but I let it go)
We put alot out early to get as much early feedback as possible. As I pointed out to PK, the actual experience changes every day and even based on where you sign in from so we can test a number of different options and flows.
If you would like to take the time to help us understand the issues more clearly, feel free to shoot me a note. We learn more every day.
In terms of request a deal, you are right there is alot of work to do. Having said that, our merchants are already seeing new customers from this process. We are going to improve and expand it over the next few weeks.
Anyway, keep the feedback coming. We are a pretty small shop so we love to learn.
What I see is that you have now not only removed my changes, but completely delisted Yoga 101, a legitimate business.
The changes I made to that listing were in place for more than 36 hours. The ad that I made for Yoga 101 appeared on EVERY Encinitas search that I performed for more than 8 hours.
The picture I posted, which you say “seemed off” is a picture of Hanuman, a Hindu God, part of Yoga 101’s branding. I suppose it might seem off to someone unfamiliar with that business. Just as I suppose the thumbnail of an empty restaurant might seem off to a person interested in Bikram Yoga.
It took you more than 36 hours to remove the offending entry, in a city, that so far as I can tell, had NO OTHER ACTIVITY during that period.
You removed the entire listing — based on what criteria, I can’t imagine — so that now, because of my actions (an independent agent with no direct business connection) Yoga 101 is NO LONGER INCLUDED as a listed business.
You removed that listing based on this blog, apparently, and never contacted the owner, or me about this decision.
In other words: You acted late, arbitrarily, and without process or reason.
You took no action when the changes occurred, but only when you became aware of them through this blog.
This when one person made one change to one business in one small town, that apparently had never had any other activity at all. (I certainly couldn’t find any other Encinitas listing that had been adapted by anybody, and I looked.)
Take a look at your goal of supporting listings of 20% of a community. Your Encinitas pages, by my count, list almost 2000 businesses.
How do expect to monitor the actions being done to 400 business in Encinitas.
How will you decide who is legit in making changes?
How will you determine when a picture “seems off”?
How will you do this when you hope to address thousands, even millions of businesses? How many changes do expect to see per day?
One of the reasons why traditional local advertising is expensive, slow and cumbersome is that these methods include a human component: People make the changes on behalf of businesses, and make value judgements as change occurs.
Typically those people have local ties, and local reputaions, and have an interest in maintaining them. This makes them careful and cautious.
Your site has a very different paradigm, one that I support 100%. It tries to increase efficiencies and lower costs. It tries to provide greater information availiability, and to keep that information fresh.
But the methods your site employs are open for misuse, as I have shown. And you have no process in place to deal with that misuse, as you have shown, except on the most gross and haphazard way.
So how will your site maintain the trust of its users in the legitimacy of the information it presents? Absent a competent, knowledgeable reviewer with a personal stake in its accuracy, as traditional local advertising has by its history and the nature of its processes.
To ignore these less obvious qualities of local advertiising is a smug conceit.
Your trade off is now obvious: Efficiency vs Accuracy & Trust. You business processes and design are weighted entirely to efficiency. Do you presume that accuracy and trust will simply take care of themselves?
Do you presume that local customers (not your advertisers, but the presumed local users of your site) will be so interested in efficiency that they will simply ignore the accuracy of its listings?
At least with a phone book, those local customers can be reasonably assured that the address, phone number, and ad content were approved by the business. After the first snipinig attack, will a customer return to your site as a trusted source? After the first sniping attack, will your advertisers want to pay $150/month?
I ask these questions because I believe that they are fundamental to the nature of the enterprise.
I simply can’t imagine that there’s a $550 million fund backing this site, and these questions haven’t been asked and answered. They are fundamentall and obvious.
Again thanks for your feedback. We love it when people take so much time to work with the experiments we have out there and give us such generous feedback. You clearly know something about the business from your work with your online ad efforts and around the classified space.
As we have all seen frm Craig’s List and other sites, we believe these problems can be addressed over time. If not we wouldn’t be working so hard at it. In fact, we learned alot from Google on how to confirm the site owners indentity
We are huge believers in the competency and knowledge of Local Merchants about thier business and other businesses around them. We have found that as they engage, they use the system to correct the data about themselves (and they can do it alot easier than waiting on the Yellow Pages) and even point out to other Local Merchants opportunties to improve thier listings. They also have proven very effective ad flagging bad behavior, and we look forward to enabling this even further.
In terms of this site, our process will be followed to ensure the legitimate owner has control of the site. We place a few sites a week on hold at this point and are working the kinks out on the process to confirm. I am not very technical, but the ability to run down fraud is pretty interesting. When we had over 10 outlets of a major company sign up in a few hours, we did the same process. It ended up being quite legitimate, they had just passed the idea around as part of thier community marketing program after finding out that it worked.
Finally, to be clear this is not the only or the first issue we have seen. Yes- there has been an attend to create a busines in Nigeria for “special deals” but sense Nigeria was not available they place it in some unsuspecting town in the Southeast. We learn more everyday. And we will keep at it with the help of people like you.
In the meantime, we enjoyed providing new local opportunites to communicate with local customers to local businesses all over the country over the weekend and will be working hard to do it again next week too.
And to be clear, our goal is 100% of local merchants in fact more than are currently able to afford the overpriced Yellow Pages. So of course we are working hard on systems and processes to handle things on scale.
Love the feedback, keep it coming..
Great, Ben. Looks like you’ve got these problems licked!
Thanks Peter (I think ;-) for the coverage.
We may have to discuss some of the finer points made surrounding the “proper” use of Java Script and Flash (Both incredible web design assets when used correctly, as we hope it is on our platform, so as to not create the dreaded “data vaults” mentioned).
And I’m not sure “ugly” is a flattering expression here in California, but I’ll take all the publicity that we can get just the same!
Also, I do hear rumor that the big guys in this space (Cars.com and AutoTrader.com, Kbb.com, others – are offering some level of exclusivity for the Internet leads they sell, but I am not one of the first guys they share their innovations with!)
What it all comes down to for Automotive or Furniture or other local Widget marketing online is what the Clue Train fellows told us way back in the late 90’s…”Marketing is a conversation.”
We are helping our clients to raise their hands and simple say to the local consumer that they are there. Informing the shopper that they sell the widget that is being looked for and would appreciate the opportunity to engage. After all, just showing up really is half the battle online.
Thanks for honoring my beta-effort with a mention in the Local-Onliner. I have been a fan for years and will remain so, ugly design and all!
Jim Bonfield, President and Head Farmer in Charge, EyeballFarm Interactive Marketing
Ted Buerger wrote in today (May 27) to provide additional information on ATN’s claim to reach 50 percent of residents in Pleasantville. My gut tells me that if we stood at the commuter station in Pleasantville and did a survey, fewer than 10 percent would say they use ATN. But here’s Ted’s explanation…….
“I also owe you a response on the traffic levels in the AmericanTowns site in Pleasantville. Yes they (and other towns’ data) are very high. But this is because the sites are being used as the central on-line communication point in the community, so they should be high.
So yes, the traffic levels described have been verified by both Web trends and the Google system, data we show to investors. I’ll downplay the levels a bit by noting that “unique visitors” are actually “unique computers”; so some of our visitors are visiting from work and from home, so the system counts them twice. But the levels are still extraordianry by any measure.
The data is also verified by looking at the site: Go to the calendar, and click on the last month; you’ll see a wealth of events posted by community organizations. You’ll see similar content in the news and announcements. (Did someone say “citizen-generated media”?) When community organizations use the site as the way to connect with the community, you’re going to get this kind of traffic. Think “MySpace for groups”.
We have several sites that demonstrate this phenomenon, which is enhanced by the organization and robustness of other content on the site. But the most remarkable to me remains the American Towns site in Staten Island, a community of 450,000. Click on their calendar and you’ll be amazed a the number of event postings made by organizations themselves.
I am not saying this is easy, because there are so many pieces to it. But I do believe that, in five years, every town will have an online point of community connection like AmericanTowns provides. In many ways, we are just riding the wave; the underlying force – as you have said for some time – is irresistible.”
Very interesting article. It’s new news to me, as TKG corporate folks have been pretty tight lipped about the future of McClatchy and Media News, as it relates to the co-owned internet media properties (cars.com, careerbuilder.com, apartments.com, shoplocal.com & topix.net). As a ShopLocal employee, I see a very strong value proposition for including as many newspapers into these internet properties, as all of these sites continue to extend the reach of the advertisements.
Here’s a correction of the original text (already changed above). If Media News does buy into the CareerBuilder consortia, it may bring some of its 49, non-KR titles. It won’t necessarily bring all its titles. Thanks to Ken Doctor for the analysis on that. In fact, in my view, Media News would have a number of reasons not to dump its existing vendor relationship.For instance, it is already a co-owner of PowerOneMedia’s CareerSite. CareerSite has been abandoned by at least one key customer, and there is plenty of talk that the owners are very dissatisfied with it. But I haven’t independently verified this.
Being in the auto and real estate industry the questions/answers are right on. It seems that everyone wants their information and marketing messages in video format. WIth all of the attention that CNN/FOX etc give to news stories more and more people are getting used to instant information. This is great for marketers who can capitalize on this trend.
“Stubbs’ ace in the hole, as always, is his local sales channel. “You can’t get local without content, and that requires feet on the street,” he says”
As I laid out before, the Yellow pages have two basic competitive advantages that I believe will not continue in the long term. Stubbs states that you can not get content without feet on the street. That sounds like a studio saying you can not get content without a studio. I think Sundance and YouTube have shown the entertainment industry that content can be created without them. I am a big believer that Local Merchants not only can but WILL create interesting local content without the involvement of Yellow Pages salespeople. If it takes an 8-10K person sales force to sell local internet advertising, the business is never going to break out and have mass adoption. Consider what this would look . I may not understand the size of salesforce he is talking about but I tried to multiply $140K at 8K people is a bigger number than my start up calculator could do. (literally my Sharp does not do billions). There has to be a better way. We are going to try to build that better way.
I just read that again..the only way to get content is feet on the street. The whole user generated content movement is based on the idea that this is not true.
Noticed Ben’s comment. Not sure he got the point of a couple of Charlie’s comments.
On the 8K reps – yes, you need that many to reach NATIONWIDE coverage. But that doesn’t mean YP.com is going hire them all. Will probably come from partnerships. Also his $140k number is double what a typical rep makes.
On his other point, as much as we all want to believe that this self-help model for local advertiser content works, there has NEVER been any media, print or electronic, where that model has worked for more than 5% or so of the advertisers. The vast majority of these small to midsized business owners just don’t have the time, energy, or knowledge to do it. That’s not to say they are stupid or anything. It’s just that there is only so many hours in the day, most of which they are already spending on running their business.
I think this is a cool idea but there is little mention of the “800 pound gorilla” internet coupon fraud. One of the major hurdles in the widespread adoption is the $500-$600 mil dollar per year coupon fraud issue. Any coupon that can be printed can be changed, i.e. amount increased, BOGO added, etc. The fact that most fraud come from retailers and redemption houses is a major problem which the industry has not solved as of yet and prevents mainstream adoption for many higher end manufactures.
Jingle is offering a pretty compelling service for consumers and we think a possibly incredible advertising service for Local Merchants.
Getting your offer to play after someone has placed a directory request is certainly potentially as valuable for a local merchant as a Google ad after a search.
Clickz hints at some of the test we have been doing for our merchants in this area. There are so many enormous advertising opportunities for Local merchants once you get them to get engaged.
Why NOT Syracuse- Watertown to Uitca-Capital District as a growth target?
Online is actually running at six percent for Tribune. I had originally said “5 percent or so” in my post.
Here’s a comment by CEO Dennis FitzSimons at an NAA advertiser meeting, as covered in Media Post June 21:
interactive revenue is poised to grow this year to $225 million–or about 6 percent of the company’s publishing revenue–the company is looking to more than double that figure within four years. “We look to increase to … approximately 12 percent to 15 percent of publishing revenues in 2010,” he said.
The Yellow pages is definitely powerful but their tactics and failure to adopt is what is going to hold them back. I’ve pretty much exprressed my opinions on our blog.
So often I hear people referring to “Yellow Pages” in reference to the printed books. Rightfully so.
But I think that is a bit short sighted. “Yellow Pages” is a business model….traditionally horizontal, recently (in my instance) vertical.
When it comes to commerce, the “I wanna buy” time, the Yellow Pages model rocks.
IYP’s and the coming “brand building era” in internet advertising have an opportunity to make hay.
We’ll see.
Steve
I sometimes see folks confuse federated search with local search. Federated search makes it easier to search existing content by providing a unified search interface across heterogeneous data – which is a good thing. I think of it as site search on steroids. Local search, in contrast, requires publishers to create and manage NEW content (specifically, detailed local business profiles) that drives new traffic and thus creates new rev opps.
seems that some of these statements are being spun in the wrong direction. frist i think it’s unclear if this 8k person sales force is perhaps made up of telephone reps as well as outside reps. second, i dont see stubbs reference to $140k per rep. they have a posting on monster for outside reps and make no such claim. i was present in november when stubbs addressed some people about growth of ypc sales force and he indicated the outside reps would be 2k-3k, a very doable number in my opinion. trust me when i tell you it takes a very different skill set to sell local advertisers nothing but internet marketing and wont be as easy as using existing reps.
Jarvis and Rosen are of course entirely correct. Unless stockholders are willing to take smaller profits, there will be no real across-the-board innovation at newspapers.
What other industry would allow the providers of their basic raw material to teeter on the edge of bankruptcy for years and whine when needed price increases are attempted?
What other business spends such a miniscule amount on marketing and advertising?
What other business pays so little to the people who generate the product’s USP?
Well at least the CEO’s have kept their major conventions on U.S. soil – albeit at the most posh resorts they can find.
That’s a great start for Merchant Circle. Will be really interesting to see how well they upsell to premium tiers.
This part caught my eye:
“… newer agents are much more dependent on the Web. Sixty-four percent of newer agents advertise online, compared to 36 percent of agents with 10+ years experience.”
This trend is no doubt repeated in other (all?) local markets. It would be interesting to see what percent of RE sales can be ascribed to each, the 64% and the 36%. What % of the agent population are those with less than 10 years experience?
“As for the Fox factor,”where citizens seek out news that is slanted to their on political preferences”? Not sure I get that. I mean they do show both sides of the spectrum…a far cry from real biased news one had to endure-Dan Rather etc.. before. Besides, It is the most watched. Thank God for the balance!
Also worth noting this Hitwise post. They say Google local domains represent .03% of Google traffic.
If all the numbers we have are correct, Google is doing a lot of geotargeting outside their local domains, or those local domains are very, very lucrative.
I added Feedblitz to my blog, and after two months I noticed that about 20% of my readers had switched from RSS to the e-mail notification, as well as signing up many more. It’s a great idea.
Keep up the great work, Peter!
SD
Former Verizon Superpages head Pat Marshall, an advisor to AgendiZe, makes a compelling (and broader) case for new distributions of Yellow Pages content in YP Talk.http://www.yptalk.com/articles.cfm?CatID=1
In related news, JupiterKagan finds that large companies are, in fact, climbing on the blog bandwagon (no word on small (local) companies). But just 32 percent use their blogs for WOM.
The release, via YP Talk, is here:
http://www.jupiterresearch.com/bin/item.pl/press:press_release/2006/id=06.06.26-corporate_weblogs.html
C|Net’s acquisition of urbanbaby.com isn’t all that odd, especially considering that the mom market represents [url=http://www.bsmmedia.com/resources/marketresearch.php]$1.6 Trillion[/url] in purchasing power each year. But the company’s buy into the “mom space” wasn’t the first. On [url=http://home.businesswire.com/portal/site/google/index.jsp?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20060706005612&newsLang=en]July 5, 2006[/url], the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel purchased [url=http://www.milwaukeemoms.com]MilwaukeeMoms.com[/url], a parenting resource site that my wife and I co-founded in 2002 to serve parents like us raising children under six-years-old. Our exponential growth –driven entirely by word of mouth advertising among metro mothers — wasn’t by chance; [b] it was by relationship. [/b] We do what the overwhelming majoprity of marketers and advertisers neglect to do: speak to mothers in a language that imparts respect for the challenges of their daily life, structuring content around the narrow windows of time they deal with in managing the affairs of house and children. As any parent knows, satisfying a toddler can be a vexing endeavor that requires Mom to fill windows as narrow as 5 minutes. There simply isn’t time for leisurely brand comparisons or listening to an array of dumbed down, stereotypic pitches for everyday staples. By necessity they will return to products, places and Web sites that make their lives “just a little bit easier.”
Whether or not C|Net can make the transition from servicing geeks to serving moms will turn on its ability to have an intimate understanding of a mom’s life and to strike up a sincere dialogue with them in the cities UrbanBaby.com represents and to impart real value into their lives. One thing’s for certain: sticking with UB’s cookiecutter design will yield limited results. To serve the mom niche, local content and local voices are required, and that’s where newspapers and local publications have a significant edge. — Pat McKenna
Pat McKenna, founder of Milwaukee Moms, wrote in to defend CNET as the owner of UrbanBaby. So I asked him: who would you rather be owned by: CNET or Journal Communications, the newspaper company that dominates Milwaukee media (and recently purchased MilwaukeeMoms).
Here’s Pat’s answer….
“Even considering the venerable reputation of C|NET, I would still want to be owned by the Journal Sentinel because the newspaper stands alongside other publications and broadcast outlets that form Journal Communications. Content reigns king on the Net now more than ever, and media companies are slowly waking to the fact that their radio, television and written content have value beyond the originating source or locality. The challenge is to devise “source agnostic” publishing strategies to syndicate locally produced content to niche sites like ours. This is especially the case with parenting content; a local TV news feature produced in Minneapolis on new ADD research at the Mayo Clinic has just as much relevance to parents in Milwaukee, Seattle or Prague, for that matter. Geography simply doesn’t hamper the relevance of the story. That station should, as a matter of course, be required to cross-publish its segment to niche channels within the company where the content has an engaged audience.
The benefits of this approach:
(a) Strategically targeted advertising opportunities
(b) Higher ad prices for niche access
(c) “Painless Publishing:” Content is produced once and syndicated as new material across multiple sources. Production costs drop significantly.
(d) Users become more reliant on “platform access” to content, rather than general searches across the Web to find niche content of interest.
(e) Resulting niche sites can be branded as a value add for each local media source; no need to create your own niche property and local advertisers can be geotargeted into each local version of the niche site.
I said it back in ‘95 when I started my Internet career. “He who bundles content best wins.” God, I love this business. :)
Best,
Pat McKenna
Founder, MilwaukeeMoms.com
Thanks for the write-up on this, Peter. Quick question on that very first sentence … are they saying the $10/month enhanced listing in Yahoo Local also helps their organic ranking? If so, I would assume just in the organic local rankings, yes? Any clarification would be helpful – thanks again!
Matt: Paul Levine is saying that the features associated with enhanced listings are so attractive that they typically double usage, and drive up organic rankings.
It has been widely whispered, of course, that people “buy” better rankings on Yahoo! While he didn’t explicitly say that there was no connection between better rankings and being a paid customer, he definitely seemed to imply that it is not a matter of paying.
There is a difference in definitions of organic local rankings and organic directory listings
When a person is talking about the local search world. There are organic website listings and there are organic directory listings (not sure if these are the exact terms)
The enhanced listing product can help your rankings in the directory listing just by the fact that you are offering more content, this content allows Yahoo! to assign your business listing some relevancy outside the category or SIC your business falls into.
As with most things in the search world more relevant content equals higher rankings. Whether that is for your website or your business directory listing.
Thought some data points might be interesting.
42 college newspapers use the AD2AD Classified system, including Harvard, Columbia, NYU, Duke, LSU, Florida State.
In case you want to make this info public, Peter, let me describe the system: AD2AD is designed so newspapers manage classified print ads using an internet database. So print ads also appear on the newspaper’s website in real time (no uploading, in searchable format, formatted as they appear in print, but with web enhancements such as photos, weblinks, etc., etc.). Through the newspaper’s website, customers use the same database to place self-serve ads. Customers can choose higher cost print-formatting options (what newspapers call ‘upsells’), WYSIWYG in real time.
The system design reflects my personal view that the PRINT product is where the value lies, and that the newspaper should simply display ads online at no extra cost.
We’ve discussed this, and our viewpoints differ. In fact, I think we disagree almost completely on the point. So I’m happy to provide some some statistics about our college customers that prove that my viewpoint is right. (OK, maybe not “prove”…but certainly “suggest”.)
Colleges saw an average increase in ad revenue of 34% within 6 full months of use. Customer self-serve ad entry averaged 67% (up from 0 to 5% before AD2AD). Remember, these were college-community customers, web-savvy, PAYING for these print ads when they could have placed exactly the same ads for free on LiveDeal or Craigslist. But and there were more ads and more revenue per ad. Also consider this: 27% of theses self-serve customers bought PRINT upsells. (When internal staff placed the ads for customers print upsells averaged about 7%)
How does this behavior compare to our non-college newpapers?
Non-college newspapers saw an average 41% increase within 6 months (vs 34% college — in most cases, however, colleges told us, this YOY increase reversed several years of revenue DECREASE).
Non-college newspapers have an average 62% self-serve within 6 months (vs 67% college — practically identical).
Non-college newspapers have an average 12% print upsells (vs 27% college — college customers are MORE ready to pay more for print).
Not saying that this couldn’t all change in an instant — but for now, newspaper classifieds online and in-print work to create synergy (and I’m using the word ACCURATELY — you could look it up).
J
Newspapers have a tough time with their website “in-laws”, chosing to deal with them rather than inviting them to live with them. As the boomers get older, the newspapers’ marketshare also gets older and diminishes. Online newspapers, thanks to RSS feeds and Yahoo!/Google, are treading water. I think local websites that encourage an online/offline synergy will win out in the end (at least that’s what I’m banking on). I’ve got two experiments going on now in my local community and they seem to be picking up advertisers and web visitors. Newspapers will have a tough time catching up with the Craigs Lists of the world, they don’t like giving away classifieds just to get the visitors’ loyalty.
I’m glad to see Google validate the market for local online coupons. It also lights a fire under the partners that have been sitting on the fence wondering whether local online coupons are real…now they know. What Google does is it adds coupons to maps, Google maps. ZiXXo provides a syndication platform for adding coupons to everything: online newspapers, yellow pages, local search, maps, blogs, you name it. If merchants want their coupons on Google Maps, go for it. If they want their coupons syndicated everywhere go to ZiXXo. Yes we provide custom RSS and email, but our affiliate network and API for integrating coupons right into listins and other content really set us apart.
I couldn’t agree more with Pat McKenna’s experience-laden comment about success for content-and-community-centric local verticals. When done well, these services will help identify, organize and complement conversations that are already going on among local vertical communities.
Content is king in local search. Content drives traffic, traffic drives revenue. Local media companies with an equally strong online/offline presence, have a unique opportunity to create THE richest collection of local content for businesses in their markets.
Sure, Google has traffic, but at the end of the day users want content. Just because someone starts their search on Google doesn’t mean the search should end there too. Create the definitive collection of information about a local business and Google will send the traffic your way.
If local media companies truly want to compete with Google etc. then they need to make a concerted effort to become a go-to site for local business content. This means going deep for local businesses: creating and managing rich information about service details, products, brands, business hours, credentials, etc. It also means driving user-generated content like ratings and reviews. And it of course includes coupons. It’s not hard to create your own coupons (high margin) or simply distribute valpak’s inventory (instant inventory, lower margin) like Google is doing.
Needless to say this is a self-serving post. PremierGuide’s private-label local search solution can help.
The Google-ValPak deal is good validation that there’s lots to do to help local merchants. However, this deal still requires the local merchants to promote themselves online (is a bakery in Piedmont, CA or a painter in Winchester, MA going to do this?) so that people will find them in the first place… I am not sure it solves the real problem (and opportunity, which is why we’re real interested in this space) of helping local people discover local things, and vice versa for local merchants to reach out to the people within the 5 to 10 mile radius of their business that’s likely to pay them a visit.
The idea of Neighborhood mapping is exciting, I think that this feature will be critical for the mobile search space to evolve.
“I never know a zipcode when I am in a new city. I might know that I am in Lake View”(Chicago Neighborhood)
The difficulty lies in the execution as neighborhoods are rarely easy to define by traditional methods (zip codes)
Overall this looks like a great step for the IYP’s I am anxious to learn more about urbanmapping.com
As a number of people have noted, Google has been picking up reviews and coupons as content onto their local maps for a few months now. It was actually pointed out to us by a few bloggers that our merchant coupons were showing up on Google Local searches on the Maps.
Our merchants certainly love when their coupons get picked up this way by Google and other properties. This is why we have made it so easy with the RSS feeds. Based on the current numbers, we see the 20K unique coupon number that ValPak has provided to Google in the near future for MerchantCircle. We also have openly discussed our support of being able to syndicate these as many places as possible including Zixxo as that business develops.
Outside of the Yellow Page companies, ValPak (which is owned by Cox, which has another interesting local internet property: Kudzu) has one of the most effective channels for selling local advertising. The franchise model they have set up combined with a pretty effective local product works.
Todd has been making the rounds for the past couple of years to work how they take that distribution channel to merchants and use it for the local online market. This is a bold move and much more viable than their prior efforts with Valpak.com; and at a time where we are finding merchants are starting to “get” the internet. On average, our merchants are uploading 40 pictures a piece. That would never have happened in 2000.
Estimates are that ValPak has around 176K merchants who advertise with them. Our belief has long been that you have to be pushing to 1,2,5M merchants to really change the local game. ValPak is one approach to helping Google achieve that and frankly may be more successful than the prior efforts with the YellowPage salesforces.
Coupons in a number of ways are Content. In our analysis of the regular, non-Atherton consumer, we found over and over they see both classifieds and coupons more like content and less like ads.
A really good debate going here, Peter. My own two cents…This move seems logical for both google and valpak. For valpak it’s an obvious distribution strategy extension, and it their distribution model probably (desperately) needs an electronic involvement/retention strategy, cuz those “coupons from every atm vision sure ain’t cutting it”! Not a lot different from the YP decision to broaden distribution via paid distribution and SEO techniques. It’s critical to being viewed as relevant as time goes by.
Google is clearly using the free coupon model as a hook to increase user value and continue its relentless pursuit of trumping all others in the scope and (proprietary) value for advertisers. No surprise, and another data point on a predictable curve.
The real value and opportunity for scaling active promotion into search demands a MUCH more sophisticated connection between search intention (or personal profiling)and promotional offer. I doubt Valpak has this even on the drawing/thinking boards. Even for this to work for Google will also take enormous participation scale and/or a lot more “privacy intrusion-challenged” evolution. The real dilema is that “entry search” does not lend itself to cross-promotion, so the promotion has to be spot on in relevant or user profile match. VERY tough to get right on scale, in local.
Honestly, I’m skeptical on the user value proposition, however. The primary use of mapping services is to find a specific address and/or business. Period. The noise forming around google maps, between brand icons and coupons will need a lot of contextual filtering not to make the consumer repel from the clutter. If they can find a way to get this balance right, it’s a win-win. However, the growing bias to selling ad space everywhere we look has a real backlash potential.
Regarding this as a possible major threat to newspapers highlights the paranoia forming amongst the newspaper publishers who have reason to fear every new thing given their tough uphill business reinvention battle. However, every local media publisher has to learn how to 1) evolve into serious differentiated SEO/SEM participation, and 2) build differentiation and value into their own destination properties.
actually motors 2.0 is something else (for later). . . the local project is called El Camino
I checked with eBay. They say “the proper way to refer to the Motors local test is “‘Local Market.’” eBay’s press release, however, strongly suggests that all this happens under the “eBay Motors 2.0″ framework. Maybe “El Camino” was the pilot name?
Pat Marshall, former head of Verizon SuperPages, weighed in on the Kelsey site:
“Doctor is on the money and the same challenges and proposed remedies can be said for much of the YP business as well. Good post.”
Hello Peter and thanks for the thoughtful comments. Premier Guide’s Malcolm Lewis and I partnered with Surewest Telephone to launch Sacramento.com years ago (while I was still at The Sacramento Bee. I believe it is a Planet Discover project now however…).
My then, youthful enthusiasm and excitement at the prospect of local advertisers using our new local directory site’s self-serve advertising tools (similar to Google’s Sponsored Links) was soon tempered by the cold reality that a local pizza restaurant owner not only doesn’t easily warm to the idea of building his own ad message, but he/she may not even understand why they should even care. It was confusing. “I already have a web site Jim…” They just want to sell more pizza.
Another project I launched with Travidia and a large regional shopping center here, Sunrise Market Place, hit a similar wall by way of cutting edge tools being offered, AT NO FEE, to over 500 merchants that made up a 501c6 Business Improvement District in Citrus Heights, Ca.
We provided many weeks of training. But we still had to beg these merchants to log-in to our self-serve Adscripter and post text about sales and special events, etc. to the microsite we had built for them.
Once again, we were reminded that the pizza guy just wants to make pizza. He “already has a web site” and didn’t understand what the big deal is about, vis a vis our efforts to have his online communications actually seen.
Local directories will work. Many are working well now. However, I remain convinced that as Peter stated, the confusion that this approach causes adds to the mix in a HUGE and unanswered way. Most small business folks are just now accepting they need a web site and along comes someone like me or Malcolm and suggests in ADDITION to that, they may need to consider my call to action platform or Malcolm’s microsite. Oh yeah, let’s add a Blog, a Podcasts, and some streaming video.
This is why we have decided to build a service in combination WITH the platform. The tech is incredible and DOES allow the pizza guy to do it themselves, but they don’t. So, we do it for them. WE aggregate their TV spots, Radio Ads, Print Ads, Direct mail pieces. WE convert them. We post them and buy THE RIGHT keyword ads on the search engines and deliver them a report at he end of the month that says “You spent $XX and made $YY.”
It is not easy. It is not a high margin business and finding people to make this work every day is kicking me in the head. BUT this approach works. The ROI is clear, easy to replicate and hard to argue with. The full-service approach ultimately serves to greatly increase client retention because in the end they get what they wanted all along…they sell more pizza! We have a LOT of learning curve ahead. “Keep it simple stupid” just isn’t going to cut it any longer. Thanks for the forum. Send your charitable contributions to PoorOverWoorkedJim@eyeballfarm.com
There are 2 questions here I think:
1) Should a local business care about a microsite if they already have a website? Answer: Yes. Their local newspaper/TV station website will generally rank higher than their stand-alone website. A microsite on a high-ranking local media website will generally get more search engine referral traffic than a stand-alone website. Even if it gets less traffic, the combined traffic is still greater than it was with a single site. And let’s not forget the 50% of local businesses that advertise that do NOT have a website. For them, a microsite is a quick and easy way to get online with a local partner they know and trust.
2) Will local businesses use self-service interfaces to create and manage microsites? Answer: Not likely. These folks generally have neither the time nor the required skills. But this has nothing to do with the intrinsic value of microsites. It simply means that local media companies have to take the initiative to create and manage microsite for local advertisers. Any local media company that wants to own a chunk of the local search opportunity in their market must invest in building unique local search content. Content has value, and like anything of value, it requires an investment to acquire and manage.
ROI of Microsites:
At AD2AD we have a system that integrates print and online classifieds for community publications. We offer a number of web-based upgrades…little icons, colored backgrounds etc. We provide for one — and only one — photo to be uploaded per ad.
We often get requests from “sophisticated” newspapers and consultants for multiple photo uploads, slide shows, image carousels…also for ‘micro web pages’ that the customer can build.
I have used throughout the ‘Mother-in-Law Test’. I show prototypes of new features to my mother-in-law, a very tuned-in and opiniated 80 year-old who rules her corner of the internet via AOL dialup. The test is simple: She has to figure out how to use the feature without help, and then not call me up with insults for wasting her time with the feature.
Several Multiple-picture upload prototypes and microsite prototypes have completely failed the MIL Test. So to date, we have KISS’ed off microsites, etc.
The MIL test has proven to be a very helpful measurement. My MIL has taught me that in the consumer/local/web world, there is an invisible factor in ROI…One must consider not only the ‘time is money’ equation, but ‘frustration is money’.
It’s helpful to think about that pizza-maker and his microsite. So you can prove that he’ll sell more pizza, and thus get some ROI on his time and money spent on his microsite. OK, but have you considered the frustration involved in that extra time? And for a small business person, whether sales resulting from that extra aggravation will actuually provide more satisfaction?
It’s my belief that the pizza guy hasn’t really finished his quote. “To sell more pizza — and/or have more fun…” His goal is NOT to sell more pizza…The pizza guy wants to own and control his life. He wants a business that satisfies him. So he will always balance the potential for new sales against the quality of the work required to gain them. The hidden frustration factor can pust up the “I” in ROI until the “R” looks very small indeed.
This discussion seems to be confusing the what with the how.
I don’t think microsite proponents are suggesting that creating and managing microsites is the local advertiser’s responsibility. Local advertisers should not be asked to create their own microsite for the same reason YP publishers, newspaper publishers, TV stations and radio stations don’t ask advertiser’s to create their own ads. It’s the same reason I don’t expect a restaurant to drag me into the kitchen to peel the potatoes for my steak and garlic mash.
As I read it, Malcolm, you’re saying:
i.e.: if I google pizza encinitas ca, I’d more likely to find Vigilucci’s (my local dive) if they have a microsite on KNBC39.com (my local TV aggregator wannabe) than if they simply have their own website. Did I get that right?
Isn’t that a difficult hypothesis to prove — in terms of ROI — to Senor Vigilucci?
Doesn’t he need to understand a whole hell of a lot about how search engines work, and how aggregate sites work, and how it’s better for him to be in “Restaurants>North County>Encinitas>Italian>Pizza” of KNBC39.com than to be at Vigiluccis.com…or in addition to having his own site? Doesn’t he need to be able to define the scope of his involvement of creating the microsite (which you say” a microsite is a quick and easy way to get online with a local partner they know and trust”…in other words someone they spend time to talk to and to review, and redo, and of course, eventually pay) and to optimize it for searching, and to compare that work and effort to the work of creating an independent site, etc., etc., or no site at all?
Just thinkinig about the problem, IMO, pushes the Frustration Factor of the ROI equation up very, very high.
Does Senor Vigillucci even need a website for his Pizza? I haven’t ever checked if he has one, and yet I’m a pretty good customer.
Perhaps we need to consider the ROI iincluding the Frustration Premium for the local advertiser to figure out:
Benefits of a microsite in a conglomerate local site vs independent site
Benefits of local search with microsite vs benefits of current local search
My experience is in the small newspaper industry. My classifieds program generally incrreases a new paper’s ad volume by 40% and reduces labor costs by 70%.
HOWEVER — Just THINKING about what it takes to switch from current mode of business to my new system — despite its efficiencies, despite its better revenue — gives the potential publisher Such A Headache that he needs to lie down and put a cold washcloth on his forehead.
I’m sort of thinking that this type of response might be the same in the microsite world, the typical response from a small-business owner.
You talk about spoon-feeding the website creation — I’m saying that the problem isnt the website — it’s spoon-feeding the CONCEPT of the microsite. THAT’s where the frustration comes from. That’s the sales hurdle.
What Jim Bonfield’s comment says is that even with Elaborate Handholding and persuasion, the small-business honors couldn’t maintain the motivation to continue. In other words, they didn’t see the return on their investment vis-a-vis frustration. THEY DIDN’T SEE THE VALUE of the microsite.
You’re asking the small-business owner to make evaluations of somewhat subtle alternative internet strategies, and guess the net effect in his personal businees environment. That’s a tough order.
If a huge amount of Sales Effort and Customer Reinforcement is what’s required, can the Microsite concept be cost effective?
I couldn’t agree more re saving the SEO mumbo jumbo. To sell the concept, regardless of whether they have an existing website or not, just show them a Google search results page.
In this example, Greiner Buick’s microsite (on yellowpages.vvdailypress.com) is the #1 result on Google for “Victorville Buick”. Greiner’s stand-alone company website, http://www.greinergm.com, is nowhere to be found in the top 100 results.
http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&lr=&rls=GGGL%2CGGGL%3A2006-19%2CGGGL%3Aen&q=victorville+buick+&btnG=Search
Even my mother in law uses Google and knows that she generally clicks on the first few results ;)
J. Schauer is right. Malcolm is always right ;-) and I am too, sometimes.
BUT…the bottom line is that each company in each industry responds to this information in different ways. Just because the horse doesn’t know it’s thirsty we still need to make the water available. (stupid analogy, I know). BUT this is really about survival for these smaller companies. I bet our Pizza maker found his POS system details confusing too, but he buckled down and learned it because he had to.
The single most compelling tool I use is a search engine ranking report. I hear this often… “I am already on Google. Just type in my name…see?” BUT when we type in their industry type with more common terms like “Sacramento restaurants” (which according to ReachLocal’s traffic estimator tool, was searched for over 100,000 times last month with “Sacramento Pizza” contributing nearly 18,000 searches of its own…) they don’t come up. SOMETIMES their competitors do. Either way, at that very moment they get it and they usually ask “how much will it cost for me to be page-1?”
I have had similar experiences to Malcolm’s by way of organic rankings success. We ran a three month trial for a Hyundai dealer in Vegas. The platform was linked page-1, Google PPC everyday. The impressions were huge, CTR over 4%. We had confirmed sales of three cars in month one alone. We brought in nearly 100 leads (Fully filled-out lead forms on the site. Samples linked from http://www.eyeballfarm.com) and produced and tracked a large number of incoming calls (can’t remember the actual amount). By the end of the third month, our landing page had ORGANIC page-1 position on Google, Yahoo and MSN (free baby!). Even though we had only spent money with Google, we were getting leads from all three networks because the microsite was now better ranked than their own gazillion-dollar web site that had been up for over a year and built on a content management system from ancient days, locking all of the viewable text in Flash and JavaScript vaults with the Meta tags spammed to the brim with 50 or more terms, none of which was written with the city name in maind. These are leads they would have never had.
Here’s the kicker… the program cost them only about $56 a day AND THEY STILL CANCELLED!!!! (I am laughing through my tears… No, that’s just tears I am pretty sure)
It’s all in the success reporting in my opinion. Selling page-1 Google is easy. Reporting it in a way that makes them understand the ROI is the hard part.
The results are staggeringly bad. No offense, but they were miles off in pinpointing my address (which is a popular street in Toronto).
I may be biased, but for Toronto, iBegin – http://toronto.ibegin.com/ – wins hands down.
Isn’t the lack of interest in self-provisioning symptomatic of the classic reasons small businesses tend to make the most difficult advertising customers — whether in newspapers, broadcast, Yellow Pages or direct marketing?
Small business owners:
1. Have very little free time to manage their own marketing.
2. Have very little marketing money.
3. Expect more hand-holding and iterative services for their investment (especially if account executives do a poor job explaining the limitations of an advertising agreement, often the case).
4. Often wind up being the worst business credit risks.
5. Have the least sophistication in their thinking about marketing messages or message delivery refinements.
6. Despite all, often have unrealistically high expectations of return on marketing investment (again, especially if account executives do nothing to mitigate it).
With all that said, I believe strongly that finding realistic marketing solutions for local businesses will be the foundation of long-term survival and growth strategies for local media.
I just don’t know what those solutions are. Self-provisioning alone definitely won’t do it.
I HAVE BEEN A RECYCLER CUSTOMER SCINCE DAY ONE DIDENT MIND THE PRICE GOING UP OVER THE YEARS BUT THE MOVE TO GO TO FREE PAPER IN A FEW STORES JUST DONT WORK FOR ME. THERE ARE STILL TO MANY PEOPLE WHO DONT HAVE A PC TO LOOK FOR ADS. I HAVE ONE NOT GOOD WITH BUT GOOD ENOUGH TO FIND WHAT AM LOOKING FOR, BUT YOU R ONLINE MOVE I CANT FIND ANYTHING.GOOD LUCK WITH YOUR ONLINE BUT I MSS THE PAPER.
Here’s a comment from an executive who I won’t identify:
“Great posting! Do you think anybody ever explained the difference between mean, median and mode to the CS PR department?”
StepUp is a powerful idea and product. Getting product information, especially product inventory information onto the web is a further step in changing the local search experience.
Why should I have to drive around looking for a replacement cord for my laptop ?
The issue with the product was for it to have an impact possible, it needs to have large numbers of merchants signing up and then actually uploading the inventory information. The combination of Intuit to acquire customers and Google to provide listing capability and local ad inventory will make the powerful idea and product that Stepup has have a powerful market impact.
I think the question that I left unanswed is:” how big a deal is Intuit-Google?” My answer is: It is a “3″ on a scale of 1-5. It isn’t going to cause a revolution, but it is a nice bulding block. Intuit will undoubtedly deliver some SMEs that haven’t focused on buying keywords. Is it more meaningful than a major Yellow Pages sales channel deal? In some ways “yes,” because it will be nicely driven online. The IYP assignation is sometimes obscured.
Looking at Hilary’s career, she has a lot of impressive titles, but not a lot of impressive accomplishments. At Times Mirror, she headed the nearly formed interactive unit that was in study mode when Tribune bought It. She parked at Tribune Interactive for awhile until bought out. Then she went to Red Herring, where she ran that publication into the ground. Then went to Knight Ridder, where the entire on-line space was rising at a double-digit pace — not much to do with her arrival. Then on to KRI corporate where — well, you know. Smart woman, no doubt, but better at marketing herself than producing results.
Gee, I get the warm fuzzies from the marketing for MerchantCircle.com.
Today I got an automated call claiming that someone had entered a review on your web site. No one had, of course. It was phone spam.
Automated calls are illegal in many states.
- John
Donna Bogatin writes favorably about the promo, with good detail, on ZDNet.http://blogs.zdnet.com/micro-markets/?p=466. Of course, she lives in New York and can actually use the cursed coupon!
Thanks for some helpful introduction to the field. As we have discussed over some excellent Dandan Chicken, we have different views of this market. I hope you won’t mind a little riff on your first point;
I was interested to see that GoogleBase was going to Kill Classifieds. I heard the hype.
Here’s what: GoogleBase isn’t going to Kill Classifieds.
A. Try to find a 3 or more BR 2 or More Bath single family house between 500,000 and 1000000 in La Costa Canyon School district of North San Diego County (Encinitas or Carlsbad). Go ahead and try.
B. I clicked on the Products link. Here are the first 20 listings:
UpperHand Adult Batting Gloves
Crypt Master Costume
Toshiba MK6026GAX ATA-100 (60gb, 5400rpm, 16mb)
In-StockRear View Mirror Parking Permit, Size: 3 1/2″ x 2 1/2″ (SPP1)
Zoya Nail Polish – Elise
Sweet & Sexy Monster Bride Costume
Pirouline Box Rolled Wafer Cookie, 1.2 oz. Box
Casio Men’s EF306L-3AV Watch Black Leather Strap
2 x 2 Plastic Holder, Dime
Sechel Lever Set (Full Dummy)
See thing about “classified ads” is that they are “CLASSIFIED”. You can quickly find a category (like “Seasonal Items”) and a classification (like “Halloween Costumes”) and hey-presto, the ads there are for those items and ONLY those items. What a concept.
In fact for the most part the items above are better suited to E-bay than to GoogleBase, or for that matter to a newspaper classifieds page. They are commodities, being sold by retailers.
The Classifieds Page of a Newspaper (or a Shopper) is the Marketplace of the Average Human Being.
It is:
* Geographically defined, and identified by buyers and sellers
* Up-to-date
* Easy to view and navigate
* Easy to buy an ad – over phone or on web
* No contracts, no commitment
* Inexpensive
In contrast to Craigslist, etc., newspaper classified ads
* Typically are NOT free, so advertised item is meaningful
* Advertiser leaves footprints through ad placement process so
* Not anonymous AND
* Some level of advertiser integrity assumed
For sale items being advertised are:
* Local
* Benefit from actual physical contact (a test-drive, etc.)
* For sale items are One of a kind, typically
* For sale items are Used, typically
Jobs being advertised are:
* Local
* Jobs are one-offs (small offices, businesses, restaurants, etc.)
* Managed by hiring individual, not by some HR department
* APPLICANTS will be LOCAL
Housing being advertised is:
* Local
* Local realtor, or FSBO or FRBO
* Located in Newspaper-distribution-defined Neighborhood
* Descriptions geared to Neighborhood usage
These ads are IDENTIFIED as local, and hence there is a degree of Local, tribal trust. You KNOW where the advertisers live, for example.
Look at the above, and tell me how any aggregating website or search engine matches those items. Look at the above and tell me how GoogleBase will kill classifieds. The items listed above are hgih-value items established by business processes over a long time, and they will take a long time to kill.
I compare the Death of Classifieds to the Paperless Office of the 1970s. (Note: Offices now use 10 times as much paper as in 1970).
The rise of Local Internet might reasonably cause local classifieds to grow, not die. IF newspapers stop trying to compete on on the Internet playing field, and INSTEAD force the internet players to compete on their turf. Few newspapers do this, however. Everybody is so Forward-Thinking and Hep-To-Modern-Trends and With-It these days.
In the 1970s, some smart people invested in paper factories.
I got the same automated call that John did. It caused me to explore the site and claim my listing. I like what I see in the free service and I appreciate the exposure. I don’t understand how people will find me though, I can hardly find my listing and I’m looking. Is it expected that prospects will go to merchant circle like they go to the yellow pages? If so I would love to hear it promoted more.
Jerry
excellent rebuttal; presumably we’ll end up somewhere in the middle with a vendor that has successfully figured out B2C, C2C & B2B. Munging together the best of a shop/newspaper classifieds marketplace with the best of a IYP directory offering. TBD
Great article, I think YP is in trouble. Their brand has been diminished somewhat because of competing print publications, not so much because of online local listings. Print is print, and people that use YP generally don’t think “hey, why am I pulling this out of the kitchen drawer when I could run upstairs and search google local listings to get the same information?” I’ve found this with my own print publication which is a monthly newsletter that is mailed to residents. Our online newsletter attracts a totally different crowd, beyond the mailing list. People either trust print or online, not typically both. That’s why I think online classifieds are important. To Meg’s point, classifieds are “entry level e-commerce”, but they also help in the web’s adoption by older, YP, consumers.
The Internet dream was to score through venture-capital financing and by raising cash in public stock offerings. Now, people with creative ideas can get rich relatively quickly by permitting advertisers to piggyback on any Web site that attracts a lot of viewers
I caught up with Neil Salvage, CitySearch’s new head of sales, at SES Local in Denver Sept. 29. Salvage says it is silly to talk about “$300 million” annual revenue, which is way too high. But he notes that advertisers in some categories are, indeed, budgeting in the $350-$500 per month range for the pay-for-click advertising. This figure can be further watered down to account for multiple location advertisers.
House of Cards. Gatehouse’s debt is so high it eats up any profits they have and they will actually lose money, which is why the IPO is so important. They are trying to find suckers to bail them out, and this line about what a great potential they have with local online media sounds like the internet hype of 1999. Anyone who believes it is an idiot. Check out their wickedlocal site. It is so weak. It’s all hype. Anyone who buys this stock is an idiot.
I made some mistakes in this piece and slightly revised it. Basically, I threw all the commenters, legit or otherwise, in one pot. That wasn’t right. I also took Merchant Circle at face value.
Please see my Oct. 2 followup for more details.
My business gets virtually all its relevant traffic from long tail searches off primarily google and secondarily Y.
Are users actually using any of the other sources out there?
Enjoying your comments Peter.
It sounds like Harvard is describing vertical directories.
I seem to be hearing “vertical” more often these days.
Keep up the great work.
Steve
I read it again.
What in the world is a non-consumer?
Steve
Verticals. I hope so. Consider: any newspaper, say a Thursday. There is the weekly Gardening column. Who does that appeal to? How many such folks are there in the circulation area? Where do they get their info on soil conditions, sales on shovels, cool planting ideas, and other items? Not in the Gardening column.
Good call back in April of 2005, addressing the challenges Amazon’s A9 would face as a Yellow Pages business.
It is pretty amazing that A9 did not focus its attention on developing an actual Yellow Pages business or some type of partnership, especially when it was in such a great position to do it. The high cost of a nationwide sales force may have had something to do with it, and they may not have been thinking along the lines of a YP partnership.
I think what A9’s Yellow Pages could’ve become is exactly where MerchantCircle is currently heading today. Not only that, MerchantCircle is becoming a networking destination for a group that is commonly ignored, the local independent business without a corporate infrastructure behind them.
Most sites are focused on consumer traffic, while MerchantCircle focuses on providing tools and services for merchants. I think of MerchantCircle as Myspace for local businesses and exactly what A9’s Yellow Pages could have been.
The content might be in the archives, but there is a classic disconnect to commerce – “Where can I get what you are writing about?”
I think it is a huge local opportunity….especially with the “green” movement starting to gain momentum.
Steve
I am not going to write about Merchant Circle for a while — I am sick of them — but Matt McGee notes the end of the bad calling campaign, and some indications that they promise to reform. http://www.smallbusinesssem.com/2006/10/04/merchant-circle-calls-off-calling-campaign/
On 13 May, I described in this blog how I had registered with Merchant Circle and changed the entry for a business I knew, Yoga 101 in Encinitas. Got a lot of comments from the CEO about how such a thing would never happen, security, processes, etc.
Read the interchange here:
http://localonliner.com/?p=110
Well, after all this chatter, I thought I’d see what was up with Merchant Circle.
I just logged in and hijacked the Yoga 101 listing again. All I did was register (under the mail address whatascam!@howcrazyisthis.com).
Perhaps the CEO will explain how such a thing could happen AGAIN?
Feel free to write me:
whatascam!@howcrazyisthis.com
I don’t think the owners were cashing any checks but maybe I missed something.
The credit card companies are already forefront of this movement, they are teargeting college student for their credit card and expecting parents to pay the bill.
These fees will probably help eliminate a lot of the bogus or spam postings as well. This is still a deal for the advertisers. Recruiters have driven up the pay per click advertising through Google etc. and will gladly pay the fees. I wish Craig would charge a minimal fee for all postings (1-25 cents) just to clean it up and get rid of the bot postings and spammers.
Vin Crosbie says the NAA’s combination of print and online is useless — and he makes good points.
“Monthly is the big caveat there. Slightly more than 54 million Americans purchase a printed edition daily, but 55.5 million visit a newspaper website at least once per month. Conflating daily print and monthly online figures makes it appear that the American newspaper industry isn’t so much losing daily print readers as gaining equally frequent new readers online. That isn’t true. But look closely at the NAA’s NAD data, which is downloadable as an Excel spreadsheet. How often does the average user visit a newspaper site each month? There’s are no numbers about that in the NAD spreadsheet, but we can calculate an indication.” Read his full post here: http://www.digitaldeliverance.com/blog/2006/10/oh_which_conference_to_attend.html
A newspaper exec, who wished to remain anonymous, wrote in to suggest that the reason why local ownership is important to The LA Times is…simply because Tribune Interactive has such a “top down Internet strategy that totally devalues local.” He also noted that “the problem with The LA Times isn’t the local staff.”
As always, good insights. I think the other problem Smalltown will encounter is the lack of web adoption and understanding by the very advertisers they are depending on for their revenue model. With local portals, defined by town limits or zip codes, the fence gets pretty small for advertisers that a) understand the value of PPC or Internet advertising and b) have a budget for such things. What I’ve found with most of my local advertisers is that they appreciate the web, like it, but don’t really want to buy it. In the towns that Smalltown has started, they might have a more receptive audience than Indianapolis, but expansion will be a problem. The digital divide will be their biggest obstacle.
God save us from self-serving posters.
Is this the potential fate of UGC? Blog spam?
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.
I just spent more time than usual browsing through Smalltown San Mateo. The design is far, far ahead of anything else I’ve seen: clear, precise and fast as lightning. Having so many logically-linked actions packed right there around each card is high convenience. Exquisitely done, really. It also delivered better, faster results by far compared to InsiderPages, when I used my usual search phrases (soccer equipment – bicycle repair). I wonder if the whole thing is done in Flash.
I like the webcard device. It is getting close to what I’d ultimately like to see, which is to give users the same kind of position in the buying dynamic that they now have in the content dynamic. Being able to trade webcards with coupons looks like a start in that direction.
But from the other direction, as Tom and others have observed, is a great yawn from behind the counter at local local establishments. Nothing a tipping point won’t overcome, wherever it is…
Bob Kempf, developer of Gatehouse’s WickedLocal, wrote in to tell me, “hey — it is a two way street.” Kempf, a longtime Ottaway newspaper exec before joining Gatehouse, recently crossed back over the tracks to become VP, Product forThe Boston Globe’s Boston.com. The Boston Globe has made a lot of noise about reaching into the SME market, so it seems that Kempf was the logical candidate for the job.
Melinda writes in to tell everyone….
Thanks, Peter. It’s been a great run, and I’ve appreciated your insights for and commitment to the news business. This would be my opportunity to thank all the smart people in the NAA’s New Media Federation for my free education. I can only aspire to make them proud. Er, and to any great innovators and technologists out there who want to light the way for community newspapers, don’t be a stranger! [:D] I won’t be actually in NY until Oct. 23, so feel free to use melindag@aol.com or request a connection via Linked In.
All the best,
Melinda G
Looks like CitySearch is jumping off of a sinking ship. Newspapers are struggling. They are doing one thing they don’t do well: spread themselves and their resources thin. Dot coms like CitySearch are much more adept at changing with the times. Good for them.
To get at your question (why would a VC invest millions of dollars in a local concept company that hasn’t hired an executive or consultant without any kind of local experience, or even exposure to a local media company?) – why is an executive important? Even more importantly – why is a consultant important?
As I see it, VCs are out to invest in projects they believe will make them money. If Grayboxx can really do what it claims (and also gain traction) – a lot of money could be made.
To wrap it up – local is so disintegrated (and still so immature) that an executive/consultant is even less important imo.
Finally someone has said it–and in italics, too!
” (Why would a VC invest millions of dollars in a local concept company that hasn’t hired an executive or consultant without any kind of local experience, or even exposure to a local media company?)”
Exactly. It’s all about SALES. Who is going to hire and manage –let alone compensate–the Yellow Pages-type sales force required to extract small amounts of money (pay per call/click–whatever), from large numbers of very small businesses, all of whom need personal attention? Judy’s Book has already thrown in the towel on that part of the equation, Insider Pages has let their CEO go.
We’re back to the “If you build it, they will come” mentality. But the small businesses are not going to come (self-provision). You have to go to them. In order to make sales that will only generate a tiny amount of revenue from each business. There is a massive disconnect between the VC’s/CEO’s and the mom ‘n’ pop market they have identified as easy pickings. None of these titans of industry has never sold advertising, and they have no understanding of the small proprietor who is bomarded daily with sales pitches from print, radio and TV, most of which they have least heard of.
The other problem is, it’s “LOCAL”. Most of the VC’s projections are based on rolling out some kind of national model, whereby lots of small markets each providing small amounts of revenue, begin to ad up (like Google AdWords). But each local area is finite–there are only a certain number of plumbers, restaurants, etc.
These companies need more than a consultant. They need to go out in the field on a daily basis, get in the trenches and try pitching their idea to Joe’s Shoe Repair and get him to commit to paying hard money, i.e. $200/month or thereabouts, because that’s about all they are ever going to pay. Good luck with that!
This is a corrected version. I had originally noted that Belo might switch from CareerBuilder. In fact, as Jay Small pointed out, Belo has been using Adicio (formerly CareerCast) as its recruitment vendor.
Chicago, run your mouth. Blog till ya can’t see straight. It won’t change the fact that the best information on new homes Chicago comes from http://www.newhomesdirectory.com.
I think most of these projections deal with ROP advertisers, when a larger threat looms with preprints. Can you imagine how rapidly Sunday circulation will fall when preprint users migrate fully to the web?
I find it also ironic that there hasn’t been any meaningful discussion of the movement of public notice advertising out of newspapers. The lack of discussion no doubt stems from the fact that metros don’t carry much public notice advertising. The politicos hate newspapers and they are changing legislation as fast as they can to reduce the amount they are required by law to spend with newspapers. And that revenue doesn’t go to the web, it just evaporates.
Well, here’s one way to look at it: if print revenues fall off drastically in 10 years at your “tipping point,” then online revs may make 50 percent of the total at that time, 10 years ahead of LRF’s projection.
Two ways to get to that split: online grows or print declines. Both are happening.
Actually, the more pertinent “tipping point” to look for, if it is even possible (and many say it is not), is the point where online makes enough money to support newsgathering, sales and its own operations, while allowing publishers to cut out the high fixed costs of printing and distributing paper products.
I would like to start a blog about local travel and travel in general. How can I get started creating my blog? Any tips or information wold be helpful.
Thank you.
Peter, I think it’s also important to note the low overall percentage of newspaper online revenue that’s from direct sales. The majority of most newspaper’s online revenue continues to come from what’s called the “upsell.” When I say the majority I mean close to 80% or more.
That upsell is in fact a forced buy. When a person places a classified ad their sale into online is considered “assumed.” When an advertiser purchases a contract or a retail display ad the online portion of their buy often isn’t disclosed to them and/or is merged into their rate.
I think it’s going to be eight years or less, but it won’t happen without all of us selling online advertising building the value of what we sell.
Andy Vogel
what if at some point, there is a tipping point, a point at which a wide swath of audience realizes, ‘I like online better.” Are we prepared for that scenario? How much money do we need to make online to keep the business afloat?”
The cool thing is that people are attacking this from both sides. That is, both traditional media companies and the new media (online only for the most part) independents.
To be honest, I’m not there yet, but I can see it as a possibility.
I do think independents need/want to have some kind of print product weekly for the next decade or so. These print products will be based off the web counterparts, though, and not vice versa.
Lots of good thoughts here, though.
-kpaul
Peter,
Great tribute to Greg. We will all miss him greatly. Thanks for putting this up.
Bruce
(Note: Bruce is President of Local.com)
Friends and Colleagues of Greg may want to sign the online guestbook. I think it is really nicely done.
http://www.legacy.com/houstonchronicle/GB/GuestbookView.aspx?PersonId=19806706&PageNo=1
I am prepared to take bets on the success of this venture, if anyone cares to define the term “success”. Let me suggest some wagerable metrics:
Google will make money and increase Google business.
Newspapers will decrease business.
Newspapers will lower their prices in an effort to make a success of their Google offering. This won’t help.
The nwespaper’s labor costs associated with managing these ads will be much bigger than expected.
Newspapaers will in a year declare the initiative a great success, despite the fact that they are bleeding money trying to maintain it. Actual sales figures will NOT be offered.
In 18 months, these same newspapers will build their own DIY portal, and pull out of Google.
In 2 years, both initiatives will be as much in the forefront of internet buzz as “Go.com”.
Thank you so much for your comments about Greg. Greg was my nephew and we miss him dearly. It is comforting to know he touched so many lives in the same way he touched ours. Your thoughts and prayers are greatly appreciated.
Sincerely,
Angela Ford-Castille
Peter,
Thanks for the post. A couple notes. First, our self-serve advertising system doesn’t imply that we may “go solo” as you put it. The system is integrated with our search/content product, and will be deployed from Q1 with our media partners.
Second, the Miami Herald is a McClatchy property, not MNG.
Note from Peter: My mistake about the Herald’s ownership. I’ve corrected it in the text.
Peter, you say, “also in the marketplace, albeit in a broader, non-local context.” Eventful has a strong local focus — how could we not, given that events are inherently local. Could you explain the “non-local context” comment?
Note from Peter: Boy, where was my mind when I wrote this one! Vis a vis Brian’s comment, I meant to say “Extra-Local,” not “non-local.” Indeed, Eventful has all kinds of events, online and offline. They’re my hometown site, and I root for their success!
They are going to have big problems pulling this off. While they want to appear to be more local and “community focused”, their business model is still heavily reliant upon classified ads and subscriptions, neither of which pay real well on the web. While they are at least realizing what needs to happen, their feeble attempt to turn the ship won’t miss the iceberg.
Hey Peter, a few comments on Yahoo Local! receptivity in the local market. Our team is giving quite a few face-to-face pres’ns these days due to the complexity and diversity of local brands and solutions. Whereas Ggl is a more than a buzzword with many, the Yahoo! brand is really strong, and their Local featured sponsorship product with scarcity (limit of 6 per category) carries a lot of weight at the merchant level. Merchant really like the consistency and “persistency” of the fixed featured ad appearing every time…seeing is believing, it seems. (Full disclosure: Cornerstone is Authorized for Y! Local in mid-Atl and Northeast.) Thanks, Jeff
Very interesting – the question is, are the advertisers getting their value? Or I guess more importantly – do they ‘feel’ they are getting a good enough return?
Remember that your loss is shared by many friends who care
and that you’re in our thoughts and hearts and in our every prayer!
Greg touched our hearts and left us with memories to last a lifetime.
Sincerely,
Danielle & Melynda Milligan
British Columbia, Canada
Normally love your column, but you’re going to lose a lot of credibility with me for reading Bogatin “religiously”. She grossly misrepresents facts and clearly has some personal bone to pick with Google. This is just another example where her theories are way off.
Mike Orren from a new site named Pegasus News has this to say on the Kelsey Blog, which syndicates Local Onliner.
“Currently, we have a relationship with Google that not only sends traffic to Citysearch.com but to our customers’ websites as well. This product directly connects our customers’ websites to consumers searching for their type of business across our partner network. ”
Err. As someone obsessed with local market media and advertising, I’ve seen lots of the google ads they refer to coming up on our sites. They are ads that purport to take you to a broad category of info and instead take you to a tangentially relevant single-business page on Citysearch.
“As you know, we offer our customers a broader reach than any other local advertising provider in the market and we are committed to continually expanding that reach.”
Heh. Wait until they get a load of us…
Peter, there is a huge difference in quality of content in the “moms” space. Local sites like MilwaukeeMoms.com are sites that were founded by moms in localities where there was a true need. National sites like ParentsConnect and ClubMom are really just another iteration of city guides.
The difference being appointed city info/reporter types that are employed by the national sites vs. the growing number of mothers who feel marginalized by marketers and feel it’s their obligation to inform others in their own community.
I don’t think anybody’s particularly close, although I’d like to think that we’re heading in the right direction here at backfence, but gaining an engaged local audience takes a tremendous amount of genuine outreach. That can only be done by locals in small local geographies, or in very specific verticals.
“Moms” is simply too big, but it sure will draw lots of ad dollars.
Nov. 17 Update: Insider is said to be down to 10 employees, from a high of 50.
A few years ago, verticals were not even on the radar. Certainly different now. With everyone after the local holy grail, local and vertical is the icing on the cake.
Steve
Is the how much Google is getting paid for placing adsense on CitySearch pages or how much CitySearch is paying Google for itself and on behalf of its customers ?
If it is how much is being paid, that would either make CS very large or very unprofitable. I don’t think it is that large at all and no way IAC has it that unprofitable.
For those of you who are interested I can now be reached at andrewsho at yahoo.com. Stay tuned.
Excellent post – more changes in the executive. Perhaps the investors are simply getting fidgety – grassroots approach is nice and all, but the business just isn’t bringing in the dollars.
Interesting you mentioned a meta-review site, been working on one. I know Google tries to do it with local sources, but imo comes up very short.
Yawn. I think this deal has been talked about for four or so years now and I have to wonder how long it will take to fully execute. Will newspaper execs get lost in the details? Will the technology integration move at web 2.0 speeds? Will Yahoo find innovative ways to leverage newspaper content?
I listened to the conference call live and felt that the newspapers were giving away the farm. The newspapers should be the the primary source of local listings, but they ceded that position awhile ago. And they gave away their most valuable strategic asset — local salesforces with “boots on the ground” relationships with SME’s. Not only are they not leveraging that asset in the deal, they are using their salesforces to build up a dangerous long-term rival.
Yahoo, like Microsoft, has a history of cutting “strategic” deals only to turn their back on their partners when they are no longer needed. The newspapers have fallen into a trap here and they only have themselves to blame.
Individual papers cashed checks, I doubt there was really much serious interest in developing anything more than a captive software bureau to serve the papers. Certainly, in typical newspaper software style, not much support was given to CareerSite and company.
This is great coverage. I’ve a small business in the DC area and have been approached by backfence with regard to advertising. I’ve been looking for commentary, evaluation, etc.
Thanks for your insights. And as one commentator noted….are the advertisers getting value.
EP
Good post but I’d add “transactions”. Community + transactions equal viable business – the rest just becomes chatter without it.
Just thought I’d give you the heads up about momready.com’s unique partnership with the Geffen Playhouse Saturday Scene by searching for Kid Reporters to review their 2006 – 2007 season of plays. momready.com, a leading online parenting magazine that offers tips and topics for busy parents, with a bit of humor mixed in, has partnered with the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles, California to launch the momready.com’s Kid Reporter for Saturday Scene at the Geffen Playhouse program.
This is a unique opportunity for children 6 years and older to be selected as the “Kid Reporter” for an upcoming performance during the Geffen Playhouse Saturday Scene 2006-2007 season. momready.com editor and CEO, Elisa Taub says, “We are extremely excited about our collaboration with the Geffen Playhouse. My two children have always enjoyed the Saturday Scene and I can’t think of a better way to engage kids in theatre. We look forward to providing great Kid Reporters.”
For each show, momready.com will provide a Kid Reporter to be randomly pre-selected through a “contest” that will be announced on momready.com. To enter your child, log onto momready.com and fill out the “momready Kid Reporter at the Geffen” form. Parents may enter more than one child and need only sign up once, as names will be stored for all future momready.com Kid Reporter at the Geffen drawings. Subscription to momready.com is free, with informative, bite-sized articles delivered directly to your e-mail box, Monday – Friday. Subscribers are eligible for unique giveaways, contests and special sales.
momready will provide the “Kid Reporter” with fun questions about the performance they attend and/or the world of theater. The answers will be “lightly edited” as their article will be published in the next Geffen Playhouse Saturday Scene Performances playbill and in a designated section on momready.com. For safety and confidentiality, no last names will be used, just the child’s first name and age.
Grubisch’s article has a couple of following insightful comments from folks at work in the local community space that are worth reading. They reinforce the experience in online community settings since the days of 300 baud. The ratio of posters to lurkers is about 1 to 10; don’t depend solely on user contributions for establishing a flow of useful content.
Earlier this year for my own edification I looked at how a specific neighborhood keeps itself informed via online connections. it is the area of Washington called Chevy Chase DC, stradding Connecticut Ave. running up to the Maryland line at Western Ave., bordered roughly by Rock Creek Park and Friendship Heights. The format was a simple mailing list. In the two weeks I was a member, there were a couple hundred emails sent by several dozen individuals. They warned people to watch out for the guy selling bad meat door to door on McKinley St., and to avoid the well dressed, but panhandling woman at the Metro, among about 40 other subjects that were then active. Two weeks.
These residents are all highly educated, have a lot of money and enjoy the latest broadband gizmos. I don’t know if they frequent other local DC-based sites. But for tracking the stuff of their neighborhood, this list would be hard to beat. This kind of community self-informing is what Backfence and others are trying to create platforms for and business models to support.
As Peter and his readers have noted here, the SMEs that local community sites will ultimately depend on for financial success (to say nothing of paying staffs), have been exceedingly slow to adopt the web. And according to pals in the search optimization business, when they do get into it, is often just to get a top ranking in organic search results listings.
Taylor Walsh’s comment about the listserv for the Chevy Chase neighborhood of Northwest Washington, D.C., that he discovered reminds me of what I found when I visited the listserv for nearby Cleveland Park on Yahoo! Groups, http://groups.yahoo.com/group/cleveland-park
The site’s content is also built around emails — scores of continually fresh ones that point out neighborhood hazards, offer concert tickets for sale, do grassroots politicking, etc., etc. Of course, both Chevy Chase and Cleveland Park are very settled neighborhoods, so there’s a strong community base to tap into with a hyperlocal site.
What is sad is how PowerOne and its constituent newspapers had the hubris to believe that they knew better about how to structure and integrate the recruitment application than those that had been on the leading edge of the technology while the PowerOne constituents were poo pooing the whole Internet “thing”. The result of this being that CareerSite has been mismanaged, initially by the MNG Interactive people and then more aggressively by the POM people.
The surprising thing is that CareerSite has survived this long, the product being basically unchanged for over three years. But everything you attribute to a recruitment application was initially developed by CareerSite. It is sad to see it pass.
Note: Owen Medd was a cofounder of CareerSite and had served as CTO/System architect.
The rumor is that CareerSite will continue to run for 18 months, ostensibly to give the current customers time to unwind out of CareerSite and transition to HotJobs.
The PowerOne management has, in my somewhat biased opinion, pretty much gutted the ability of CareerSite to make any significant progress advancing the product the last three and a half years. Initially they tried to use the CareerSite technology base to advance their own C2 platform attempting to rectify it’s significant technology issues (cost and poor implementation decisions). Subsequently they froze any technology development or maintenance as they tried to get a handle taking over the CareerSite technology. The final death knell was when they elected to outsource a rewrite of the CareerSite platform to India without much understanding of the feature set and with no input from the system architect (that would be me… myself and Ed Farrell conceived CareerSite as I was exiting from the original Online Career Center prior to it’s purchase by Monster). This failed and the end result was the release of a skunk works internal project to address performance issues. I’m not sure how widely that was deployed to customers though.
CareerSite was pretty much doomed when Advance left, as Advance is very much a technology/platform buyer. Advance leaving meant that they didn’t see a future in the platform and that they were better served dumping their rather large investment (millions of dollars) in CareerSite and moving to a completely new vendor.
Owen’s facts on PowerOne Media aren’t 100% accurate.
But the bottom line is that PowerOne Media’s investors were never really ready to embrace the commitment and investments needed to build a national brand. And they were never strong enough to mange their local newspapers. PowerOne Media was caught in the middle of this struggle. Perhaps Yahoo/HotJobs, with its stronger brand and deeper pockets will have a better chance at success.
As someone that has been involved well beyond Owen and Isaac’s involvement, I have a few clarifications/comments.
There have been no layoffs for months, we (CareerSite) have actually grown and hired in several functional areas as we have continue to mature. Any layoffs or reductions have been with the POM corporate structure as products have been sold. CareerSite has grown and became the center of Enterprise infrastructure and development for the three remaining products.
Owen’s characterization of the current technology platform is somewhat inaccurate. While it is true that there was an attempt to outsource a rewrite to India by individuals that did not have any concept of what they were doing, the actual rewrite was completed in house and all of the customers completed migration earlier this year. The current technology platform is extensible, scalable, suitable, etc. The ‘legacy’ platform had become a little long in the tooth given its late 97 birth and lack of qualified oversight at the code level. The real problem has been a complete lack of strategic direction from the investors to define, fund, and build a product and brand as Isaac stated.
In terms of Advance, I would agree that their expectations based on the unrealistic promises of when the platform would be ready combined with the fact that it was status quo in terms of feature/function were the nail in the coffin.
The last year has resulted in completion of several internally initiated significant feature/function improvements for candidates, employers, and newspapers with several others ongoing at the point of the plug pulling. It was obviously too little, too late.
It is a sad event given that CareerSite has always had talented people wanting to make a difference but lacked investors with a strategic plan beyond acting as a low cost ASP that would answer to whichever schizophrenic newspaper group was currently screaming the loudest.
The author’s name is a pseudonym.
TV is in the cat’s seat when the convergence of media finally happens. Newspapers’ role is diminishing over time as their readership 1) erodes to the Internet and 2) gets older and older. People are inately lazy when it comes to getting their news. We watch television to get our packaged news by attractive anchors with full-color moving graphics. Newspapers require work, er, you have to read it.
I’m not a Curley fan myself. Where is the revenue model? It’s easy to spend someone else’s money to do cool, “cutting edge” things at the newspaper, but it’s quite another to have a legitimate business model that adds revenue to the bottom line. I’ve never seen someone put up on a pedestal so high that worked for someone else like this guy has. He’s a zippo lighter salesman at a caveman convention.
POM is and always has been a victim of it’s own gross mismanagement.
Coming soon to a tombstone near you:
Here Lies Another Faceless, Forgotten Dotcom
It’s hard to stay current with trends in any industry these days, but POM didn’t seem to know what horse it was on or how to ride it. That and the drearily common types of jackass hires for upper management – people more concerned with textbook management theory and ‘comtrol’, than with facing up to their own inexperience or lack of ability – seem to have sufficed for the K.O.
c’est la morte. Y’all will get better work somewhere else.
10,000 regular visitors is a great network and that would be awesome in the San Francisco market.
CareerSite is an interesting case study in terms of the politics and spin of corporate mergers. Certainly at this point the goal of all concerned is to put the proper spin on their involvement and move on to, hopefully, bigger and better things.
Information flow, the control of it, and the ability of a group to adequately analyze that information play an important role in any group’s perception of a set of events. CareerSite has had quite a number of groups involved, it has always been humorous to see what each of those groups is fed about a particular event and how they react.
I was just reading how the popular axiom “the winners write history” is slowly fading away as those who witnessed events first hand can easily share their viewpoints.
Local content, indeed.
As I’ve talked with very small businesses around Burlington, Vermont, where we’re developing Front Porch Forum, many do not have a website, AND do not want one. However, they are interested in advertising on the web.
So, we’re developing our sponsorship program with that audience in mind (in addition to the web savvy types).
Front Porch Forum provides online forum to neighborhoods. In our first two months, word-of-mouth brought 10% of local households to our member rolls. People are eager to connect with their neighbors and FPF helps meet that need.
Cheers!
PowerOne Media’s CareerSite, like most legacy job boards, relegated itself to a state of irrelevance by neglecting to satisfy and engage its users. Show me a job board (or search engine) that fails to deliver exceedingly relevant job search results, and I’ll show you a job board that will never reach its intented potential.
Yes, the Yahoo! (HotJobs) partnership will generate revenue for all stakeholders.
I think it is still to be seen whether yet another legacy job board (Yahoo! HotJobs) will produce revenue for the new set of stakeholders. After all, what is new or different about the HotJobs platform? Or Monster? Or CareerBuilder?
The primary differentiator is not whether a recruitment solution is “legacy” or not (witness Monster, HotJobs, et al, all of which are spawned from the Online Career Center/CareerSite “legacy”) but what sales and distribution organization is promoting the solution and how much content and and eyeballs they can gather. Who would have guessed in 1997 (hmmm… well, pre-TMP buyout) that Monster would be in the position it is in. Or that CareerBuilder would actually have survived to be where it is today? A well-organized sales/marketing/business organization with a crappy solution trumps a superior technical solution with lousy sales and marketing every time.
I meant to mention that it is my belief that a reasonable recruitment solution, with all the web 2.0 bells and whistles, integrated into the existing distribution networks and doing a reasonably good job of tracking where individual responses come from (and ignoring the myth of “relevant” job searches, as none of the existing job boards do a good job of producing relevant searches) is relatively straightforward to produce.
Properly targeting and promoting such a solution is the tricky part. Can you target a market segment that gets you critical mass on a local level and allows you to leverage that into a larger network play? Inquiring minds (and wallets…) want to know.
Relevancy requires engagement on behalf of both the employer and candidate to produce the necessary data points. Short of writing the killer app to read the employers mind based on a usually poorly written job posting or chaining them to their chairs to fill out a RedMatch style 10,000 question form, it usually degrades to keywords, occupations, and location. Particularly when newspaper ads are involved.
Clearly almost anyone can write a job board given that there are now over 40,000 of them out there. The lure of $400 job postings, $1000 resume searches, and tens of thousands of dollars in Google Adsense has created a porn site like frenzy to find a way to cash in before employers stopping wasting their money on the advertising PPC model and start paying for results. While distribution can be considered free given the Craigslist’s and Google’s of the world, effective distribution to engage a targeted set of eyeballs is not. Particularly when the passive job seeker is taken into account. Who wants to hire the people that are always looking for a job? The eyeballs you really want probably aren’t actively searching the job boards – local, national or otherwise. Social networking (SimplyHired, Jobster), resume mining combined with career progression prediction, targeted advertising placement (Dice), etc are all being tried. I agree with Jobster CEO, Jason Goldberg, in that the solution that gets HR to stop sorting resumes and start recruiting again will win.
Of course I am over simplifying and the argument could be made that for a significant percentage of job postings (especially newspaper listings), it is only about getting the position in front of as many people that are looking as possible. Something has to explain why the local oil change place paid a significant chunk of change for ‘priority placement’ on the local job board, mlive.com/jobs.
Finally, it has been interesting to see the latest commentary on CareerSite being broken, an anchor, etc but not one finger being pointed at the MNG, Hearst, and Advances for running into the ground through mismanagement. Despite it all, the product was profitable and continually signing new business. (Despite) CareerSite’s lackluster marketing/sales effort – it was obviously a viable product for providing private label recruitment sites. It would not require a ton of investment to effectively own that space with a superior product that delivers results.
Peter: I wonder a couple of things related to this newly engaged recruitment battle:
1) Whether this move, which effectively breaks apart any hope of newspapers collectively working together on recruitment, is a harbinger of things to come. It’s easy to see the same kinds of splintering — with the aggregators picking off news chains in small groups or onesies. We can see apartments, cars, and traditional display/exposure ads following the same path. How fast, I wonder?
2) How fast the inroads of social networks in transacting people business — classifieds — will happen? We can count in the tens of millions of dollars the craigslist effect, especially in the Bay Area, as the site has sucked at least that much out of tradtional newspaper pockets? My sense is that the recruitment companies and their aggregator partners still have at least three years of high-margin revenues, as the craigslist effect and other similar phenomena deepen.
Anyone have a sense of how fast it will move?
As the SES conference sections are dominated by representatives of various advertisers the SE’s still generate the most leads to most businesses and well optimized businesses benefit. I have one and have dominated my local field with strong optimization.
G sees this in their analysis of searches and is smart to stay ahead of the game. I’d keep an eye on what they are doing to attract more sme’s to their fold.
Dave
I was surprised by some of Mr. Perry’s competitive claims. Based on my own personal brand awareness, I wouldn’t have guessed that AutoTrader was that dominate over some of the other competitors.
Just for fun, I did a search for Chevy Suburbans within 25 miles of Philly (19019 zip actually). I only came up with 162, which is much different than Mr. Perry’s claim of 425.
Suddenly, I doubt all of the other metrics he sites as well. Is there an independent source for comparing traffic levels? It would be interesting to see if his claim to have “four times” the traffic of other competitors fails under similar scrutiny.
It appears that Kim did not use either Google or MapQuest. This from CNN’s report on Kim’s tragic death:
“Officers said the couple used a map to choose the road they were on. “They got the map out — a regular highway map — that showed the route,” Anderson said.
However, it wasn’t clear whose map the couple used. The 2005-2007 state highway map distributed by the Oregon Department of Transportation has a warning in red print, inside a red box: “This route closed in winter.” A Rand-McNally map did not have a similar warning.”
I was surprised to see business ratings and reviews by sources in addition to CitySearch.
From a user standpoint, there’s one thing I really like. I did a search for events at a place called “First Avenue” here in Minneapolis, which doesn’t carry your mainstream music acts.
I was able to look at their events, separate them by date and genre, and could purchase tickets online. It was not through IAC’s Ticketmaster, even though they are a TM venue. This was all without leaving the AskCity site.
You are right, JackOfAllTrades. The numbers don’t match at all…I checked Compete.com for some traffic estimates. They show AutoTrader at 5,564,966 UV/month and Cars.com at 3,603,126 which is hardly a 4:1 ration, if I am doing my math right..it is possible that Mr. Perry might be referring to Page Views or Searches or some other metric, which are extremely susceptible to differences in site design and web tracking methodology. Alexa is another free tool which gives some directional information. There data also doesn’t agree with the presentation (http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?site0=cars.com&site1=autotrader.com&site2=&site3=&site4=&y=r&z=1&h=300&w=500&range=3y&size=Medium&url=cars.com)
Peter, if you have the slides from presentation, do you mind posting it?
And Ask PR weighs in too…
“Search engines sit horizontally across the rest of the Web – over commerce, content, community or communication—they are not content, but get you there. On the other hand, Citysearch is the leading vertical content site for local information. Combined together or used separately, both serve their purpose.
Citysearch already gets a huge amount of traffic from search engines. Even a site like Wikipedia gets 70% of its traffic from search engines each month. Should you go to directly to Wikipedia or should you go to a search engine? It depends where you are in the process of investigating a topic. Your usage of a general search engine, like a Google or Ask, probably differs from your usage of a deep vertical, like a Wikipedia or a Citysearch, yet they are all part of the same ecosystem. And they blend well together in the middle of the spectrum.”
Additionally, 10% of Ask’s queries are ALREADY local–Ask is just trying to do a better job of managing those. To do that, Ask wants to give you as much information as they can in a reasonable amount of space, and if you want more, you can go to a content site, such as Citysearch. Or if you want to write a user review, you would go to Citysearch.
Strange that this article doesn’t mention the best of the free DA services: 1-800-free-411. It’s no surprise that 411Metro is in “financial straits.” I’ve tried both and 1-800-free-411 is the faster, more convenient of the two.
Pat: Actually, Jingle Nets is the producer of 1800 Free 411. Glad you’ve had a good experience with them…. Me too! PK
This is Chip Perry’s Response:
Peter, I can assure you that every statement I made at the conference was entirely factual.
Regarding the question about the number of listings I cited, our search results pages diplay on the first page the number of “matches” or listings that fit the consumer’s search criteria. The number I cited at the conference was the number of actual vehicles contained in the search results, which is greater than the number of “matches” that we show at the top of the page. The difference comes from the number of actual NEW VEHICLES that are included in the search results along with the used vehicles that match the consumer’s criteria. For example, when you do a search for “all” (new and used) Audi A8s within 10 miles of zip 30309 (where I live in Atlanta) you will see we display 11 “matches.” You will also see that the first “match” actually contains four individual new A8s from Jim Ellis Audi. We are the only site that presents new vehicle inventory this way. We call this kind of listing a “New Car Aggregate Listing” because we aggregate all the new vehicles from a dealer’s inventory that match the consumer’s search criteria into one listing. We do this to present a more easily scannable search result list than if we listed all the new cars individually. This type of search results presentation has been very well received by our users in both surveys and usability tests. So if I had used this example in Philadelphia I would have said we have 14 Audi A8s even though the top of the page says 11 “matches.” I probably should have made this clear during my presentation, but I hope this clears this up and I hope you agree that the comparison I made was indeed fair. By the way, we have a change in the works that will display the total number of vehicles, not matches, at the top of our search results pages. And you may also be interested in knowing that this unique way of displaying used and new inventory (we are the only major automotive site to do it this way) is very well received by our audience which is made up of 33% new vehicle intenders and 67% used vehicle intenders. Many consumers bounce back and forth between considering a new or used vehicle during their shopping process, and many consumers like to see a new car dealer’s actual new vehicle inventory before visiting the store or generating a lead.
Regarding the question about our traffic levels compared to our competitors, the data I cited came from a publicly available October 2006 Comscore Media Metrix report, which does indeed show that our users’ average monthly time on site is about 2 and 1/2 times higher than cars.com and 4 times higher than most of our other competitors including KBB and Edmunds for example. During my presentation I cited comparative statistics only about time on site, not unique visitors or any other audience metric.
I don’t dispute the Alexa or Compete numbers but in the audience measurement game there are many different sources and you know as well as I do that they all have their various and sundry strengths and weaknesses. We are very confident that among the automotive shopping sites we have by far the largest audience of in-market car shoppers and we are in fact facilitating by far the largest number of actual vehicle transactions. We have a large amount of anecdotal feedback from our dealers that supports this, and to prove the point more broadly we’ve just completed a major study on this which we will be releasing at the NADA conference in Feb 2007.
Don’t hesitate to ask if you have any other questions and feel free to share this with your colleagues in the blogosphere.
best,
chip
Worthy of a Greek Tragedy… Regardless of what anyone can criticize, it is absolutely unimaginable what James Kim would have felt in his heart as he fell for the last time. At the moment, he may have felt that he failed in his quest to save his family. How truly horrific! Immense contrition should be extended to all those involved. Likely, he is in Heaven now so he knows his family was rescued. This is extraordinarily painful.
Long live the MLS! Actually I’m getting a bit sick of hearing about Zillow all the time.
Great Site. I continue to see more of IDT in the local space and understand they actually have an entire division named IDT Local Media with a variety of local assets. Does anyone know all of them? What else have they invested in? At Kelsey I heard about http://www.localpull.com, http://www.click2talk.com, and HopStop. Looks like a roll-up strategy of some kind.
The interesting part of Chip Perry’s defense is that it seems similar to a shady dealership trying to explain why all of the sudden the price of the car just went up because of a trade. I can’t seem to find those “new car vehicles” even when I search using the “all” criteria.
Moreover, cars.com has always been easier to find a new car with it being one click away from the homepage. Whereas AutoTrader actually sells much of its new car traffic to Dealix which is a pay per lead format . . . something Mr. Perry says they don’t do. Here’s the path straight off the Trader home page:http://autotrader.dealix.com/step1.asp?refid=88888&detid=50000
Clearly he was caught fudging some numbers and spouting unsupportable statements. One doesn’t present data such as the number of Suburbans in Philly and actually expect someone to do a search and find far less than 400+. However, I found 193 to be exact compared to Car.com’s 105 based on Center City Philly Zip 19101.
The other part that Chips neglects to explain is that from a consumer standpoint Trader is far more cumbersome to use compared to other auto sites. Thus longer time spend on site trying to wead through their pay for better placement listings. When you look the Nov.06 Comscore Data, Trader shows 4.95 mm uniques and Cars.com has 3.86mm. 28% difference in audience not 400%
Thanks for taking it up with Chip, Peter!!
The way I see it, AutoTrader probably has the largest used inventory base (may be because they let dealers post vehicles for free…) and the largest audience (except for eBay motors, which has other categories too- parts/bikes etc.)…I guess they don’t need to “work” the numbers in such an obviously misleading fashion.
Nevertheless, I commend Chip for being so responsive to bloggers. Its a welcome trend in business leaders of today.
Metro D.C. media veterans will remember Washington Technology’s glory days when it was run by its founder, Esther Smith, who earlier started the Washington Business Journal. Esther, who today is a founding partner of Qorvis Communications, threw a spotlight on the then-nascent but promising technology industry of metro D.C., in the mid-1980s. By the time the WPost acquired Washington Technology, the D.C. technology boom was basically a story of contractors lining up at the federal trough. That made a lot of people rich, but it didn’t produce much entrepreneurial innovation, or interesting stuff to write about. How sexy can you make an article about a local company winning a “contract to configure commercial software solutions for billing and accounts receivable operations within the Defense Department?” Earlier this year, the Wall Street Journal drew up a list of the “Top 20 Inventive Towns,” based on the number of patents registered. Nowhere on the list was Washington or surrounding tech-heavy suburbs. Tthe list included 11 communities in Silicon Valley, which owes its existence to its proximity to Stanford and Berkeley. When the D.C. tech boom was gathering steam, Northern Virginia’s George Mason University set a goal of becoming the “Stanford of the East.” But that required a lot of money, and, beyond financing a handful of high-profile chairs and throwing around some scholarship money, the area’s tech titans kept their wallets in their pockets. Stanford’s endowment today is $15.2 BILLION; GMU’s is $41 MILLION. Now, that might be a good story for Washington Technology to look into.
Pretty funny and VERY accurate. As a long term member of the DC business community and one that serviced some of those companies….its a very unique world and one that doesn’t travel to other regions/markets etc. very well.
Well said, Tom
Is there a content aggregator out there that could provide reasonable recruitment tools, decent distribution (eyeballs) *and* a compelling story for newspaper properties? Even better if there were tools across the major classified categories in addition to recruitment…
The song says “two out of three ain’t bad”… My scorecard says that one out of three is the average score.
Is it possible to develop such an aggregator? Or does the politics of the situation make it impossible.
CareerSite marketing and sales has always sucked, it has never been the strong point at any stage of the organization. Despite the fact that product development has languished, the basic software premise continues to be viable and salable.
Passive job seeker, stop HR from sorting resumes… It is kind of spooky to see 1994 business plan common sense being sucessfully recirculated. Good to see it all coming back to light again.
Given that the CareerSite software experience has not been dispersed widely beyond Ann Arbor, I suspect we will see an equivalent software platform emerge for those customers that value a networked, brandable recruitment solution.
After all, why not 40,001 sites?
Regarding a good heat/ac man in San Diego, why not try Yahoo! Answers? They’re celebrating their first anniversary today — maybe you’ll be lucky. http://answers.yahoo.com
My only beef with autotrader is the inability to sort results by distance. IIRC, this functionality was previously available on autotrader a number of years ago.
IMO, cars.com is much more useful for that reason alone.
Peter, I think that there’s also the factor of online communications systems such as Skype, which combine messaging with audio communications. Vocal and person-to-person communications are still key, but these can now be combined with online content relatively easily.
The other factor is the power of implied endorsements from content. Personal communications are certainly the most powerful form of endorsement, but emails and messaging, a form of publishing, provide a different kind of endorsement than verbal word of mouth. An online message is something that can be repurposed easily for audiences large or small. So it’s a different kind of power.
I also wonder about the sample. Obviously it’s a very wide base of data, which implies that it reflects the relatively slow penetration of broadband Internet capabilities in the U.S. Certainly amongst the broad range of consumers the leading role of TV makes sense, but if you limited the sample to people who had access to both the Internet and TV, I wonder what the numbers would look like.
Massage is the #1 choice online?
Yikers!
Perhaps the difference between print and online usage is that print measures are done by asking people what they do, and online tracks what they actually do.
That’s why the ability to track consumer behavior makes Internet advertising so much more accountable than traditional media.
Perhaps it is because, instead, it is basically a flawed model? I looked up my wife’s business, one of the only full service interior designers in our town, zip code 55391…she came up on the 5th page. Others came up that were 20 miles away.
you are obviously one of those lame coffe cafe’ peep that think life is about sitting in some trendy lounge,reading some lame barnes and noble book,while yahoo’ing or google’ing,all the while sipping your over priced,bitter,multi worded trendy latte’ and waiting for the next episode of friends to air!!!….i’m from boston, and grew up with dunkin donuts…the crap they call coffe here in ca is a joke!!! maybe some day you can gas up your volvo wagon, and drive your dockers wearing ass to oceanside and have a real cup o’ joe and try the blueberry cake donut…it’s really good. oh and unlike lamebucks…it won’t cost you more than 3 bucks…and it will taste good for once……..
The way politicians work they will want all the ads to be priced the same, that being the lowest price paid for any comparable ad!
Peter, this Onliner post is one of your best, in my opinion. It’s full of insights that I’m going to suggest my team members read and review. A few tough points for startups to digest…but some opptys described, too. Thanks, Jeff Tadie
Interesting post. I just accepted an invitation to participate on behalf of Front Porch Forum in a session at Harvard later this month focused on the internet’s role in local politics. I wonder if OhioElects will attend?
The event is co-hosted by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society and the Sunlight Foundation. I don’t think it’s online anywhere yet.
#5 – Success with an internal sales people is the key to broadbased longterm growth – it is the “heavy lifting” that others work so hard to avoid…
It has been somewhat rolled out in Anaheim. I think the free model should work :)
This just goes to show that even great local content sites need a solid sales and revenue plan.
It’s a shame that these folks were let go, but unless there is a meaningful amount of revenue coming in, any property can’t expect to survive long term.
Viva local sales!
Without more information than this, it’s hard to say much about this development. But, in the spirit of citizen journalism, let’s give it a shot!
Perhaps BackFence isn’t aiming at the right target. Stories that appeal to an audience across a 50,000 to 100,000 population (e.g., “city council enacts smoking ban in restaurants”) may best be reported by professional journalist, as has been the case for generations, and supplemented by bloggers. Stories that appeal to residents of one neighborhood (e.g., “utility work closes Maple St. and Birch Ct. to through traffic this week”) are not of interest to the other 49,000 people in town.
So, a BackFence model runs the risk of combining (A) stories with broad appeal that may not meet professional journalistic standards with (B) lots of micro-stories that are each only interesting to a very small slice of their readership.
This brings to mind Cathy Resmer’s piece yesterday about local news and community newspapers.
For comparison sake, after four months, Front Porch Forum has about 6% of metro-Burlington, VT signed up while in early start-up mode.
Perhaps we were expecting from local web sites. MediaVidea asks: Where is the money in local news sites.
http://mediavidea.blogspot.com/2007/01/where-is-money-in-local-news-sites.html
Michael hits the nail on the head. I run/own a local site in a resort town (Sun Valley) where we blend a modest professional journalism team with an army of bloggers. Way back, I was a part of the early team at Microsoft Sidewalk (later rolled into Barry Diller’s citysearch) so I learned how it’s easy to hemorrage money with local websites :)
In the 2+ years since we launched the site, it’s become the #1 source for local information reaching a broader audience than the local papers, TV, radio, etc. and we are profitable (barely) but on a nice trajectory. We run very, very lean so there’s a hundred things I wish we could do but the top of the list is serving our community and making money and we are a bootstrap operation so some of those things will have to wait.
We’re always appreciative of feedback if you want to check out the site at sunvalleyonline.com. The thing I’m proudest of is how we’ve ignited the community to contribute news, pictures, personal stories, classifieds, etc so 80-90% of our content is created by the community. You can reach me at dave – at – (sunvalleyonline) – dot com if you want to provide me feedback.
Peter:
So, who’s surprised?
http://blogs.marketwatch.com/barnako/2007/01/boss_leaps_the_.html
Frank
Frank Barnako notes on his site that much of Backfence is of little compelling value, and sounds slightly “corporate,” which I found interesting, and responded thusly:
It is interesting that the content on Backfence, all of it the creation of its users, could be considered “corporate.” The neighborhoods Backfence serves in DC (I live in one of them) are not filled with people ready to disparage their neighbors, lay down accusations, or otherwise needlessly “ruffle feathers.”
It turns out that the content/community model adopted by Backfence carries with it the natural social communication constraints one finds at a local art show, along a game sideline or other public settings where people mingle.
The way to actually find out whether you can create an online audience that cares about this, of course, is to put something in place like Backfence. It is always good in this day and age to find a place that encourages civil behavior, but it’s hard to sell.
To my mind, the model to watch is Baristanet, serving the hyper-hyper neighborhoods along Bloomfield Ave. by Montclair, NJ (I once lived there!) The lead on that site comes from the Baristas themselves, who carry personality and point of view up and down the avenue.
I can’t tell how quickly the ad revenues are filling the Barista’s tip box, other than by observation there are more ads. And they are doing more cheap and useful things (a mashed map of coffee shops).
As has been observed about “hyper local,” and as Baristanet and many neighbrohood listserves demonstrate, when you are working a very dense local market like those around any metro area, it is tough to get sufficiently hyper and build a business model around it.
If Mark Potts can assume a Barista-like personna, he’ll still need to isolate the neighborhoods within say Bethesda, which has scores of them. He could do worse than to go to centralized Starbucks and put up a 3×5 card that says “B-town Baristas wanted.”
One of the things I think they’re missing in the equation is that you do need trained editorial staff. They’ve had a ‘hands-off’ approach since the beginning. It’s not working. The other, imho, is their clinging to ‘online-only.’ There’s still a little money to be made (in the short term anyway) from print sales. This could fund a small news operation (editor, reporter, sales, interns) for each of the regions, I believe. They’ve gone through a lot of funding so far. Best of luck to them, though. Hope they take these words to heart.
I had contacted backfence with regard to some potential advertising. I’ve got a local business in the DC area with very strong serps on a regional basis and am fairly savvy with regard to taking advantage of local visibility and seo.
The backfence salesperson with significant costs. Frankly the content wasn’t great for our audience. maybe we contacted them too close to this change in direction and the handwriting and pressure were already in existance.
BTW they never gave me a feel for traffic. So how could they justify advertising rates.
Its awful tough to make something like this work within a community.
I agree with you about the “crowded” mom’s space on the web, however the Modern Mom’s website really offers an organized approach to much-needed information. Thank you for sharing this site with us. I’d like to share our site with you, http://www.ForHerInformation.com ; a site for the conscious-minded woman. Our national PBS TV series and quarterly publication are also featured on our site, along with our new radio show and online newsletter.
It’s all about “community” for women; sharing ideas and solutions that fit into our busy lives.
Enjoy,
Beth Aldrich
Founder
For Her Information Media
I never understood how backfence planned to make money (which is ultimately what publishing is about. Editorial is simply there to stop the ads bumping into each other.)
How was backfence ever going to sell advertising? No plan, no experience. They recentlly bragged about having 500 advertsers in ALL their properties. The average Big City paper has 5,000 adverters!
The minute they did start making money –if they ever did– their local monoploynewspapers (the San Jose Mercury News, Washington Post, etc) could have taken all their advertisers away overnight simply by creating their own “backfence’” sites, then offering backfence advertisers free ads on that site, plus disocounted ads in the main paper. Newspaper ad reps are hardcore, and they have a great product to sell. Backfence would have been gone in less than six months, once their local papers took serious aim at them.
It’s taken the well-meaning, but naive founders this long to find out out that there was no future in this ill-conceived venture.
Yea, I’ve seen this vLog. It’s a must watch.
When it comes to being local – the old saying applies – Think locally – act globally – Her only problem was that she was to slow to obtain cities…you have to have numbers on the internet…Like http://www.DiscoverOurTown.com operates with 2000 USA cities..as everything cycles, some cities are seasonal on the internet while others are year around destinations…it takes girth to be successful!
The biggest problem in Backfence.com’s thinking was believing they could generate sufficient funds simply from advertising. Small-town/suburban hyperlocal paper publications often have to supplement their ad revenue stream by providing other services–or are parts of companies that have other revenue streams besides advertising.
Even with the best content and great blogging personalities, sufficient online revenue is *seriously* difficult to generate–unless you’re a crafty splogger gaming the search engines, or participating in some other kind of click fraud. Odd how online revenue seems to work in favor of the dis-honest than the industrious.
I’ll agree with Jeff’s initial comment… wow! Lots to digest in this one Peter… thanks! I’ll see if I can reflect on any of this on the Front Porch blog.
No surprise here. I feel bad for the folks that were let go, but again, they drank the kool-aid. Local portals relying strickly on banner ads and some google adsense revenue will fail no matter how much money is thrown at them. A “community” is smaller than 50,000 people. We already get enough news at this level from newspapers.
If revenue, much less profit, remains elusive in local online efforts like Backfence.com, let’s not give up on the idea of connecting people online based on local geography.
At E-Democracy.Org, we’ve been hosting very active online local Issues Forums for over a decade with extremely limited resources. We are now in seven communities in Minnesota and England. Our model starts with the low low cost “forum” at the center including a local volunteer forum manager and steering committee (think Rotary) and builds out from there. See: http://e-democracy.org/if
I think the starting point for local citizen media should be what can you do online for almost nothing that is sustainable and engaging. Then build up from there as your grow your participatory audience.
Steven Clift
E-Democracy.Org
So, who’s surprised?
Not me…
http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/weblogs/pressthink/2005/11/30/lz_bcfc.html
I’ve seen millions, and in some cases tens of millions, pumped into cityguide sites. AOL Digital City almost got it right…but overextended the cost side by deploying discrete market-based and self-contained teams…very few centralized efficiencies. However, Digital City did have deep rich local flavor and passion in its core 10-12 markets…in fact, “chunky and sticky” was the mantra for all the content staff. There was real opinion and editorial. Ad packages were ROI-based…with decent renewal rates. Sounds like Backfence was missing most of the passion, depth and thus, value…I hope they can survive and revamp…perhaps go narrow and deep in limited markets.
AdSense can be enough.
It isn’t enough when you have useless overhead.
(Is it acceptable to comment on our own comments? )
The quality of the content on BF sites is a function of the commitment to go only with user-contributed-material. So far as I know, this was a deliberate effort to put in practice what all the proponents of citizen journalism were promoting. It was born amid the clamoring about WE MEDIA after all. (And clearly in some neighborhoods, we be boring.)
The experience thus far offers some important lessons for others out plowing the local online garden (I’m one), some of which Local Onliners have noted here. That is all good. And maybe BF itself is adjusting the model based on that experience.
To my mind, thhe BF story should put into the grave at last the notion that a local online content business can ever depend on its users alone for content. Neighborhood listservs maybe.
I, for one, loved the name Backfence, even if I wasn’t really interested in the content. It may have been another story if there were a Backfence/North Vancouver, but I’m not sure. If the communities served by Backfence are anything like mine, they are served by three local community newspapers that are delivered free to the door. They all make money in a “community” of about 150,000. They also all have unremarkable online presences that could benefit from citizen reporting. A blend of local professional journalism and citizen journalism may be a more likely model. As someone who sees a lot of citizen reporting on http://www.orato.com, I agree with the comment that citizen journalism needs to be backstopped by professional editors who are respectful. You also need to have at least a few stories that are simply great fun to read.
This article has been posted more than once I see, but I’ll leave the same info here that I left elsewhere. About that #10: the Jingle service is called 1-800-Free411. Just in case anyone wanted to try it out after reading your post.
While I can certainly understand GMT’s fears, this seems be another example of “not-invented-here” syndrome from old media and it is likely to increase the probablity that GMT’s fears are realized.
I don’t buy these numbers at all:
“According to Borrell Associates Inc., National ads make up about 50 percent of overall newspaper ad revenue, but 75 percent of newspaper online revenue.”
They’re not even close…
Chris
(I had messed up the research. Borrell’s actual data is now in the article, corrected. Thanks Chris. Peter)
When there is credible, often exclusive content on a local news Web site, it will attract an audience. WestportNow.com, the 24/7 news and information source for Westport, Conn., has been at it for almost four years.
We get thousands of visitors a day who know they’ll often find content here they will see nowhere else (of if they do, its second-hand info days or weeks later).
Our stories and pictures are often cited and reprinted by others, ranging from the local cable news operation to The New York Times. Our package of 2006 Year in Pictures included 360 photos from more than 50 photographers.
When the content is good, credible, and presented in an attractive, professional manner, local Web news operations can succeed.
Gordon Joseloff
Publisher
WestportNow
No one leaked this story to the Journal. It was based on statements made during an analyst meeting, according to my contact at Gannett. She specifically mentioned comments made by Craig Dubow, but I’m not sure exactly what meeting or what comments.
The fact that two of the three publishers don’t want to talk about this is yet another indicator that it’s very premature. And though the Journal story provides great context and insight regarding the industry, I can’t help but think it’s got a lot of people making much ado about (yet again) not much. Front page news? Hmmm…anybody remember this story (front of marketplace section if I recall) which also amounted to nothing?
I disagree with Taylor – you can depend on users to provide content. But if users have no drive/reason to contribute, they won’t.
Look at the plethora of message boards out there with experts helping newbies – do they gain anything? There are reasons for their motivation in helping the newbies, and you simply have to tap into that same motivation.
If it’s just The Troika, can they really call it an “Open Network?” Or will others (independent and small newspapers) be able to join in?
Also, will “the others” begin to play a bigger and bigger role in the mediasphere over the next few years?
Backfence news may not appear to be the most interesting nor the most relevant unless you actually live in one of the towns it serves. As a resident of one of their communities it was a good place to get all the local information, find out who had eaten in a restuarant down the street and what my local politicos are saying… and yes they were all active on the site. Sure its not Hollywood simply a small Northern VA town and yes I do care about the dog park and the school playing fields.As for advertising well at least I can findmy local stores there not the big flashy big box retailers. I hope it survives all the speculation and continues to serve my communityregardless of its internal upheavals.
Here is the key….the best sales force in the nation maybe in the world. You don’t throw that away easily. The Telco sales teams are well trained, experienced and motivated.
This local ad “troika” and partnership stuff is starting to sound a little too much like the old “New Century Network” from a decade ago. http://www.businessweek.com/1998/12/b3570103.htm where there was too much “Us vs. Them” and giants being pushed together out of fear rather than trust/mutual value.
but then again, it could work like the other GMT ventures such as CareerBuilder and ShopLocal.
Will be fun to watch.
Major metro areas get the press, but don’t forget the “Wal-Mart” effect of succeeding in smaller cities with less competition.
My previous company published 390 directories, all but a handful were in suburban and semi-rural markets. I have no doubt that we would not have been able to compete in major metros. We didn’t have the skill sets necessary to be compete at that level.
But in our smaller markets, we were very successful. It’s the same online. You have to be committed to a strategy. The Big Apple may have the bright lights, but there are just as many opportunities in Peoria.
We have been using Valueclick to serve national ads. Are they not mentioned because they don’t focus on media sites? Why should I care?
Up and down we go, but I think Lisa Monaco’s ratings misplace the notions of best places for print publishers. In fact, as you point out McClatchy evacuated the Twin Cities because of its “slow” growth. Curiously, the Twin Cities has always been slow growth, well-known in newspaper circles for its slow but steady growth and ability to withstand recessions better than the rest of the country. That used to make it an enviable newspaper market. Now, I think the whole Northeastern/Midwestern tier looks problematic to newspaper companies. Why? They need high population growth markets in the South and West. There, the growth mitigates and masks to a degree the growing disfavor of print advertising. So they’re countering structural downturn with some short-term local market growth. It’s a good strategy in the short (2-3 year) term, buying some time until they can deal with the larger issues.
An understandable strategy, but it fails to recognize the long tail aspect of local search. The combined searches of all the second and third tier MSA’s collectively outweigh what we call the “power metros (Miami, NYC, Boston).” In print, it’s not possible to chase the long tail efficiently. Online, the rules are different, if not inverted. As Dick Larkin said above, “there are just as many opportunities in Peoria.” Our experiences online bear this out as well.
Mark — ValueClick doesn’t provide its advertisers with targeted media on a geo/behavioral basis. It’s a shopping. That’s what we’re defining here. I like ValueClick (sort of).
Interesting…from another Curley….my brother is Robert Patrick Curley, a very good labor lawyer in Philadelphia. Check out my blog and concact me if you want.
Sorry…mistyped the url
The worst part, by far, is the number of newspapers left hanging by this. Most of these online editions STILL seem half maintained, if that…just stuck in limbo I suppose. Not a good time to see that happen, surely.
This is a pretty appropriate area for these guys (incumbent local media companies) to be investing and a good way to monetize their existing market position. There’s pretty good demand and a large market that local media has a distinct advantage in selling to. It also isn’t clear that there’s an easy way to “craigslist” away this local advertising revenue stream as there are still reasonable back-end costs involved. It will be interesting to see how this shakes out. Can the local media companies organize their go-to-market efforts with appropriate focus and resolve?
It’s silly to think that web dollars will shore up print dollars and I wish that our trade media would stop even writing about the print / online paradox in those terms. Similarly the Barrett / Sappell debate should not be “debilitating” both strategies are valid on the web and both can and should be implemented with a few dedicated resources. My guess is the the real problem is The Times inability or unwillingness to go forward with either strategy if it doesn’t provide an immediate payback in the current budget cycle. Both the Washington Post and NYT are under similar cost pressures but are more willing to try unproven models in order to sustain a leadership position on the web.
Backfence. And the Backfence managers and employees that I’m leading are really pumped about our plans
People used to say how the Internet will enable the little guy to compete against the big guy. I have always taken the opposite tack: the Internet enables the big guys to pursue the smallest niche that previously was not high-margin enough to pay attention to. If the newspapers produce something at the local level that works really well, there’s nothing to prevent Y or G from devoting just a small fraction of their total resources to steal the market from that niche player. The newspapers have lost utterly; they just haven’t fully come to grips with that fact. Also, it’s fairly common knowledge that Google uses human editors to flush spam out of their search results on “head” queries on the long tail curve, so I don’t know why these guys think that their human editors give them a qualitative advantage over G.
Mark, the newspapers for years have produced something at the local level that works really well — the printed newspaper. Yes, key metrics are in decline, but it is still a good business. The reason newspapers have been so defensive against a wide range of local online products all these years is that they have traditionally had such a good business to defend.
Pure online plays seem to do a good job of chipping away at newspaper market share of data in a given category (jobs, cars, homes, retail, community news etc.). But they do so on an order-of-magnitude smaller cost and revenue structure. The outcome is value destruction in the advertising economy — less money to be paid and made overall.
No technology, no automation, no user-provisioned content initiative I’m aware of fully overcomes the change in ratio of content cost to advertising revenue when content-driven businesses move online.
Stay with me a moment here. You are correct that the big search companies use a variety of human-operated methods to improve the perception of match quality in search results. But those people are not placed in local communities for the purpose of management and enrichment of local data. They are hired to improve perception of their core products, where advertising revenues are derived from that match quality.
I get your point that local editors are a competitive advantage only as long as a global brand chooses not to invest in them. But I have not observed much interest from the Googles of the world in putting people in local markets to deal with local listings or even customer support. So far. I believe that reluctance has much to do with the comparatively small advertising market base for these products as they exist today.
The search portals’ investments in technology development and acquisition are indeed daunting — but those are economy-of-scale investments, not commitments to compete against local media with people in local markets.
True, all that could change if the economics change. Right now, however, we have more competitors fighting for leadership in the online local search world than the money generated in that world supports.
While that competition plays out, the newspapers already have good human resources in their local markets, should they choose to aim some of them at enrichment of searchable local data. My point is that we still have that advantage, derived almost entirely from the continued profitability of the print business, and should use it to grow competitive and enduring local search products.
It may be in your best interest to believe the newspapers have “lost utterly,” and in mine to believe we have not. I would not be quick to assume, however, that the whole industry is just ostrich-heading against some inevitable outcome.
Peter, thanks for the report on this. One thing I’d like to clarify is that our website is http://www.tristatehomeshow.com not the Evansville Homes 4U, which is a competitor site.
Also, I’d like to clarify the revenue on enhanced listings. Rate card rate is $29.95 and we have sold several at that, but there are also discounts bundled with several programs that, at least for the first year, would drop the average rate down into the lower $20s and bring that revenue down to more like $33-35k. It is still all new revenue and we expect that we may be able to bring that average rate up in year two. We have several other advertising revenue opportunities with the site.
Jim Michels
“Can’t someone find it?” Sure! People can. Ask the neighbors. That’s Front Porch Forum’s approach.
It’s not uncommon in our neighborhood forums for a member to ask the few hundred households around him “any recommendations on buying a new fridge?”
He’s likely to get several responses, some by email, others back to his forum, some in person when he’s walking the dog. He’s almost sure to hear about the local version of Pacific Sales and to “wait until their June sale,” or to “talk to my brother-in-law who can get you a deal,” etc. Neighborhood stories are piling up here, here and here.
So, yes, use the local shopping sites for research, and then ask your neighborhood forum to help hone in on the best local option.
Peter hey — There’s no way video can provide the kind of context for news that you get with words. Context is important.
At least those poor souls at POM won’t have to deal with the cheap nickle and dime jack-asses in the newspaper industry. One of the biggest reasons POM was not profitable was the fact that they did everything for free. If a newspaper cried a little bit then POM would create whatever enhancement they wanted, free of charge. That is a dictionary-perfect example of how not to run a successful business.
The candor that Andy Sack brings to his blog is astonishing and admirable. But the problem with candor is that it’s a bottomless well. As Andy Says, Yelp out-maneuvered Judy’s Book by focusing on younger (25-34-year-old) demographics and cultivating them with age-savvy tone and substance. But Judy’s Book owned the older (35-49) demo, and those soccer moms, and much more, represented 23 percent of of the total U.S. population compared to Yelp’s 14 percent slice. Not only was the Judy’s Book demo slice thicker, it was more rooted — more into what I call nesting than networking. Advertisers love young networkers, but they also love nesters, who earn more money (if measured by median household), are more likely to own their home, be married, have children and be generally more settled, and thus likely to spend money on all the things that nesters do. Initially Judy’s Book seemed to understand that it owned, or could own, this huge demographic slice. But it made no serious effort to exploit what it had. What it might have done is build local communities around these nesters. But the site’s bizarrely counter-productive rules prevented that from happening. Members were driven to become “City Editors.” To achieve that title, members had to raise their “Trust-Score” to 8 or higher. To do that, they had to maximize their “Friends,” postings and responses to their postings. So hundreds of members pulled out all stops to become City Editors, and get the gift certificates that went with the title. The easiest way to raise your trust score was to mindlessly seek out Friends from among members, regardless of your likely compatibility with them and to ask questions that you sent to all your Friends. It didn’t matter how dumb a question was, if it got asked of your Friends, and you had 250 of them, you could push up your Trust-Score. Not surprisingly, the quality of postings went down as the desperate competition got more desperate. Members appealed to JB to do something. Initially, JB managers said it was up to the members to hash it out. Many members, frustrated by the decline in content quality, either quit the service or went into hibernation. The result was a huge vacuum of content on JB — when it could have been building nesting communities across America. Finally, JB’s management discovered what many of its members had long since concluded, and went to work creating an entirely new mission — finding Internet deals. But there were already too many deal sites on the Internet. Plus, deal sites need the right kind of scanning software more than they need bargain-eyed Internet browsers. So that’s where JB is today — one more deals site that has alienated its huge resource of nesters, who, contrary to what Andy says, are active Internet kibitzers, and, in the bargain, have fatter wallets than 25-34-year-olds. If only Judy had been around to chart a sensible path.
This is interesting, Google seeing value in offline advertising. Many folks think that print is dead, and I for one disagree. I agree with Google saying to “stick to your core”, but newspapers are too enamoured with the Internet now and think they can outsmart local portals. Good luck with that, and take Google’s advice.
As an internet manager at car dealership, i can say hands down that autotrader is the 800lb guerilla. 50% of our used car sales come from them. we’ve begun using cars.com as well, but so far we get about half of the leads/contacts from them as we do autotrader (with a lower closing ratio).
The comment about autotrader aggregating all of a dealers new car results as a single match is 100% true – and VERY frustrating for the dealers. I guess it doesn’t matter though, as autotrader is nearly worthless for new car sales.
I am blown away by McCue’s scenarios for simplifying the user’s experience, which I’m sure will materialize not far behind the pizza order.
can’t wait!
“Marchex’s reasoning is simple: people may prefer to go to something as appealingly titled as newyorkdining.com than NYPost.com or SuperPages.com when they want to find a good restaurant.”
Appealingly? Man I could go on for days on this one.
1. What trust is there in newyorkdining.com? um, none! So why wouldn’t I go to NYtimes.com and trust them.
2. So Marchex is scraping content from the web and mashing it up as their own…oh boy that hasn’t been done before. They are walking a legal tightrope on this one.
Here’s what I think happened.
1. Marchex figured out that type in traffic off these domains is declining.
2. They are trying to figure out how to get search engine traffic and NOT have to pay anyone to write quality review content.
So the Marchex solution is to scrape content in the hopes of building SE traffic and branding…this is SO lame, and about 5 years late to the game.
Webmasters: Ban Marchex’s spider from your site and if they ‘use’ um…steal your content file a DMCA complaint IMMEDIATELY
Will we get a follow up to the ‘Un-Yahoo/Monster’ piece in terms of this deal’s impact to Adicio’s recruitment product? Combined with the loss of Freedom, Belo, et al, as well as the apparent impending loss of Advance to HotJobs, it would be interesting to hear your thoughts on how they might adjust their strategy. The NYTimes certainly didn’t ‘lack alternatives’ as Terry Baker said those that aligned with HotJobs did.
The five years too late Web 1.0 solution is what the newspapers deserve given their foot dragging on moving forward in the digital world. While they align with the brands, products, and strategies of yesterday, the rest of the web is moving forward into the decentralized Web 2.0 model. The definition of local will not be synonymous with newspaper but will be captured and monetized much more effectively.
Peter, love ya, but I gotta tell ya, until a site from the get-go stops sucking on the tit of category disambiguation and get me to some search results immediately, I am not going to label something Web 2.0. Type in Paintball in Vancouver and I get a disambiguation page – Paintball Sports or Paintball Supplies. Cut it out. Just give me the listings, I’ll figure it out from there.
Mousing over and scrolling down is just common sense, not really innovative. No find nearby on the flyouts for the the icons doesn’t give me the gigglies. And the ability to narrow down to those restaurants that take Visa and AMEX (all of them) ain’t enriching my life.
Still, nice design.
It’s an insightful vision for sure. However, it feels a bit like the classic “if you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail” syndrome. To me, the real challenging user experience and information product design dynamics cannot assume IVR to be such a silver bullet. DA services have been working to get consumers off the phone for decades, and stripping down the service model to name and number lookups, but the gap between IVR word recognition and “consumer intent in a localized context” is just plain enormous.
To me, there is a rich future in “conversational techniques, service models and technologies” that blend voice, mobile and, internet and employ search, browse,lbs and speech techniques.
I won’t pretend to know how this will look in 10 years, but it’s really clear to me that it is no more about putting Google as is on the phone than it is about 411 elegantly morphing into a super search tool with abilities to discern intent by the tone of your voice…
It’s a wide open space, yet to be invented, and-imho – incrementalism rarely wins in this kind of a challenge/race.
Selling a safe, smooth model to the carriers may be a smart bus development model when the carrier is worried, but the consumer market is highly unlikely to emerge without major disruption and reinvention.
One man’s opinion…
I still prefer the http://www.yellowpages.ca because it is easier to use and is keyword searchable and provides immediate results.
Nice try Canpages but you didn’t hook me. See ya on the next go around.
Can I say humbug? The company leaves inflammatory reviews (eg: This guy is from Al-Qaeda) to get companies to ‘register’ on their website.
Ugh …
I am a deputy managing editor at The Philadelphia Inquirer, and I will be there, hoping to say hello.
Can’t wait.
Carl
Peter, I would be interested to see where you get the 3m monthly uniques from? I don’t think even Yelp gets that at the moment.
Used cars should be purchased from someone you trust.
They might be able to monetize their videos using this method of embedding affiliate links in the videos.
firstpagefitness.com/blog/2007/02/06/embedding-affiliate-links-in-videos/
Here is a link to the WordPress plugin that fixes some problems.
firstpagefitness.com/blog/2007/02/27/problems-with-wordpress-stripping-out-affiliate-video-code/
We’ve done something similar with earning prizes for writing reviews to great success. Was it too costly for Insider Pages to continue the program?
OmniVisionLive keeps creating partnerships!
With Smalltown.com fast becoming a leader in local content web cards, Omnivisionlive has been building the video content in these markets for years. The products that we produce are much more than just video. After we produce the video products for http://www.Yellowpageslive.com and http://www.Restaurantslive.com we begin the process of marketing the websites to insure a Return on Investment for our advertisers. Through media partnerships such as ABC7news, KCBS, and Comcast to mention a few, we are able to drive substantial traffic to our sites to support our clients. Finally, there are packages out there for the local business person to get the exposure they need in their own back yard.
Best of luck to them, but I doubt they’ll have any success if they’re trying to get a toehold on the market beyond San Diego. The rest of the country has been happily using 1-800-FREE411 for so long now that it’s almost second nature to use it for info when you can’t be near a computer.
Ken Doctor, in his blog, http://www.contentbridges.com, talked to Grilly about his move:
“It’s about independence,” he says, going to a company that has fewer legacy ties to old ways of doing newspapering. With Philly’s large regional market and potential to innovate more quickly — a website redesign is on the way — Grilly also says it’s an opportunity “to be first.” First in innovating new solutions to what have been intractable problems in advertising revenue and editorial value for many newspaper companies.
Why is it always called “hyperlocal”. Hyper means “over” or “excessive”. Excessively local content would be a complete guide to my living room. It should be “microlocal” if anything. Calling it “hyperlocal stuff” implies being vague about the superfluous.
Peter:
A thousand apologies — this changed in a big way the end of last week, and while my head was spinning, I forgot that this was coming until it popped up in my feed reader.
Short story is that after the partnership began and was in progress, FOX pulled the rug out from under us and now the whole thing is off. I’ll be posting on that on our site presently, but I’m calling you right now.
Here’s the update:
http://www.pegasusnews.com/news/2007/mar/12/why-dont-plan-doing-business-fox-again/
I met Mike at the We Media conference in Miami a month ago. He was one of the few people at the conference who “gets it,” and his site is one of the best implementations of local content that I’ve seen. Fox blew it on this one. As Pegasus solidifies its position as the #1 online news source for Metro Dallas, the local stations will be needing a partnership with him.
Well, I just got one of these calls, and there’s NO review under the phone number. I would consider their ways not mended. My advice: ignore them.
I just got a call saying I had a negative rating. Not a good way to start the morning. Every customer that walks in my door receives top-notch service and I carry excellent merchandise. I have never had one complaint, only praise. It’s unethical for them to place calls like this.
I, too, received a call this morning telling me that my business had a negative rating with my customers. After checking it out, I found that no one had rated my business. How is that negative? The only negative thing I can see from this is that no one knows anything about merchantcircle. I hereby rate these jackals VERY NEGATIVE!!!! Anyone who would do business with these people doesn’t care Who they are associated with. BUYER BEWARE!!!!
This is a great resource…thanks
Along with each of the business people listed here, I do agree that these schamers are out to force businesses into registering to see their negative comments, which I can say for our business, is highly unfounded. We have always strived to give the customer our utmost attention and 99% leave extremely satisfied and with high recommendations. We monitor our own ratings through mailings done every three months and have always had good results. I wouldn’t believe anything you read on their website. I do not appreciate the negative phone call and it upsets me that even one of my employees should here that on our answer machine!
Thanks, Judi, Diane & Mike! I know now that they’re back in their ill conceived business. March 13, 2007 seems to be a common thread here. Fake complaints referred to in an answering maching message (some of you might have gotten email notifications instead), nothing to be found at the website. These skunks want MY business? I think NOT!
Thanks for the heads up.
Rich
When I read the title, I said, “Ohhhhhh!” loudly enough that people at nearby tables looked up. I was really enthusiastic about Mike getting a shot like this and it’s too bad it’s not going to happen. Nonetheless, I think Pegasus is going to do great things.
Merchantcircle.com uses deceptive advertising and unethical marketing practices. Below is an excerpt from the letter I just sent to the Silicon Valley BBB:
“My business was just phone-spammed today by a company representing merchantcircle.com — the prerecorded voice message said “a customer has left negative feedback about your business” and to “visit merchantcircle.com to view this feedback.” There is no feedback on my business; it’s a bait-and-switch scam, baiting business owners with non-existent negative feedback and switching to a sales pitch for their services.”
Other hallmarks of a shady company such as no phone number posted and having to hunt for an email address (questions@merchantcircle.com) would indicate to me that this is a company to avoid ANY dealings with.
Sounds like an awesome roster Peter! Great work putting the conference together with the Kelsey Group folks…
Look forward to meeting you in person – have been following your blog for a long while!
Colin
After receiving several emails and comments that Merchant Circle was at it again with the phony “you show negative” whatever, I looked into the situation. A Merchant Circle spokesperson confirmed that the company has a new ratings system (like Judy’s Book former system). Companies start out with a negative rating. The clever people at Merchant Circle apparently used this as the basis for a new telemarketing campaign, scaring people to go to their site to investigate. Merchant Circle would not provide me with a transcript of the actual message. My speculation is that Merchant Circle got its best results from the scummy negative review telemarketing campaign, and decided to rev up a similar effort when it fell short of its goals (but I do not know this). You know — they make one bad decision after another over there. If more local companies were like this, I would quit the industry.
Same deal here…Received an automated phone call this morning telling me my business got a negative review. It was obviously a scam to get me onto their site and register my business so that I could “manage” (delete) my reviews!
Mended their ways? More like changed their deceptive marketing practices!
Beware!
Now, in Feb 2007, Monster.com has a similar arrangement with New York Times company newspaper group (includes Boston Globe). so there seem to be 3 big groups: Careerbuilder, Monster, Hotjobs. I would like to see a chart that lists the newspaper affiliated with each group. but right now, it seems that to search for a job online with the national job boards, one would have to search all three of these groups.
Well…glad I found this site. I too received an automated phone call saying I had a negative review…and to go to their web site.
I wonder how many good business panic when they get this message and go the their site to fix the review…
Found this address on their site…
MerchantCircle
201 Main Street
Suite 100
Los Altos, CA 94022
The little guy is getting screwed in this internet age. What happened to the mom and pop shops that took care of you. I use these guys for all my rentals on the South Jersey Shore. They’ve been around for 70 years (before television or the internet) and know the area because they live there. I’ve been using them for years without a hitch.
Oh by the way… here is there sight (twist my arm), mccannrealtors.com
Peter,
There is always PiggyBack SEO as well. I actually wrote and published a post last night concerning this subject: http://www.firstpagefitness.com/blog/2007/03/19/if-you-cant-beat-em-join-em-the-art-of-piggyback-seo/
Based on the screenshots provided, the Yellowpages.com’s IPTV experience was quite compelling – the interface seemed quite intuitive for those accessing information using a remote control and no keyboard.
I could definitely see SMEs being interested in reaching consumers via IPTV – especially with the rapidly-decreasing cost of producing high-quality video (as was discussed so frequently during the conference)… And by 2011, self-service should be a well-established and effective sales channel.
Matt’s presentation was very informative, and I believe the company is well-positioned to succeed as consumers increasingly turn to the net, interactive TV and their mobile devices for information on local businesses.
Looking forward to the Kelsey Group getting the presentation materials online so we can check out the presenters’ PPT slides in greater detail… :)
Hi Peter. One of the points we made in the presentation was that individuals, for the most part, are better served by working with aggregators rather than doing PPC by themselves. On the organic side, individuals have a better shot at doing better for themselves — but they’d have to work pretty hard at it.
There remain many categories out there where SEM’s can still show well within logical searches in the SE’s. It’s possible with or without aggregators and should include ppc.
I’ve done it for 3 years.
Most businesses will be found off of an enormous variety of phrases that include a wide variety of business terms and a wide variety of relevant geographical terms. In this manner businesses can be found both in organic searches and off of versions of SE local (or google maps).
In one example my regional business gets about 1,000 SE/visits month from a variety of logical queries that combine logical geo phrases and variations on our main business terms. Of interest, typically within any one month, no one term will show more than 20 visits.
The long tail is a great way to attract business and convertable business.
Dave
From what I just saw today, they haven’t cleaned up much. I just got done ranting about them on my blog – sites like theirs give local search/review sites in general a bad name.
Nick’s presentation was extremely impressive… Looking around at the audience as he was explaining Spot Runner’s service, you would be hard pressed to have found anyone who was not completely sold on both their business model and self-serve system…
When Nick listed some of the per-spot prices (ie. the $10-12 you have quoted above), several people around us literally gasped…
I am definitely interested in using Spot Runner’s platform to run creative produced in-house, and could also see reselling their service to the SMEs we deal with through one of our other companies.
The one issue that immediately came to mind was that as this system takes off, the $10-12 in Santa Barbara could quickly become $1,000-1,200, negating much of the benefit of the service for the SME market… Unlike Google’s AdSense platform, the ‘real estate’ in the TV market is fairly limited and is not expanding at double and triple digit rates…
Spot Runner’s ease of use and degree of control would definitely still appeal to those larger organizations (as it obviously already is), who are less interested in cost-savings than small businesses…
Spot Runner is definitely a company to keep an eye on, and after hearing Nick speak, I wish I would have been an early investor in the company… They are destined for success!
“Crowley cited research showing that 38 percent of SMEs would be interested in such a self-service ordering process.”
I’d be interested in seeing the source of that data. Was it IPTVs own internal research, or did he cite a broader industry study?
Also, conversely, doesn’t this mean that for 62% of SMBs, self-service local online advertising is a non-starter?
Nice site, much better than the yellow page site which can be very frustrating to use…try searching for a Vancouver Restaurant and you get Fast Food joints, Restaurants in Calgary, Penticton, Victoria, Furry Creek and some Catering business…that’s not what I asked for…the Canpage site gives me what I requested…Restaurants in Vancouver with maps & text messaging…very cool….Good Job
1:25? Wow! Vegas has us at only 1:87 yesterday. Where can I cash in?
;-P
Sam Zell says news has to be relevant.Just who decides this question? I don’t consider crime reporting relevant to my life. I got so tired of reading it I cancelled The Tampa Tribune for over a year. I like to read about things in life that are useful. The BBC gives a news report tyhat last 30 minutes including the sports on TV. Our nightly news takes up 6 hours a day or more. Why? The English say “keep to the path” instaead of “keep off the grass” See the difference?
I will be watching Mr. Zell to see what he thinks is relevant.
The Big G’s been sniffing around Cheap-TV-Spots.com and their sister online TV ad agency BareNakedAds.com also. Both place quality ads on TV nationally or locally for less than a click-thru budget. BareNakedAds.com produces a TV commercial, in 24 hours, for free, as part of their inexpensive air time package. With dozens of international awards, and as little as $15 per nationwide airing, Cheap TV Spots and BareNakedAds.com are making it hard for any media company or any other discount agency to compete directly with them. They also make web and e-mailable versions of their ads for unrestricted distribution.
eBay’s growth is slowing because its maturing. Reports of eBay’s demise are overblown.
That being said, I want to point out that eBay is far from perfect and has plenty of huge challenges.
By the way, you are welcome to respond to my post.
if you liked hopstop, then check out two more of our investements in Qoof (www.qoof.com) and TripCart (www.tripcart.com). You can find a list of our portfolio companies on our website http://www.idtventures.com
The most likely scenario in which the Hearst paper would shift to online only status is if this move would be consistent with the provisions in its contract with The Times which enablie it to collect 32% of The Times profits after shutting down the paper.
After all, an online local news site isn’t actually a newspaper, since it isn’t printed on paper.
Aside from allowing Hearst to possibly have its cake and eating it too, this would allow them to fire fewer employees, and gain valuable experience with an online-only local news operation.
I just got the 2007 version of the San Diego Entertainment Book (I always wait several months into the year to get 50% off). It is a real disappointment. Many favorite merchants and restaurants previously had coupons, but they seem to have dropped out.
The book itself is about half as fat (maybe by design?) But it is still populated with less relevant coupons, some from more than 20 miles away.
These days, Entertainment.com makes you do an online activation before you can use your coupons. This allows them to update their coupons throughout the year. That’s good. But the “fresh” ones were just schlocky. I can’t imagine signing in to see what other schlocky things they have for me — a 2 for 1 foster freeze? I bet I won’t buy the book again, even at 70 percent off (that’s next month!).
Hi Peter,
Thanks for the write-up!
Our goal is to bring communities together, and make them more locally and politically engaging. People will be able to make new friends right in their own neighborhoods. We are taking careful steps to ensure privacy while protecting the power of our platform.
To this end, we have retained Tara Lemmey (Homeland Security Internet Privacy Committee and former President of the EFF) and Lauren Gelman (Director of Stanford Law School’s Center of Internet and Society) as Strategic Advisors. They are helping us develop a strong privacy policy while protecting the power of our platform. Fatdoor, we hope, will be a site people love because it will make their own communities more engaging, friendly and approachable.
Note: There will be no information about kids on Fatdoor. Also, telephone information of residents will not be exposed unless users voluntarily choose to publish it. We are taking very careful steps to ensure that the site delivers a very positive message.
Also, one note : Sanjeev Agrawal is early strategic advisor, but is not an employee of Fatdoor. He is still with TellMe, post acquisition by Microsoft.
Thanks once again for the post, I’ll be in touch,
Kind regards,
Raj .
Hi peter, ps. your readers can find out more info on my thoughts on the future and Fatdoor at http://www.fatdoorblog.com
Raj
Hi Peter,
FatDoor have a stand at Web 2.0 expo, but they’re not showing anything yet.
Here’s what I’m hoping: I’d like the service to allow people to complain/praise their neighbors as far as how loud they are, party-throwing, inconveniencing, etc. I have a *crazy* upstairs neighbor that had I known about in advance, I’d never have moved in…
OK, “online only” won’t happen. On 4/17, the two sides made their deal, and the P-I will be kept alive for at least nine more years. Under the agreement, Seattle Times Co. will pay Hearst $49 million, and Hearst pays $25 million to keep the JOA going until at least 2016. The deal gets rid of the need for The Times to account for “losses” and allows for more normal operations. It seems like a good deal.
Regarding MySpace’s failure to pull the offensive ads….. Peter Zollman notes in Poynter tidbits that airliners have a three day rule that any media org that takes their advertising is required to automatically pull it whenever there is bad news impacting them. Clearly, My Space and others have got to develop a similar system, across the board.
How many of these broadcast sites are in the top 10 classifieds sites? Is it not better ensure your core business is strong and secure than to venture in areas where there are giants dominating the space such as Ebay’s Gumtree, Craigs List etc.
ps. I do like your site, keep up the great work.
Mo.
Do not appreciate having Canpages left on my doorstep. DO NOT NEED THIS !!!!!!. When travelling we pay to have our mail looked after and then this useless item is dropped on my step and lays there telling the everyone nobody is home!! Even when we are home this would be IMMEADIATELY taken out to the recycling. What a waste of trees. If you want to continue this nonsense then you should have home owners permission to leave or you will open yourself to litigation if that home is invaded because of this useless info laying around on front step.
I saw the ad on another site this morning. Regardless of the tragedy this week the ad is offensive. We all know about the shootings over the years in the Rap community. This ad should have never been made in the first place. It’s very disturbing to have an ad poke fun at violence. The ad should be banned period.
“the paragraph is dead”?
I presume that statement is just for shock value. Watching video is just one of many modes that consumers of media can be in. Reading (and writing) text isn’t going away anytime soon, or ever for that matter. If a user wants to comment on a news story, do they have to upload a video to do so since the paragraph is dead? C’mon.
Peter, it’s a sobering picture for certain.
One looming challenge which concerns me is that thing can get a lot worse.
I sold a house recently, and the broker said she advertised in the newspaper because traditional clients expected it as a part of her commitment to ensure the property was visible wherever possible. However, she went on to say that the ROI was just not there, and at some point she hoped people stopped demanding it because it was the poorest return on her marketing dollars.
Her best ROI was on Craigslist, of course, followed by the vertical engine, Move.com, then various traffic local direct marketing tools and then the print newspaper.
If this is a looming “finger in the dyke” problem, it could get a lot worse as the general consumer usage patterns teach them that print placement may not be “needed” anymore.
the “shoot the rapper” add would actually bring up a camera to “shoot” the rapper with, not a gun like one would expect. The desired affect was to make the person think a gun would come up, but have it be a more acceptable image when you actually went to the add. Not saying it’s appropriate, but really thinking it was in reference to a firearm shooting would be the viewers own contribution and prior conditioning. A paparazzi photographer viewing the page might thinking of shooting the rapper with a camera first. It’s definitely an underhanded advertising tactic regardless
It’s nice to see this story getting picked up by an industry pundit outside of the Twin Cities. It’s extremely entertaining to watch the ongoing saga. This was a blog I wrote on April 13th….
One of the great things about writing a blog that includes some commentary on the daily newspaper industry is the endless supply of material. Every sufficiently large city has a daily newspaper, most are inept, and they provide a perpetual stream of things to write about. It’s not unlike The Showbiz Show With David Spade, where the primary issue is how to reduce the mountains of humorous celebrity fodder into a weekly 30 minute show. Like Spade and his writers, I don’t have to work too hard to come up with things to write about because I can just pick up my morning paper and, with an amazingly high degree of frequency, I am generously provided ample material. And it happened again this morning with a story about the paper itself and its new publisher Par Ridder who are being sued by Ridder’s former employer, the St. Paul Pioneer Press, for sharing sensitive information with Star Tribune colleagues.
While the story has been in the news for some time, new details are beginning to emerge about the specific information that was shared (customer lists, strategic plans, financial data, and advertising rates). But the best part of the story is Ridder’s claims about what he was actually doing when he sent emails to his colleagues with Excel attachments containing the information. When the Pioneer Press found out about the emails and the files that were sent, Ridder claimed he was merely showing the Star Tribune executives the format of the reports, which he liked. The communication then would have been, “When you open up these Excel files, please ignore the P&L data, the long list of customers we can go after, and the ad rates we can undercut. Just focus on the Pioneer Press’ masterful use of the Times New Roman font, their brilliant use of Microsoft’s color palette, and how they have built these tremendous charts and graphs. That’s the critical stuff we need to emulate in order to compete against these guys.” It’s as good as one of Mel Gibson’s drunken tirades or Britney Spears’ psychotic haircuts. You just can’t make it up.
Newspapers are certainly facing their share of challenges in the years ahead.
As per your previous post on IBM’s report that traditional media will continue to dominate throughout 2010, I think the business model of newspapers does still have some wind in its sails, though the sails are becoming more ragged and hole-filled everyday.
While newspapers are well-positioned to form community hubs and vertical engines, I question whether they will be able to successfully make the transition from their legacy business models to community/UGC-focused internet companies.
It’s been my experience that there are very few execs willing to cannibalize their revenue streams to capitalize on opportunities that are still just on the horizon and much more difficult to monetize. Their natural inclination to cling to these profitable but unsustainable business models will likely be their downfall as smaller, swifter and more tech-savvy companies with more focus, fewer legacy ties, the freedom to experiment with innovative revenue streams and little need for gobs of capital launch and begin to eat their lunch.
Companies that see the light and tackle the net with a ‘damn the torpedoes’ approach will likely do well as they already have a sales force in place, existing revenues and infrastructure (though much of it will likely have to go, as well as many of their employees who are not from generation net).
The local papers in this area (Metroland, Osprey) seem to be doing a fairly good job of making the transition, with Metroland definitely taking the lead by securing valuable domain names years ago, launching lots of web-only initiatives, etc.
It will be interesting to see how it all plays out. I, for one, would prefer to tackle the local opportunity from the position of a web-only startup than an entrenched player with lots of legacy ties – it’s much easier to be aggressive and push boundries. There’s a lot more up-side for the Davids in the industry than there is for the Goliaths, that’s for certain.
Shawn Riegsecker, CEO of Centro, put up his own thoughts on the NAA New Media Federation board.
I’m sure most, if not all, of you have read the press the last couple of days (a link from MarketingVox below) regarding how the revenue growth rate is dropping for online newspapers at a disturbing rate. All the trades are using this to further their assertion that the industry is hurting. There are two things to be said about this press:
a) I believe it’s misleading and is masking an incredibly strong growth in online advertising for the online newspaper industry; and
b) The chickens have come home to roost on a problem the newspaper industry created for itself when it didn’t separate forced classified upsells from “true” online only revenue
In a few conversations I’ve had this year, it appears print classifieds are down so far, specifically Recruitment, that it’s dragging the ‘attributed’ revenue down so far it is severely impacting the online financials. I was told by a couple of properties that their upsell classified dollars are doing so poorly that year-over-year first quarter revenues may be close to flat. Conversely, these same properties are reporting significant growth in online only ad sales…specifically banners, rich media, sponsorships and national advertising.
I guess if this industry lives by the sword of print classified upsells, it should get injured by the same sword (according to a Gordon Borrell posting in this forum, anywhere from 76% to 80% of mid-to-large newspapers’ reported revenue is in classifieds—mainly Recruitment; Gordon, please correct me if I’m misrepresenting your post). However, it’s my belief this press comes at an inopportune time and is masking an incredibly positive story for online newspapers. Here are the reasons why I think online newspapers, with the possible exception of Google, have the best story in the online industry to tell to Wall Street and the press right now:
- 11.5% increase in time spent Q1 2006 versus Q1 2007 (NAA/Nielsen)
- National online display revenue is approximately 300% higher in Q1 versus last year in the same period; this is a great sign as national advertisers lead regional and local advertisers when it comes to online spending; if national revenue is this significantly up, it means regional and local will be soon to follow
- Although maybe not statistically significant, I’m assured these numbers are directive and indicative of the overall online newspaper industry; according to the campaigns Centro placed with online newspapers since 1/1/06:
o Online newspapers increased their rates 16% from Q1 2006 versus Q4 2006
o Online newspaper CPMs have increased, on average, 32% Q1 2006 versus Q1 2007 (nice work)
- Brand advertising, for the first year in online, is expected to outpace Direct Response spending 18.5% versus 13.5% (eMarketer, 2006); this is great news for the industry as brand marketers look to associate themselves with premium content and editorial versus remnant networks and/or mail sections or technologies on portals; the brand dollars are already arriving at your doorsteps from national advertisers at a breakneck speed and the velocity of this is increasing
- Competitively, the page views are flat or declining in “content” sections on portals according to Comscore MediaMetrix (and I hope no one attempts to say its because of AJAX as our entire system is developed using AJAX and, having audited the amount of AJAX in the “content” areas of the sites whose page views are declining, it’s our assertion AJAX has nothing to do with declining page views); more likely, it’s because once users migrate to using Google as their starting point, they don’t use the content areas of other portals as they once did; also, as users become more sophisticated online, they gravitate to the source of all news and information which, as we all know, is online newspapers
There are other factors contributing to this but, suffice it to say, the online newspaper industry has incredible mojo and momentum in the overall industry than anyone else (once again, possible exception Google). However, the need to prop up its financials years ago using print classified upsells to show top line revenue and ‘profitability’ is now hurting the industry at a time when it has one of the best and brightest stories to tell. I’m assured this industry’s online only revenue is incredibly strong Q1 this year versus last and, over the long-term, this is all that matters and where we should try and take the conversation to.
Just keep in mind Austin Powers when he said, “That’s why right now is a very groovy time, man”. Have a great week…
Hi, Peter –
What do they have in common? All of the communities on the list are densely populated near suburbs or outer boroughs of major metro areas.
Why would outer boroughs/near suburbs be more “bloggy” than major metros, exurbs, or smaller cities? My theory: the nearby major metro daily soaks up the ad revenue that would otherwise support the local, usually weekly, paper that covers the near suburb/outer borough. The result is a metro daily that provides inconsistent coverage of their area, and a local news source with shrinking newshole. This creates an ecological niche for a placeblog or online community site for that neighborhood to flourish.
It’s true that they’re all in areas where house prices rose dramatically during the last decade, but you can say that about the near suburbs/outer boroughs of all of the top 50 metros in the U.S. So it’s not house values that are driving the creation of web-based local community sites: it’s shrinking and inconsistent news coverage in the tight band around major metros.
Outside.In’s Top 10 Bloggiest Neighborhoods was very interesting today. How inspiring to learn about the level of online community going on in these neighborhoods (including some former stomping grounds of mine!). I wonder how our little Five Sisters compares? I’d love to see the data. (Does anyone know if that’s available? I couldn’t find it.)
The Five Sisters (Burlington, VT) was named a top ten neighborhood in the United States in 2006 and many residents credit Front Porch Forum, a kind of neighborhood blog (to stretch the term), for contributing to the incredible sense of community here.
The Five Sisters forum has an astounding 340 members out of the 350-household neighborhood. Another 20 local officials (city councilors, state reps., school commissioners, police lieutenant, etc.) participate. In the past six months, 50% of the members have written… 630 postings total. Since these folks are actual nearby neighbors, a vast majority of the follow up occurs offline on the sidewalk or over the fence (that’s the point!). In this model, only residents of the neighborhood may read and write postings… it’s all about helping neighbors connect and foster community within the neighborhood.
The Five Sisters is the flagship of 130 contiguous neighborhood forums covering all of metro-Burlington and hosted by Front Porch Forum. In its first six months, about 20% of Burlington has subscribed to this free community-building service. Everyday folks, not just heavy web users, are making wonderful use of it. Front Porch Forum garnered a couple more community-leader awards last month and will be featured at the Personal Democracy Forum in New York City on May 18, 2007.
Peter, can you link to the source of this study?
While this study is nearly 2 years old, I seriously question the interpretation of the results.
I’d love to see the details on this study and the data. How were the questions phrased, where people were pooled from.
It’s apparent that the results are subject to subjective analysis given that 22% of American “strongly agree; which was likely just one of the 5 choices that could have been selected. I wouldn’t be surprised that 51% weekly usage stat was based upon those that answered that they “frequently” used the YP.
It’s been said that this guy is a good speaker. Doesn’t mean he has the model right.
These pre-made ad templates are the true opposite of economical branding. Who wants to share an ad with your competition, in your same market, as soon as you stop airing the ad? Who wants to be be baited by a seemingly low production rate only to be forced into a long term contract for overpriced air time?
I think the end user will eventually catch on to this sham and abandon all these unoriginal template companies in favor of inexpensive custom-made ads like those produced by the world’s first global internet-based discount TV ad agency, Cheap-TV-Spots.com. They offer a smart combination of award-winning, flat rate custom ads and honest, targeted air time that is significantly less expensive than any other online ad agency. Try them out to see. They also do not restrict regions for airings, so one ad, at one price, can air anywhere in the entire world.
Here’s the kicker: Their sister agency, BareNakedAds.com , produces custom TV ads for free and airs them nationwide for less than spotrunner says it could air in your example of Santa Barbara. Honestly, $10-12 per spot isn’t unusual, and real discount agencies often have an even better deal than that. It just shows how little most people know about local TV advertising.
I suspect that the template companies have a chink in their armor – that the end user becomes informed enough to see that these companies really don’t have anything significant to offer, and that it’s all a strategy for the purpose of posing for potential acquisition suitors. If you listen, you can just hear the self-service media bubble starting to burst.
A Smalltown Webcard (www.smalltown.com) costs $40 per month and supports many features, including the ability to play video. Smalltown Studios, our internal professional services team, will produce a custom video up to 3 minutes long for $300. If a customer wants a broadcast quality video, we put them in touch with a local video production resource.
We’re finding that the “home-made” low budget videos on our sites are much more compelling and informative than the professionally produced segments with high production values. Stock photos and videos don’t convey the unique qualities of a truly local merchant or service provider. When a local burger joint uses stock video or expensive production houses, they end up looking like McDonalds.
I’d love to see the new CitySearch design, but every single link I click to try to get there–including specific city links (e.g. sanfrancisco.citysearch.com) take me to WashingtonPost.com’s entertainment guide, which is powered by CitySearch (I’m a regular Post.com visitor but have probably only looked at their entertainment section a handful of times). That’s one powerful–and obnoxious–cookie!
The plain text (except for links) email done right is still the best traffic driving tool around.
We just got our weekly missive out late on a Friday afternoon when our traffic generally starts trailing off (about four hours off schedule). Roughly 4,000 opt-ins. We screwed up the first thousand (one of those weeks). And we STILL got a 7% clickthrough and a 50% bump in pageviews over the rest of the day.
Yeah, the gearheads want RSS. But most folks still respond to an email. And linked text works on any computer or handheld.
I have been working online real estate space since 99…saw so many people come and go. Zillow loaded with $57+M and most talent people you ever can met, I’m very doubtful they will succeed any time soon…they may figure out eventually…the reason is very simple : they do not have “the feel” for real estate…just not yet.
I met a FatDoor lead engineer in mid-Feb for a job at FatDoor…very smart, and decent guy. I still own him a demo. :) There are few reasons I did not deliever the demo…main reason I sensed that FatDoor soon or late will be in real estate space…so I am not suprised to see Peter’s post today….since my own startup ZeuPa will be in real estate too…
Social network provides the freedom in respect to space and time in people’s daily life….FatDoor sort of takes “space freedom” away….will be interesting to see how they will handle it.
I wish the best luck to FatDoor… ZeuPa and FatDoor will meet one day.
” A new site, FatDoor, however, hopes to look on the brighter side of having neighbors. The startup crawls the Web for publicly available info (College, job, church, clubs, blogs) and is being designed to help neighbors establish commonalities from the getgo, rather than sitting in the isolated silos of today’s typical “Bowling Alone” neighborhood”
it sounds to me that if you get to know your neighbors in such a virtual way- you will still end up having an “Alone” neighborhood. Sitting in front of the PC and learning about your neighbourhood- isn’t exactly interacting with your neighbours, you need to get up and out in order to do that..
P. Zollman riffs on the EVoter meeting here:
http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=31&aid=122900
A number of comments came in that were negative on Buffalo Rising. I have taken the comments down, since I don’t really know what the motivation for them were (competition, jeolousy, bad checks etc.). I do know that I find George Johnson to be an interesting observer and analyst of hyperlocal, and that the team has built a very good hyperlocal site.
Craigslist is popular to me because of its simple UI and lack of extras that we don’t need such as ads and other space taking elements of a site.
I’m not sure how much I really like that site. It has a nice UI and design but as far content, I’m not seeing much that is unique or different that would draw me to the site on a daily basis.
Raj Abhankyer provides more detail on his fatdoorblog.com blog, May 12: ….
“As part of our private preview launch, we are in the process of energizing the city of Cupertino, California. Since we have deep roots into the local community here, we thought this would be a good way to test our product in Cupertino in preview mode. To our delight, there seem to be more use-cases than we could imagine, here are some of the active communities we have seen form in Cupertino on fatdoor:
· Cupertino Block watch: Users have created block watch groups and signing-up their neighbors.
· Members of Veteran’s memorial at Cupertino Memorial Park: Users have created this group on fatdoor and are in the process recruiting funds for this effort to recognize soldiers from Cupertino/Sunnyvale who have died in the Iraq War.
· Political activism and fundraising: A few candidates are already recruiting new supporters and identifying lawn sign volunteer homes through fatdoor. In a couple of weeks, we expect to see all of the candidates for the 2007 Cupertino city council elections will have a community group on fatdoor.
It’s exciting to see that the Cupertino community is already fully engaged with fatdoor and finding new ways to connect with the next door neighbors! Look for our national launch – coming soon! “
This is a change in direction! Good luck! Glad to See that you joined the million unique visitors club! That traffic level makes a difference…Keep the traffic coming and that can cure all problems! I want to follow the success of the coupon looker – maybe a affiliate realtionship potential?? Call me!
We know why Judy’s Book threw in the towel on being a review site (difficulty in selling advertising to mom n pops), but to become just another one of several hundred coupon sites? And now the name “judy’s Book” doesn’t make sense. Judy’s Big Book of Coupons?
What am I missing here?
Judy’s Book’s leadership took decisive action to get out of the site’s rut. Hyperlocal sites that got no direction — none at all — produced a mosaic that had nothing in common. The sites were driven almost entirely by members seeking to win gift certificates or, at least, the city editor honorific. That didn’t produce useful or interesting content, but, too often, dumb questions designed to produce reponses. It was a perfect self-defeating model. Yet, Judy’s Book, despite all the bad modeling, had a fairly large audience of active users who, given direction, could have helped develop rich content across many hyperlocal communities. These folks were smart, passionate, articulate and willing to dip their oars. But then Judy’s Book decided to appeal to coupon clippers — the virtual variety. As others have pointed out, there are already a lot of sites devoted to coupon clippers. The original JB members, for the most part, are not devoted clippers. JB will have to attract new members to do the snip-snipping. In the end, you have to ask, would the original Judy — Andy Sack’s mother-in-law, a successful Seattle businesswoman — like to be memorialized as the inspiration for10-percent-off coupon clippers?
Brilliant article on what I have heard was a terrific conference. Solving for local in the auto industry is very much so a hot topic right now. This is very useful. Thanks.
Interestingly, although they had a “commercial investment” category where they planned to take an equity stake in a for profit company, it looks like they didn’t do any of those. (We were a candidate and made a couple round of cuts before being eliminated.)
Congrats to all the (well-deserving) winners. I’m a little baffled at why MTV needs a grant, but otherwise, my hat’s off.
I think the question here is – what is to stop Yahoo/Google/MSN/Ask incorporating this themselves (if it proves to be successful)?
Personally the moment I see a download I runaway. Far far away :)
Hey Peter, loved your coverage of the Centro event. It was great meeting you. (I’m that new guy they placed in OHIO of all places! haha). I was finally able to get over here and sign up for my RSS feed.
Thanks for the work you do! It’s extremely useful and insightful.
Talk soon,
kc
Great post for those of us who could not attend the conference. I’m wondering how the economics will pan out. So if I own a store front in the real world, what kinds of entry point will I get to my web site in the virtual world. Also, the mapping provider that develops the easiest APIs and gives financial incentives to the development community will have the advantage in this technology race.
that would be some technology and promotional campaign. The line will have to be drawn for those that don’t want to get bombarded with txt messages from their favorite retailers though.
I am an advertiser with Canpages in Calgary, and I read these comments and it makes you wonder. Some people have nothing better to do but “WINE” about the stupidest things”.Like don’t leave a phone book on my door step or I my sue.”….Get a life ! I personally love the book and it’s information and easy to read (larger print) format. Thank you Canpages for giving us advertisers a Great product at a fair price unlike the Yellow pages. Ps. Your new web site is the best!! Thanks
Peter’s review of Where 2.O was spot-on.
There are a couple of points that I would like to add for those of you who were unable to attend the conference.
Overall, I think the unintended but obvious theme of the Where 2.0 conference was that “Location cues are the key to unlocking the human spatial experience.”
Peter reflects this notion in his Takeaway #1. I am not sure maps are at the top of the data pyramid. Instead, it might be useful to think of maps as the representation of the data pyramid. As the base of the pyramid becomes broader and more detailed (more specific coordinate detail on world geography) more attributes can be added to the framework, making the entire dataset more useful for solving a variety of spatial problems.
It is clearly the case that maps and MLOs (Map-Like-Objects) are ascendant in the online worlds of mapping, digital earth representation and local search.
Peter’s comment # 5 resonated with me. It is clear that the big search engine companies are providing free tools and data to developers to push them to extend to boundaries of the known dataverse. It is likely the use of these tools by “local” teams will uncover new levels of specific detail about people, places, history, travel, economics, demography…you name it. But whatever it is, it will be crawled by the search engines, become part of their index and seen on their SERPs.
What is less clear is the influence these mapping and spatial display tools might have on the nature and structure of social search. Some companies are snapping up social networking companies in hopes that local search will meet social search and, as a result, the owner of the network will be advantaged by groups acting as “trusted authorities”. Other companies seem to feel less need to “own” the social search network, but want to supply the tools that will be used to pursue local knowledge and in the process create a “knowledge community”. While I do not think the tools were designed to be a “back door”, they may have the same advantage without the cloak and dagger. How these two trends play out will have a profound influence on local search.
Next, Peter hit the nail on the head in #10. Where2.0 has mutated into a kinder, gentler places. Unfortunately, it’s just not as exciting as it used to be.
Finally, something map-geeky. While listening to the speakers at Where 2.0 I found myself fidgeting and groaning. More tools, more capability, more mappers and a more examples of cartographic illiteracy. Examples include point data shown with area symbols, area data shown as point symbols and volumtric data shown by both point and areal symbols.
However, in the face of this pain, I have just one small request. For a start, remember that when using choropleth symbols (color or pattern to show classed data values by enumeration districts), the classes that you use to represent the data SHOULD be mutually exclusive. In other words, when you have a legend value for one class that includes the data valued from 1 to 10, the next larger class should start with a numeric value that is not included in any other class (so, you should not have 1- 10, followed by 10 – 20). Doing so makes the map much less useful to the viewer. Think about it.
I had the opportunity to attend Where 2.0. This was a great event (even for marketing types like myself) and there was a huge amount of energy around the show overall.
Nice write up!
Tooting my own horn here, but we had an explorer-like system over a year ago with the same idea (at least for businesses) – select a category, and go browsing over any area to find the x nearest points. ‘The Explorer’ it was called :)
Good ideas in here.
Hey.
I wonder if you saw my presentation at Where 2.0 on Tuesday at 11:05 on our Quakr project (http://www.quakr.co.uk). It is an attempt to do the 3d world using user generated photographs (currently pulled from Flickr).
The biggest hole in all the current mapping technologies is that they believe they are dealing with a single absolute set of data. There is no time based information inherent in the view of “THE Google Earth” or “THE MS Virtual Earth”. When a building is built, a shop changes hands or a public space is re-developed, the model is out of date and shows no historical references once it’s updated. Our project aims to use the fact that people are doing the photography already, are geo-locating their photographs already, and can pull all that data together to show any place in the world as it is AND was.
The major hole in the StreetView product is that it is entirely based on places that the immersive media video car can go. It will never be able to answer questions like … What’s underneath the Golden Gate bridge? What happens when you Bike/Walk down that lane?
It seems to us that these are important questions in order to properly orientate any person within the world.
I wonder if you have any thoughts on this??
Frederick James has built a hyperlocal search prototype for NYC at http://www.frederickjames.com
It lists every business on a block and allows users to virtually walk through the city, block by block
Hi,
When Mr. Cerf was at MCI, he had a website
called “Cerf’s Up”. Which was a great site on
the history of the internet and his vision of
where the Internet may go.
Some of the links were very good.
Since his move to GOOGLE, did the site go also.
Is there a BLOOG ?
Thanks
Any links available to Where 2.0 Video Content??? Great article – Thanks.
There’s nothing shatteringly new about post.com’s Local Explorer, but it’s so well packaged, and new layers of open-source content can be added. The only disappointment is that the news links are to stories that aren’t hyperlocal. That’s because the Post doesn’t, yet, have local-local contributors, staff or “citizen.”
I got a phone call today at work. It was a recording that “claimed” I had a review posted by one of my customers about the service at my barber shop. The recording went on to say that all I needed to do was log on to MerchantCircle.com and type in the business phone number. Then I could read this “review”. Well, I typed in the number. Then the site told me that I had to register to read the review. This was free registration, or so it said. I will soon find out. So, I registered. There was no review. I had been tricked. Then I found where to “unsubscribe” and did so immediately. I tried to find a way to contact MerchantCircle.com. I found nothing in the way of a phone number or e-mail address. I found this site.
Your report sounds very interesting. Any chance a non-member can get it?
What might be a good match up for newspapers is NearbyNow and their mall search thing. Maybe this is what you meant by #7. I know my roommates look through the newspapers before going shopping at a mall to see what might be on sale. I’m sure NearbyNow/the malls would be happy for teh traffic. It’s all local.
That could hit #2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, and 9.
Wow! I used to work at PowerOne Media when they were simply AdOne in NYC. I’m with a new software company after freelancing for a while and wanted to just call them to get my old 401k rolled over, but now… I doubt they would even have the information anywhere for me. It’s a good thing that it wasn’t a big chunk of money anyway.
Still it’s sad to hear this happen because I liked the people I worked with there and I thought this company had a chance to last. When they merged and then left there was a lot of issues with trying to make all the software work because we were moving forward with things like XML and Java at the time and the other company wasn’t even close to that technology. Still I never had a good feeling about the merger and look at what has happened.
Hmm. What a mess.
$12m of stock in an OTC stock doesn’t seem to smell right for an online classifieds business that ‘grosses $5m a year’. Do you know if that is ‘grosses’ as in gross merchandise value or actual revenue (i.e. 3-5% of that number)?
The sale price seems low based on the financials reported.
#4 – Vertical Directories is certainly of interest to me, and I agree Peter that it is a direction the papers (and magazines) have to go.
I say “have to” because those that do successfully merge content and commerce will be the ones with sticky local traffic.
Keep up the great work Peter.
Steve
Nice read but I have a few corrections. I worked at cars.com for 6 years….they do not send leads to 10 – 20 dealers. The site user can select up to 3 dealers they would like to do business with for a New Car product and used leads go directly to the dealer.
I am now with Web2Carz.com a Used Car listing site with New Car Quote service and Car Loans. In my experience with SEO for Google and Yahoo I found that having keywords or a link or two is just not enough in this very competitive space (Automotive). Without high ranked SEO friendly links to dealer sites which are not offered by any major player in the Auto Classified space and SEO optimization of the sites this effort might simply not gain much ground.
Jim, I think Web2Carz.com can help you gain some ground in your uphill battle. If you are interested feel free to email us.
Alex
Don’t kmow if this is the right site.
I need someone to sell my odds and bobs. I live in Delan
Same sort of thing happened to me just now, Brian, and we are listed on the Do Not Call Registry as well. Decided to check up on them first and I’m glad I did. If they lie about access to that first review then imagine what else they may lie about. The reason they don’t post better contact info is that they would be beseiged with irate calls or messages most likely! Wouldn’t trust these guys if they were the only reference on the web.
Sprocket Entertainment’s Stan Simmons, who I didn’t get to talk to before writing my post, wrote me an email about Sprocket’s newsletter. Sadly, he says the comedy nights may not last, and the newsletter has probably been more of a mixed success than I presumed.
“Currently our list is slightly over 1000 and the only advertisers are those we barter with (both hotels Carlsbad Inn & Tamarack) or the ones that purchase our business sponsor package http://sprocketent.com/become_a_sponsor.htm,” he says.
” Since we were emailing our list of upcoming shows on a bi-weekly basis, we decided to advertise our sponsors and maybe drum up interest in advertising in the newsletter which we thought would be a minimal charge per month if we got any takers. We haven’t really aggressively sought out advertisers due to the Carlsbad Theatre being up for sale and it appears that after 5 years of high quality comedy shows we may be seeing the end of the ‘West Coast Funnies!” in Carlsbad depending on the new proprietors.”
Peter- Call next time you come through Atlanta! 404-488-6965
good to know that websites are now considering travel as part of their portal… travel industry is the worlds most promising if not the most profitable industry on earth.
It sometimes amazes me how these patents get awarded in the US. What is new or innovative about crawling a website for local information? More to the point how can it be claimed that there was no prior art?
This is definitely a strong case for hindering innovation. Most innovation tends to stem from startups and as Clark writes “you go after the small guys and establish a track record.” The long term damage these exercises pose to US tech should not be underestimated.
I am deeply saddened by these sort of activities and I for one will not be using local.com (which isn’t even that good anyway) anytime soon.
It turns out the announcement of The Verizon trials were a prelude to a five-year contract with CallGenie, which was announced June 26. It is likely that Verizon will plan to deploy CallGenie’s technology in a number of its markets.
What a bunch of hooey. Good luck proving you “invented it.” when there are a ton of sites and open source projects that have been doing this sort of thing for years. How about this one…definitely one of the later local search developments since it only goes back to 2002:
http://www.google.com/programming-contest/winner.html
Not even worth the paper it was written on! Good luck getting acquired for that “wonderful” patent/IP! Someone should fire the person who cam up with that brilliant idea!
I’m not a particular fan of the sentiments Heath voiced, but they are a busienss reality given today’s litigious environment. Yes, there is substantial prior art, but it may never be heard by a jury.
Patents, like laws, are considered binding until they are legally disqualified. Having a patent means that you are obligated to protect your rights in and to the IP by enforcing the patent. In general this means either threatening to enforce the patent (usually to accomplish some market strategy) or by actually enforcing it through claims of infringement and damages against a specific business or group of businesses.
Unfortunately for smaller businesses, claims of patent infringement can be devastating, since it will cost approximately $1 million to mount a significant defense. What usually happens is that several smaller players cave and the owner of the patent moves on to try and fry bigger fish.
From a legal perspective, this is where the game gets interesting. Bigger fish can afford to mount a defense. The biggest fish may even attempt to have the patent invalidated. It is at this point that prior art, anticipation, etc, become critical parts of the process. Until then people can argue about validity, but doing so accomplishes little except raising your blood pressure.
Next, remember, patent infringement is really not about what’s right (although we could all wish it were so). It’s about some lawyer standing in the courtroom with a jury composed of people who watch the Jerry Springer show, opening a laptop, showing a local search application and then pointing to the defendant and saying “This software from (Insert the Company name here) is exactly what my client invented and they stole it from him and have made billions in the process.” In reply, the defendant’s experts are going to explain how the algorithm really works, how computers really work, how databases really work and as the eyes of the jurors start glazing over, the plaintiff starts counting his money.
If you want to consider a real nightmare in patent law, look at Markman Hearings, a critical part of any patent lawsuit.
The Patent process is the U.S. is broken ! We need to find a way to fix it, not to complain about it being screwed-up.
Oh, that’s just lovely – a business model based on “go after the small guys” who can’t afford the lawyers. Have we lost all perspective here? In what respect is that an ethical or honorable or productive way to think about business?
If people can find loopholes in the system, be it the patent system or the search system or whatever, in a way that allows them to make money legally without actually contributing anything or having a real idea or working for a living, well, whatever. It’s up to us to change the laws. But let’s not pretend, Mr. Clarke, that there is anythin