MerchantCircle is joining the ranks of companies creating local and vertical content, including Demand Media, Associated Content, Examiner.com, AOL’s Seed and Patch, Perfect Market, Helium, Brafton Media and others. MC’s new Local Content Studio is being helmed by Andy Halliday, who many of us remember as former head of eCommerce at Excite@Home, who has since been engaged in several entrepreneurial efforts.

The basic idea for MC’s Local Content Studios, and the others, is to create optimized content that can be used to economically and efficiently spur local traffic to its directories and profiles, while driving ad impressions. Presumably, MC will have an edge over rivals via 1.3 million SMBs that have claimed profiles on the service, covering 95 percent of U.S. communities.

The SMBs may be seeking to build attention for themselves (i.e. real estate agents), and/or earn awards or make a little cash –$1 or $2 per article. The cash can eventually add up: some SMBs, in early testing, are already being sent checks for $300 and up.

The Studio is, in fact, may be seen as an extension of MC’s Answers division, launched last September, in which members are encouraged to provide their expertise on a wide range of subjects (where to fix, how to fix, etc.). Both efforts are part of a broader effort to broaden Merchant Circle’s identity and engagement with consumers and businesses beyond the core directory.

At the heart of The Studios is an online authoring and publishing system which can support thousands of simultaneous content development projects. The projects can be claimed by local merchant members or other writers remotely, submitted, reviewed for approval or corrections, and published to local and topical “Expert Pages.”

Merchant Circle VP Darren Waddell says that the creation of the Studio does not alter Merchant Circle’s extensive and successful relationship with Demand Media, which includes syndication of MC’s Answers, domain registration for MC members, and expert articles and other content to MC profiles for $9.95 per month, among other activities.

MerchantCircle’s efforts to launch more local content is not occurring in a vacuum. We have watched with interest as Yahoo has been developing local news and information via the hiring of writers in New York and San Francisco, and recruitment of writer/editors in San Jose, Chicago and Denver, per reporting in Paid Content. Their written and edited material will likely be paired with material from Associated Content, which Yahoo purchased this spring. It represents a very different take than Patch.com, which is hiring journalists for hyperlocal reporting in up to 500 communities.

Appointments are seen as the next frontier of e-commerce and advertising, as online and mobile-centric consumers increasingly look for the immediacy of booking electronically.

The appointment space is a competitive one, however, as several companies jump on the opportunity – although some are working special niches, such as medical and auto dealers. We’ve previously written about such appointment-centric vendors as Full Slate, BookFresh and Appointment City. Maxi-Page, another contender, is one we’ve also watched with interest – in part because its CMO is Jean-Pascal Lion, the former YPG executive.

Lion says his interest in appointments stems from his role as a spinning coach and his work with Studio Cycle, which covers 18 gyms in Quebec. After a year, Maxi-Page is now powering spinning schedules for1,500 customers. Almost all of them use the online interface, although five percent reserve the old fashioned way – by phone.

Customers book their appointment, get calendar updates for multiple platforms (Outlook, iCal, Blackberry) and receive a confirmation and an alert reminder. “Users really love that,” says Lion. In addition to Studio Cycle, Maxi-Page is handling appointments on a white label basis for a wide range of verticals in Canada and the U.S.

But Maxi-Page, which has 10 people and operates from angel funding, can go further than basic appointment related info, which generally costs about $50 per location. It offers both “lite” versions and full versions that include a wide range of local business functionality, such as request for quotes. Offer/coupon publishing, and reservations. It also connects via Facebook Connect, and is available in French, English and Spanish.

Such functionality makes it ideal for partners such as Yellow Pages publishers that have strong sales channels for local verticals, says Lion, who considers sales a critical key to success.

Ad agencies have never really been a major part of the world of local online advertising. Apart from some geotargeting for their national and regional clients, they haven’t paid much attention to the many opportunities in local (geo-target banners, local search, couponing,directory and social).

Where there has been agency support, it has been largely on the certified marketing rep (CMR) side that is moving Yellow Pages/directional media dollars around to IYPs and other local “service” media. Companies like TMP’s 15 Miles and Wahlstrom have done well with this, as have more broadly configured “third party resellers/SMB engagers such as ReachlLocal, Yodle, WebVisible, Orange Soda and Clickable.

Other groups, such as AdReady and PaperG, have acted as agencies for clients as they provide local “versioning” for them. Best Buy, for instance, creates different ads in Phoenix than in Miami. AdReady does a lot of versioning work with major clients such as Alaska Airlines. Vertical ad networks such as Adify have also gone into geo-targeting, as have media placement services companies such as Centro, which has worked with mega-advertisers such as GM on their local initiatives.

Recently, however, we’ve been seeing ambitious local initiatives at several of the large agencies. From what we can tell, the initiatives have been spurred from the client side, as national and regional clients have watched local’s momentum – or should we say “Geomentum,” which is a division of MediaBrands, which itself is owned by InterPublic Group, the third largest advertising agency holding company. It has a nine person leadership team, and can also draw off of MediaBrand resources.

We talked with new Geomentum President Lisa Bradner, who most recently served as a Forrester analyst. Bradner told us the problem has always been that it is so much easier to buy national. Local provides all kinds of insights and understanding about clients. But the challenge is to make it scale, she says.

Her efforts will focus on helping people understand the granular research on how/where to spend local. It is a combination of testing and measurement, she says. Whatever happens, advertisers are cutting newspaper spending, and they’re looking for new ways to reach people locally. Verticals with a strong local component such as retail, financial services and insurance will each do well out of the gate, she suggests. Consumer packaged goods and pharmaceuticals also have a local component, but “they’ll be slower to get there.”

What many advertisers want to know is how they can effectively localize their advertising from market to market – an effort that has been worked on intensively by specialists, such as Gannett’s ShopLocal. “Walgreens might lose sales in Poughkeepsie for different reasons than Santa Monica,” says Bradner.

The key is to “take it below the DMA level,” says Bradner. “You want to target the great white space between 1:1 and the DMA,” something that Bradner dubs “one to some.”

Classifieds haven’t been especially enhanced by mobile apps – although it is nice to have them on the go when shopping for a car or a house. But Oodle keeps pushing the envelope with its effort to bring the world of social media to classifieds.

The classifieds site, which also acts as a platform for clients such as Facebook and WalMart, has now added an iPhone app that CEO Craig Donato says is less about search than it is about making it easier to post items. “We’ve made it really simple. You post an ad, take a picture and you’re done,” he emphasizes. The iPhone isn’t just a phone, he adds. “It is a wireless camera.”

The app also makes it easier to see what you friends (and friends of friends) are looking for via Facebook Connect. Roughly 70 percent to 80 percent of the site’s traffic is via Facebook Connect, says Donato. “Mobile and social are very interrelated.”

Friends that have too many friends (i.e. 2500 friends) kind of water down the exclusivity on this. Their friends could be just about anybody. But it still interesting. “Classifieds exist as a second degree of connectiveness,” says Donato. “The amount of want ads is very high,” especially for items such as tickets.

Donato notes that other efforts at Oodle have been moving along, including its Oodle Pro reputation management-and-classifieds placement program, which has just gotten its 1,000th customer. “People (especially Realtors) use Pro to get leads and to focus on taking advantage of other social features.”

High school sports have been the centerpiece of many hyperlocal efforts. They bring to the table highly passionate fans, families and players in the hard-to-reach 12-17 year-old demo.

But the economics of school-by-school efforts don’t always work, whether for branding; region-wide advertisers and advertising sales; production needs; data and content acquisition; or site infrastructure. Just getting the scores on a timely basis has been a major chore, much less coverage rights. Various athletic councils tightly control play-off rights. Consequently, it truly makes sense for sites to be developed on a regional and/or national basis. But to date, nothing has been especially effective.

Gannett is making a fresh go at it, however, with Highschoolsports.net, adding to its roster of other vertical developments (moms, shopping etc.) A startup version of the site was acquired in 2007 from entrepreneurs who tried to leverage their customer base for Schedule Star, a software program first created in 1964 that manages athlete data for 7,000 schools.

The site hasn’t developed much in the three years it has been owned by Gannett – it is currently only in 13 markets in Florida, Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio and Tennessee. Each of the markets contains multiple schools. Indianapolis, for instance, includes nine schools.

Now, the site is under new management and things are expected to change quickly. The company has now announced that it is ready to launch 38 markets by the end of August, and 100 by the end of the year, which it expects will bring it 9.4 million unique monthly visitors. The initial flurry of rollouts includes major markets such as Washington D.C., Atlanta and Denver.

Gannett’s local TV, newspaper and Web properties are attached to each rollout. There is also a tie-in with Gannett’s USA Today for national content and cross-promotion.

While the sites are geared towards national and local advertisers, there is also an e-commerce play via MyLocker.net, which provides school, team and league-specific clothes for 110,000 custom online shops. Gannett owns a minority share in the company, which promises to give a portion of sales back to their school-partners – up to 17 percent when the schools themselves initiate the sales.

The larger question is whether Gannet intends to try to go truly national with highschoolsport.net by teaming up with other media companies that also have their eye on high school sports. Tribune and Belo, for instance, have also been developing high school sports sites in several markets: Tribune, with several sites under different brands that have been retooled from My Varsity Sports, and Belo, with High School Game Time.

That’s the approach being taken by HomeRun, a 25 person San Francisco startup launched by AdRoll co-founder Jared Kopf, which recently recruited former Intuit and GoDaddy Exec Bob Olson as SVP of Sales Using HomeRun, which launched in October 2009, members of your social network can see what you bought and when you bought it.

The site was financed in part by Catalyst Media’s John Durham for an amount that Kopf says would make it #4 in deal a day raises, following Groupon, Living Social and BuyWithMe, which has raised $21.5 million. It currently serves seven cities, including New York, San Francisco, Seattle, Los Angeles, Washington DC and San Diego. It also has a limited presence in 19 additional markets. In its core markets, the site has a mixture of feet on the street and telemarketing.

Kopf, a social vet via an early tenure with Slide, says the transparency will add depth to user profiles, and also provide participating advertisers with a better market sense of what worked.”It is a friend graph in the same way that Facebook is,” he said. “This is true social buying.”

Like Facebook, users can decide the level of privacy they wish to invoke. For instance, they may want to make a restaurant deal public in hopes that their friends will join them; while keeping offline any buys of retail goods or elective medical treatments.

In addition to public viewing of acquired “Daily Steals,” HomeRun seeks to differentiate via “Avalanches,” which trigger progressively reduced prices for all bidders when certain thresholds are reached; and The Private Reserve, an affinity type program for top point earners, such as special VIP tours that cannot be purchased. Says that Private Reserve offers “early access and preferred access to what a city has to offer.”

Another program, Beginner’s Luck, is described as a welcome wagon type program that provide free or discounted offers for new members, such as a free Latte or hot cocoa. The deals don’t require any buying thresholds.

In a discussion with Paid Content, Patch President Warren Webster discussed Patch’s check list of 59 variables that the site uses to determine which new towns it enters, including a first cut that consists of town population between 15,000 and 75,000; having better than average school scores; and better than average household incomes and voting penetration. A second cut includes qualitative characteristics such as walkability and the presence of an active business community.

While the site hasn’t focused on revenues to date, Webster told Paid Content that it has had some experimental advertising, including banners ads and business listings that can be upgraded into advertising. It also has had some geo-targeted national advertising for campaigns such as Pepsi Refresh. The site also plans to syndicate the data it is collecting on local communities to marketers.

There has, of course, been a blind assumption that if AOL is investing, than hyperlocal is finally ready for prime time. It is too early to come to that conclusion – witness The New York Times’ pullback a few weeks back from The Local, its aborted hyperlocal effort.

But AOL CEO Tim Armstrong’s vocal and consistent support for Patch, which he founded in 2007 as a side project when he was at Google, is definitely seen as validation for multi-million dollar investments by others. These include other news-centric town site nets such as Main Street Connect; Content creator sites such as Examiner.com, and city sites that breakout neighborhood info via zipcodes such as Allbritton’s TBD.com in Washington DC, Citysquares and various newspaper efforts.

Hyperlocal commerce sites such as Merchant Circle, DataSphere; Matchbin and ShopCity should also be seen as part of the mix. So should sites that have hired human writers to supplement local news feeds, such as HelloMetro and Yahoo Local. Event sites such as Zvents and Eventful are also part of the mix, as are sites that have a lot of events and local in them, such as Center’d and American Towns.

City guides that are more metro oriented, such as Citysearch and Yelp, should also be part of the mix, as should social directory sites such as YP.com, Local.com and MojoPages.

So – what’s the prognosis? We certainly like what we see at Patch. The town sites are attractive; they invite interaction and have a good “human” feel – some more than others, often based on how long the town site has been open. The longer, the better.

The aggregation of events is good and so is their mapping. There is also some intriguing video that draws people in. I especially enjoyed the contentious town meeting in my hometown of Chappaqua, NY. A lot of the infrastructure is more economically produced by central resources.

But in truth, Patch’s success or failure won’t ride so much on content and feature differentiation. $50 million is a lot of money. But it represents the scope of the project, not the individual sites. You wouldn’t go to a Patch community such as Westport, CT and say it stands head and shoulders above other local alternatives, such as Hearst’s Westport News, Main Street Connect’s The Daily Westport, or Westport Now. Patch’s young and enthusiastic reporters are sometimes better (or not better) than their young and enthusiastic reporters.

What Patch’s ultimate success really rides on is changing local user behavior so that people feel compelled to check out the local patch at least a couple of times a week. It has to be a bigger swath than the older homeowners who make up the primary audience of community weeklies – it’s got to be everybody. And then they’ve got to sell SMBs from the directory level on up – much of the effort probably riding on self-serve. And then they’ve got to get the geo-targeted national advertising going.

Patch hopes to get over the hump by having enough of a footprint in its communities to begin marketing in a major way, perhaps, I speculate, on TV and radio and online. For sure, it is an exciting effort, and no one should dismiss it out of hand. In fact, AOL is spending the money and making the effort that could, in theory, save local journalism and hyperlocal commerce for everyone.

ShopCity, a storefront and marketing platform for SMBs, hopes to jumpstart its reach via a new “City Manager” program that allows local media partners to secure local URL rights owned by ShopCity (i.e. ShopMountainView.com) and market its services. City Managers, who handle sales and marketing as well as community relations, share revenues from storefront and marketing sales. They will also get a piece of the action from ShopCity’s community marketplace and upcoming daily deal feature.

One example of the program is ShopCorona.com. In this case, the SoCal city’s economic development division actively helped to market the platform to SMBs, greatly simplifying the city manager’s job – and winning an 80 percent participation rate among local businesses.

Embarcadero Publishing, a seven-title Bay Area group, is ShopCity’s charter media partner, having secured the rights to ShopPaloAlto, ShopMountainView and ShopMenloPark. Embarcadero has also begun actively soliciting support and business participation, landing partnerships with the chambers of commerce and municipal governments in all three cities, and ramping up for a September promotional campaign.

This summer, the Silicon Valley publisher hired a bunch of college kids to canvass the business community, showing off business profiles with a dedicated ShopCity iPhone app. “The response has been overwhelmingly positive” says ShopCity CEO Colin Pape. “Small businesses really identify with our ‘shop local’ message and we’re generating a lot of goodwill by providing them with a complimentary profile page and online storefront.”

In other ShopCity news, Pape says the site is also building out its new national local shopping portal via ShopLocally.com , a URL that it recently acquired.

Some people (like me) don’t like games. Game mechanics-driven “check in” media like FourSquare, GoWalla, Loopt and BrightKite mostly leaves them cold.

But what if check-ins triggered group buying discounts? That’s the concept behind GroupTabs, a new service launching in New York City next week. The idea is that offers could be floated on smart phones with a one or two hour window, and users can check in at the location. When enough people arrived, the discount (“20% of Wine Bar Purchases”) would kick in. The location pays a fee for the promotion if they reach their threshold.

Led by former Citysearch sales exec Zane Friedman, GroupTabs began development in April. It has adopted Foursquare’s open API for check-ins, and plans to work with other check-in systems as well. One modification it has made is that it requires check-ins to be made at the location: Foursquare lets you do it all from your home or other locations.

“We give people a reason to try LBS (Location Based Services),” says mobile vet Josh Malin, who is part of the three person start-up team. “Immediacy determines what they’re doing. They are not in it for the badge.”

Malin says the site will begin with one deal a day, and maybe add several deals a day after it starts adding some volume. He anticipates that the deals will be much smaller than Groupon-like deals, since they’ll mostly be tailored to bars and restaurants. Average deals might have 20 or 30 buyers. When New York is fully developed, additional markets may be pursued, perhaps up or down the east coast, or San Francisco.

GroupTabs will obviously be limited to busy metro areas. Not many suburban areas will have 30 people ready to buy a drink down the street when they are gassing up or whatever.

The latest attempt to make hyperlocal a sustainable reality came today with Allbritton Communications’ launch of TBD.com, a hyper metro site for the Washington DC area. Allbritton, which has sunk “under $5 million” into the project to date, hopes it will grab hold of the DC audience in the same way that its Politico has done with political types – simultaneously via the Web and TV, where it takes over the slot formerly held by Allbritton’s former News Channel 8.

I’ll say right off the bat that I like it a lot. Although I had the opportunity to visit the newsroom with other members of the BIA/Kelsey team about six weeks ago, I got my first glance at the site today. My takeaway? It’s fun, useful and totally up to date with social and mobile media.

Most importantly, it seems like something I’d probably read (and watch) everyday if I still lived in DC. It just seems natural and un-self conscious – completely opposite DC’s staid (and untrue) image as a stuffed shirt of a city; and other hyper metro sites that I won’t name here, but make NPR seem wild and crazy.

The site integrates, a little, with Allbritton’s WJLA TV, and it is co-located with the WJLA newsroom. You’ll see the WJLA programming schedule and its landmark weather reporters Doug Hill and Bob Ryan headline the weather page, for instance.

But it has a totally separate identity, helped by a dozen writers lead by former Washington City Paper Editor Erik Wemple. As Wemple notes in a public letter: “One of them writes nothing but lists. One is all over pedestrian life. One holds politicians throughout the region accountable. Three carry a year-round obsession with the Redskins. Three are covering some of the fastest-developing communities in the region. Three are the final authority on all things arts and entertainment.”

The entire site will eventually ramp up soon to about 50, including the TBD News team carried over from News Channel 8, and six community reach-out staffers.The site also seamlessly integrates with 129 DC area bloggers and picks up news from all the DC sites, including The Washington Post and also from WJLA competitors such as WTOP-AM. And much of its substantial neighborhood news comes via a news filter that sorts by zip code.

It has also taken some unique approaches that only time will tell will pan out, such as TBD TV, the “companion” channel that takes over from News Channel 8, the 24/7 news channel that had been featured on cable and dish services throughout the metro area. It features programs that sometimes borrow WJLA personalities (i.e. The Arch Campbell Show,) but also has begun to produce some of its own unique offerings (i.e. Capital Golf Weekly).

The site was initially slated to launch at the end of August. It is obviously up early – the testing URL leaked and they decided to roll with it. Consequently, the mobile apps (i.e. “All over the iPhone, All over the Android and All Over the Mobile Web) aren’t ready yet, although they’re being promoted; and there is a lot of content that you’d expect to see that isn’t there (i.e. high school sports) and exurban content. It is possible that they’re leaving the tough (and expensive stuff ) for the thinning Post to cover

But we know there are plans to do other things that will be totally innovative if they pull them off, such as having local bloggers for the site featured on the local news when there is a hot breaking story (i.e. the fighting among 70 teens at L’Enfant Plaza Metro station the other night).

The advertising strategies also aren’t fully unveiled, and the site will obviously focus on building up an audience first. Currently, you’ll just see some run of site ads such as Belfort Furniture and contextual tile ads, such as The Washington Ballet under arts, and McCrea Heating and Air Condition under weather.

Will this site ultimately be self sustaining? That’s the big question. It is expected to lose up to two million dollars a year as it gets going. But if the site maintains its promising start, the local dollars should theoretically follow. Another question is whether the TV companion will take off.

In the course of writing this post, I was chatting about the site’s debut with hyperlocal pioneer Rob Curley, who ran The Post’s ambitious hyperlocal strategy two years ago before moving on to Greenspun Communications’ Las Vegas Sun. Curley was very enthusiastic about the site’s design. The amazing thing is that they probably showed that sites are more likely to win with a TV station as a partner than a newspaper, he said. That’s food for thought.