Local Distribution Deals Keep Rolling: Marchex Taps New Vertical Partners
There seems to be no shortage of announcements from local players that wish to increase incoming content and distribution. In the past few months we’ve seen Citysearch feed content and ads to Local.com, AOL and Marchex; Idearc do the same with Marchex and Local.com; and Yelp feed 2 million reviews to Local.com (to name a few).
The idea is, the source of content gets more distribution for its advertisers, while the distribution partner gets more content, enhanced user experience and sometimes a revenue share on performance-based advertising that now resides on its domain.
To continue this trend, Marchex announced a handful of content partnerships today to enhance some of the vertical content in its network of 150,000 sites (26 million monthly uniques). This will include reviews from Yelp and attorney ratings from Avvo. Altogether, the deals add 5 million ratings and reviews to Marchex’s network, bringing its grand total to 8 million.
The rest are below (from the press release):
Yelp.com: A site where people read and write reviews of their favorite neighborhood businesses. Yelp will be providing more than 2.5 million reviews that Yelpers have written about everything from restaurants and spas to dentists and mechanics. The site had more than 9 million unique visitors in the month of March.
Avvo.com: This leading attorney rating service, which profiles hundreds of thousands of attorneys using information from state courts and bar associations, Web sites and the lawyers themselves in addition to reviews from users, is providing its Avvo Rating and user-generated reviews for thousands of attorneys across the United States.
HealthGrades.com: Under expansion of an existing relationship, the leading health ratings organization is providing detailed listings for more than 750,000 physicians and will be adding more than 5,000 hospitals nationwide.
lilaguide.com: This resource site for local parents will provide more than 150,000 user-generated reviews and recommendations for parents on local shopping, baby gear, activities, restaurants, daycare and other parenting resources.
Restaurant.com: This online dining resource is providing reviews, restaurant photos, wine lists, links to menus and discounted gift certificate offers from thousands of restaurants across the United States. Restaurant.com customers have saved more than $50 million through their gift certificate program.
Gusto.com and Urbanspoon.com: These leading restaurant and travel sites are collectively providing tens of thousands of customer reviews of restaurants in select markets across the United States.
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Related: Marchex Chief Search Arcitect Matthew Berk will speak at next week’s Drilling Down on Local conference in the following session. Hope to see you there:
Wednesday April 30, 2:15 pm – 3:00 pm
The Online City: Close Up on Seattle
Seattle is the real thing as a tech capital. It is also our muse for new ways to present local news, information and services. Who better to discuss “the online city” than Patricia Lee Smith, The Seattle Times’ online leader (and a creator of The Times’ great NW Source). Joining Smith is Marchex’s Matthew Berk, the Seattle-based creator of OpenList and a creative leader in providing new ways to access local information.
Speakers:
Patricia Lee Smith, Vice President, Interactive Media, Seattle Times Co.
Matthew Berk, Chief Search Architect, Marchex
