Newspaper to Offer 'Simplified Search' Product
Search-engine marketing firm TrafficLeader, whose technology supports BellSouth€™s "Real Search Engines Solutions," announced a deal with the Houston Chronicle to sell search marketing to local businesses on a similar €œflat-fee, guaranteed clicks€ basis.
We had predicted €œsimplified search€ would make its way into the newspaper arena before long. The deal represents the first formal announcement of such an arrangement with a U.S. newspaper.
Local businesses can currently buy such products from select Yellow Pages publishers (Dex Media, BellSouth), vertical directories and Web hosts (Interland, Affinity Internet). In addition to TrafficLeader, there are several other companies in the market that are enabling simplified, guaranteed clicks products to be sold to local businesses, including SME Global Solutions and Inceptor. Local SEM firms like ReachLocal, LocalLaunch, Leads.com and LocalLead also provide similar offerings.
The entry of newspapers — as another category of "small business aggregators" — into this arena means that SEM is being commoditized at the local level. In a year, in any given metro market, there could easily be several players offering these seach marketing tools to the same pool of SMEs.
The Houston Chronicle and its related Web site are owned by Hearst Corp. (which also owns YP publisher White Directories). The paper is considered the seventh-largest U.S. daily metro paper.
If the product sells well to local advertisers in Houston, expect to see Hearst expand it to other markets where its owns other newspaper properties.
The challenge in the newspaper space is "execution." There's a wide range of "sophistication" here at NAA. There are a great many people who "get it," and others who do not.
This type of thing is a product that newspapers can sell advertisers and/or use to try and expand their advertiser base.
Some of the top tier (NYTimes digital, KRD, Tribune Co., etc.) have a "strategic vision," others are still in the very early stages of figuring out that the Internet is not like a print newspaper and that they need to do very different things in each medium.
The internal cultures (as well as limited resources) of these organizations may mean they hesitate and stumble in formulating and executing an Internet strategy that will be competitive.
Will newspapers be simple resellers of third-party stand alone search offerings or do you envisage more strategic plans?