A recent Kelsey Group Web poll of certified marketing representatives, the sales professionals responsible for national Yellow Pages advertising in the United States, indicates greater support for syndicated usage research among those working for larger agencies.Of the 24 CMRs representatives…
Online auctioneer eBay is moving aggressively to shore up its leading market position by reducing the risk of becoming too reliant on Google's dominant search share. Recently, eBay has negotiated large deals such as the integration of its PayPal unit's…
Mike Fordyce and his partnership team at Ingenio were busy last week finalizing several deals. The first was with Local Matters, which is integrating Ingenio's pay-per-call network into its AreaGuides.net network of Web sites. Local Matters is in the middle…
YellowPages.com, a joint venture of AT&T and BellSouth, announced it will provide search returns for the Yellow Pages and Find A Site sections on the Anywho.com portal. Anywho.com has roughly 3.4 million users per month. Since its acquisition by the…
The Knot has finished courting the Wedding Channel and consummated a transaction valued at US$57.9 million in cash plus the issue of 1.15 million shares of common stock. The Wedding Channel has won several key patent lawsuits in the past…
Reuters is reporting that Schibsted, Norway's largest media group, has agreed to acquire Trader Classified Media's Western European and Latin American units for 580 million euros, or US$746.7 million. "Among Trader Classified's properties are Spanish online job site InfoJobs.net and…
I'm at the Where 2.0 conference in San Jose all day. The conference setup is a singular track of rapid fire sessions —many of them 15 minutes in length involving a single speaker with trusty Power Point deck in hand.…
eBay announced that it would begin adding "Skype Me" buttons to certain categories of listings for a test trial period starting June 19. The trial is an early step to accomplish several goals resulting from the $2.6 billion purchase of…
Lots of press coverage out of the U.K. on the Yell rate cap preliminary ruling this week. We will offer our full take in this week's Local Media Journal, but we thought a sampling of the U.K. coverage on this…
I've lived in Marin County, California, for almost 20 years now. For three-quarters of the time the Pacific Bell/SBC/AT&T Yellow Pages directory was the only one available. A couple of years ago, Seig Fischer and his Valley Yellow Pages team…
Sensis, Australia's leading Yellow Pages publisher and diversified media company, has a tall order to nearly double revenues by 2010. A Goldman Sachs analyst suggested that only through acquisitions could Sensis reach its goal. The key question is, what properties…
Yell Group is unhappy today, but perhaps not all that surprised. The U.K.'s Competition Commission issued its provisional findings on the question of whether price regulation is still necessary in the U.K. (this assumes it ever was) to foster a…
Interesting story in today's WSJ about the challenges facing local television stations. Much has been written about the impact the Internet will have on the TV business. Many analysts were quick to point out that television revenues and CPMs continue…
Google has started to include StepUp Commerce retail feeds into its mapping solution. This allows consumers to search for local retail products from the StepUp merchant base then click to view real-time inventory. We have been speculating about the inclusion…
Search Engine Journal also reports on a survey about the interest in online video advertising among marketers. We've been looking at online video and IPTV over the past year and have anticipated its implications for advertisers, particularly local and SME…
Loren Baker at Search Engine Journal points to a Jupiter Research study that shows search engine marketing budgets increasing. More campaigns are also being formed as overall SEM revenues are on the rise. This is happening as education and evolution…
Some news from around the local media world this week:—The Washington Post's Leslie Walker examines the trend of "hyperactive Web browsing" a generational usage pattern online that defines what portion of a Web page is viewed before a user moves…
One of the world's premier directory organizations is now officially for sale. France Telecom has confirmed that it will sell its majority stake in PagesJaunes, the dominant directory publisher in France. The Kelsey Group has long viewed PagesJaunes as an…
