Citysearch and Local.com Partner Up
Local.com announced today that it will pull in and display content from Citysearch in its local listings. This will enhance Local.com’s own content and bring in more ad revenues from Citysearch advertisers.
Citysearch will meanwhile get more distribution for its content and advertisers, which, in the long run, could increase its own traffic as well as its value proposition to advertisers. The latter is obviously of interest to the city guide, and is something it continues to augment with local sales investments.
For Local.com the deal could boost traffic in addition to ad revenues, with better content from Citysearch including more than a million reviews, coupons, photos and other things from its growing base of content and multimedia.
It seems possible, in other words, that the partnership could grow to include many of the things Citysearch has integrated over the past year including menus from MenuPages, and other forms of transaction-based advertising (think appointment scheduling) the company has expressed interest in pursuing.
And as everyone in local search is thinking and talking about video, content from Citysearch most notably could represent a step toward video for Local.com, given Citysearch’s strong moves in the area.
Citysearch’s video pricing (as alluded to earlier this week) in fact allows it to own the content (as opposed to advertiser ownership), which could have been cleverly formulated with these types of distribution deals in mind.
It’s also interesting to note that Local.com’s VP of bus dev, Peter Hutto, was previously at IAC, and the two companies have worked together in the past. We’ll be reaching out to Hutto and Citysearch’s Rob Angel — both friends of TKG — to get more color on the deal and its opportunities for each company.
