More on Local.com/Citysearch Deal
As promised, today I had the chance to talk with Local.com’s VP of bus dev and sales, Peter Hutto, who took time away from his vacation to provide some more color on yesterday‘s partnership with Citysearch.
Hutto confirmed that the deal will involve boosting the content and site experience of Local.com while also bringing in incremental ad revenues from Citysearch advertisers. This will happen through a revenue share arrangement for traffic that flows through Local.com.
He also expanded on a few other points alluded to in yesterday’s post, such as having this deal be a foundation for more content formats to enter the Local.com fold, including video.
“Our strategy is to be content aggregator first,” says Hutto. “There are lots of different forms of content out there, and you’ll see us make a broad range of deals to bring in content, such as deals we’ve formed with Superpages and Citysearch. Part of this will be to aggregate video from other folks.”
This is very much in line with the principles of universal search, in which users are coming to expect varied content formats in when they search for things online. In local search this trend is definitely present, and has been seen most through interest in local merchant videos.
For Local.com, the deal itself and its possibilities (including video) are essentially a function of this content aggregation strategy to bring in lots of different content from different sources.
“In this deal, Citysearch really saw us as Switzerland when it comes to distributing their content,” says Hutto. “In the future, you won’t see Superpages distributing to to Citysearch and you won’t see Citysearch distributing it to Superpages. But you could see both distributing to us. And anyone else who’s got it, we’ll take it.”
