Yelp Gets a Boost
Yelp! has announced that it got $15 million in a fourth round of funding led by DAG and existing investors. The company also sent some growth metrics: October '07 -- 5M Unique Visitors December '07 -- 6M UVs January '08…
The Power of Public Relations for Yellow Pages
As I noted in a blog about The Kelsey Group's Local Online Media event in London last week, analysts, speakers and the audience were positively upbeat about the Yellow Pages business. The feeling by all was that the stock market…
Mueller to Leave Idearc CEO Post — Cites Health Concerns
Idearc has announced CEO John Mueller will resign after just eight days on the job, citing "unforeseen health reasons." Mueller, who was previously Idearc's chairman, had replaced Kathy Harless, who was removed following a sharp decline in the company's value.…
Yahoo! Beefs Up Local Organic Results
Yahoo! announced that it will make a considerable change to its result pages, and the content it will allow Web sites to provide in organic listings. According to the Yahoo! Search Blog: Site owners will be able to provide all…
NAA Coverage: Inside the Yahoo! Consortium With Lee’s Greg Schermer
The 19-company Yahoo! newspaper consortium is set to launch beta tests with two newspapers of Content Match, an AdSense-like product. The beta tests are expected to be followed by a launch throughout the entire consortium in September, according to Lee…
YPA Data Show Stable Print, Growing IYP Usage
The Yellow Pages Association released new usage data showing that U.S. print directory usage was stable in 2007 at 13.4 billion print lookups, while online directory references climbed 15 percent, from 3.3 billion searches in 2006 to 3.8 billion in 2007.…
Sensis Shows Signs of Print Turnaround
Sensis, Australia's largest directory publisher, recently released first-half results from its 2007-2008 financial year (ending June 30), which show solid growth of its print products. White Pages in particular grew 9.9 percent in the first half, an improvement over its 8.1…
NAA Coverage: Tierney on Philly.com’s Media Lab; Pursuing Women 35+
When a local team headed by ad agency and PR veteran Brian Tierney bought The Philadelphia Inquirer and related holdings 18 months ago, it was seen as a possible model for how “new thinking” could transform the newspaper industry. Since then,…
NAA Coverage: MNG’s Singleton on Online Growth, Wireless
MediaNews Group CEO Dean Singleton is well known within the newspaper industry as one of the least sentimental businessmen among all the publishers. He’s taken a hard line against journalistic "excess," resulting in products that have been highly profitable but…
Citysearch Keeps Distribution Deals Rolling
A couple of weeks ago, Citysearch formed a distribution deal with AOL that pushed its content and ads throughout the AOL Local Network. As we wrote here, this had a close resemblance to the December deal the company formed with…
TKG’s Global Local Search Forecast Launches Today
TKG's recently completed Global Yellow Pages and Local Search Forecast underpinned most of the discussion at last week's Local Online Media: London 08. Today it launches officially. Each year the forecast measures the size of the local search industry and…
Can Print Yellow Pages Publishers Turn Digital?
Nearly 100 executives in The Kelsey Group community participated in a half-day session that we hosted in London titled Local Online Media. The panel I moderated was "The Financial Future of Directories and Local Search in Europe." The panelists were…
TKG Data and Analysis: A Weekly Recap
Here is a quick recap of items from the TKG blog this week, in case you missed any. Click below to read each post in full. Online Video Boom Carries On ComScore Video Metrix announced today that December saw 10…
Online Video Boom Carries On
ComScore Video Metrix announced today that December saw 10 billion online video views -- the largest number to date. There were meanwhile 141 million total unique users to video sites. Google sites led in both categories. This general trend has…
YPG Fills a Gap With Acquisition
Yellow Pages Group in Canada made another small step toward complete coverage of the Canadian directory market by acquiring the directory business from TBayTel, a leading telecommunications company in Thunder Bay and Northern Ontario. This means YPG will now be…
Local.com Boosts Local Sales Staff
Local.com, which has previously relied on third-party sales, is going direct in a big way. The company has outsourced contracts for 50 salespeople, up from 10. “We plan to ramp sales staff to several hundred this year,” says CEO Heath…
Newspaper Next 2.0: The ‘Local Info and Connection Utility’
I liked the 2003-2007 concept of a “local info hub.” The idea was to think beyond the original business boundaries of newspapers (and Yellow Pages). Now that concept has been fancifully enlarged to a “local info and connection utility." The…
Web.com Will Be New Name for Website Pros
Website Pros is taking the name of Web.com, a company it merged with in late September 2007. Company officials say the name change will occur by mid-2008. They note that it reflects the company’s increasingly broad mission, and is easy…
Newspapers Launch (Another) National Net
A new national newspaper network has been set up by Gannett, Tribune, New York Times Co. and Hearst Newspapers, representing 37 of the top 40 U.S. markets. The network, Quadrant One, will compete (or extend) McClatchy’s RealCities; the NAA’s National…
Classifieds on Video? Four Examples Here
When veteran newspaper design consultant Alan Jacobsen called last year to tout his new classified video site, Real People Real Stuff -- “the marriage of Craigslist and YouTube” -- I thought it was kind of fun but didn’t have very good…