Over the past day and a half, there's been lots of talk about Google's new Google+ Local, effectively fusing its flagship social and local products (and ditching what was Google Places). Peter Krasilovsky has a good writeup earlier about how…
Zagat is Google's great equalizer against Yelp. Google has now demonstrated why it paid $151 million for Zagat last September by including Zagat, which formerly cost $4.95 a month (or $24.95 per year), as part of its new rollout of…
We just passed the one-month mark, in terms of days left until our big MLM San Francisco conference. Meanwhile, the program continues to get better. Last week we confirmed Groupon's Mihir Shah and American Express's David Yoo. It should be…
YP CEO David Krantz wanted to dispel a widely held notion when we spoke with him late last week about the company he now runs, newly acquired from AT&T by the private equity firm Cerberus Capital Management. "This is not…
London-based Telnic is carving out an interesting role for itself as an online enabler of small businesses. Telnic is the organization that offers the .tel top level domain, which for GBP 14.95 per year provides a simple Web presence that…
Mobile ad network Millennial Media is out with its Q1 mobile mix report, showing that tablets were among the top 20 across all mobile devices. The Apple iPad, Samsung Galaxy Tab and Amazon Kindle Fire are the top three tablets…
ScoutMob, the two-and-a-half-year-old mobile-centric deals company, has landed a new $3.25 million round to develop its technology base and add more markets. It is currently in 13 cities and has more than 1 million subscribers. The company, which had previously…
Following last week’s post detailing our webcast, we held it yesterday with lots of discussion around the trends driving mobile innovation and investment. This comes in the midst of preparation, programming and speaker recruiting for our upcoming MLM San Francisco.
You can download the slides or watch the streaming webinar replay here. As a bonus, the webinar had a discount code for conference registration, which can be seen in the replay. You can also see summary points below (and more after the page break) for the “10 Trends” from the webcast.
And we’re close to announcing a new batch of conference speakers, which should really round out the program (a great lot so far). Stay tuned for that, and we hope to see you at the conference.
Trend 1: Mobile Ad Revenues Take Off
We see ad revenues growing a great deal, partly driven by evolving mobile usage patterns and smartphone penetration. The latter just surpassed 50 percent of all U.S. mobile subscribers according to Nielsen.Meanwhile, our forecast indicates that U.S. mobile ad spending will go from 1.7 billion last year to about 7.7 billion in 2015, which is a CAGR of about 39 percent (and affirmed recently by the the IAB).
There are also some interesting dynamics unfolding with the economics of mobile ad rates. Mobile usage is outpacing advertiser demand, so you see greater supply of ad inventory than ad spend.
So ad rates such as CPMs and CPCs are going down. We believe that trend will continue, but will normalize at a certain point over the next couple of years as advertiser demand picks up.
MLM Session Tie-in: Mobilizing Commerce: A BIA/Kelsey Perspective
Target, one of the largest discount retailers in the U.S., announced today that it will now offer its guests the Shopkick app for their smartphones. When customers walk into their local Target store, they receive points known as "kicks." As…
The global directories company Yell Group, which is fighting a rapidly declining core business as it shifts to new digital products, has announced it will be changing its name to Hibu, pending the approval of its shareholders in July. The…
Local display doesn’t get as much attention as search for SMBs, but we know that in many situations, it can complement search campaigns, or even produce better results. No one pushes harder on this than PaperG, which has developed a…
Are deals still being driven by shares, posts, likes and other social media features in an era of Groupon and LivingSocial Super Bowl ads? Yes, definitely, according to Second Street Media, which held a webinar with The Washington Post last…
"Yes!" say University of Virginia's Darden Business School professors Rajkumar Venkatesan and Paul Farris. The 99 percenters who fail to redeem coupons they receive in fact do matter. Their new research to this point is summarized in this month's Harvard…
The June calendar is definitely filling in. It is the most active month in memory. I’ll be attending five events -- three in San Francisco, two in San Diego. As Richard Rogers says: “June is bustin’ out all over.” In…
Gearing up for our MLM San Francisco conference on June 27, we're holding a free webcast this Tuesday to give a sneak peek at the topics that will be most prominent within the program. This will be built around a…
That was quick. Yahoo’s radical shift to a new Commerce/ Marketplaces strategy -- announced in mid April -- has abruptly ended with the resignation of CEO and former PayPal head Scott Thompson, and SVP Sam Shrauger, his PayPal colleague, who…
Last week BIA/Kelsey attended the EASDP congress in Brussels, a two-day event focused on the emerging social local mobile ecosystem, and how directory publishers might fit into this new landscape. The association, which represents both B2B and B2C publishers in…
Today, Yell announced its acquisition of Moonfruit, a United Kingdom DIY website and online shop builder, for approximately GBP 18 million, funded out of Yell's cash reserves. Retention bonuses of up to GBP 5.2 million will be paid to key…
Business listings provider Localeze announced today that it will provide online business listings to Savvi, a savings network. Localeze business listings are standardized across its list of approximately 150 local search platform partners, including search engines, online directories, social networks,…
XAd, a mobile local ad network, released its Q1 2012 report today that shows growth in the local-mobile search category, particularly transportation-related search within the travel sector. We're not surprised by the results, given our forecast of total U.S. mobile…
