Summary Online-only Yellow Pages site YP.com announced this morning that it will buy online classified site LiveDeal in a stock transaction estimated to be worth about $12 million. The deal will bring together directory content and classifieds in one online…
Summary EBay announced today that it will begin working with radio ad start-up Bid4Spots. The deal will bring Bid4Spots' auction-based radio ad sales capability to eBay's Media Marketplace. This represents a growing direction for eBay to broker ads to cable…
Online video stood out a great deal as a theme and business opportunity at this year's Drilling Down on Local conference in March. Spot Runner's Nick Grouf keynoted, while other speaking slots were given to TurnHere and IYPs that expressed…
Summary New legal search destination Avvo launched today to join the likes of FindLaw and LexisNexis Martindale-Hubbell. Like these destinations, it offers users search tools to find lawyers in different categories and locales. Legal search will be a growing area…
The San Jose Mercury News reported yesterday that IAC is a few weeks away from opening its new venture arm in Silicon Valley called Primal Ventures. The focus will be investments that are more strategic than financially driven in order to…
Summary The new Yellowpages.com beta is available for users to access and play around with. Lots of features are still unavailable, but you can get a general idea of what the new site will offer. The look and feel has…
In case you missed it, here is a compilation of blog posts from last week from TKG's Interactive Local Media program. Click below to read each post in full. The Kelsey Take: Newspapers by the Numbers Earlier this week, the…
As expected, Google today announced the acquisition of hot (no pun intended) RSS feed management company FeedBurner. See last week's post for the drivers and implications of this deal.
Summary Earlier this week, the NAA released its Q1 figures for the financial performance of the newspaper industry. The numbers tell the same old story: Print ad revenues are down, while online revenues saw double-digit percentage growth (although still a…
Summary Jingle Networks' free DA service 1-800-FREE411 has discontinued live operators in some locations. Operator expenses in these markets have significantly cut into margins as the overall cost of providing these calls isn't being offset by the advertising volumes. Free…
Summary After completing a free DA call this week using Google's newly launched 800-GOOG411, we were asked if a text message was desired in addition to the free voice and "connect me" features (the multimodal functionality that is standard in…
Summary CBS announced today that it has acquired London-based social networking site Last.fm for $280 million. The site claims about 15 million monthly users (4 million in the U.S.) and hangs its hat on music video distribution – thought to…
Spot Runner announced a deal today with LexisNexis Martindale-Hubbell to distribute spot cable ad creation and buying capability to affiliated law firms. This can be compared to Spot Runner's deal with Coldwell Banker in the real estate vertical that gives…
Summary BizReport.com reports that Google will begin to axe websites from its AdSense publisher network that have an unfavorable "ad/edit" ratio (to use a magazine term). Though this seems detrimental to Google's strategy to extend its reach for brokering ads…
Microsoft announced this morning from the Where 2.0 conference that it will add New York City to the list of cities available in 3-D in Live Local Maps. We wrote about 3-D mapping and its possibilities for Local in a…
The Vecosys blog is reporting the rumor (take it only as that) that Google has its crosshairs set on Feedburner for its next acquisition. This would make sense for Google, given its ongoing expansion of venues in which to broker…
Summary Examining patent filings has become something of a beat, in the blogospheric reporting of online media. ZDNet's Russel Shaw takes a look at a fresh Google patent application for a new mobile local search app. The long term potential…
Summary The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) released their annual Ad Revenue Report yesterday. Though there were increases in many online ad categories compared with 2005, it's interesting to note that nearly every one declined in percentage of…
Local.com has announced a new mobile search product. Though it has been in testing for a while (I received a quick preview at SES in April), it officially launched today. Known as Local Mobile, the ad supported mobile site lets…
Summary An article yesterday on the SeekingAlpha blog examines a recent wave of investment consolidation in the online media space. This signals, among other things, an impending acceleration of advertising shifts from offline to off, and a revenue diversification play…
