Ad agencies have never really been a major part of the world of local online advertising. Apart from some geotargeting for their national and regional clients, they haven’t paid much attention to the many opportunities in local (geotarget banners, local…
Classifieds haven’t been especially enhanced by mobile apps -- although it is nice to have them on the go when shopping for a car or a house. But Oodle keeps pushing the envelope with its effort to bring the world…
High school sports have been the centerpiece of many hyperlocal efforts. They bring to the table highly passionate fans, families and players in the hard-to-reach 12- to 17-year-old demo. But the economics of school-by-school efforts don’t always work, whether for…
With 200+ deal-a-day sites and vendors, the only way to carve out a niche is to find dramatically different takes on group buying (i.e., focusing on verticals or integrating with other content). How about making your buys visible to your…
AOL’s Patch gave a progress report today on its $50 million hyperlocal initiative. The site said it now has 100 hyperlocal sites, and will launch 400 more over the next six months. It also said it plans to hire at…
ShopCity, a storefront and marketing platform for SMBs, hopes to jumpstart its reach via a new “City Manager” program that allows local media partners to secure local URL rights owned by ShopCity (i.e., ShopMountainView.com) and market its services. City Managers,…
Some people (like me) don’t like games. Game mechanics-driven “check in” media like Foursquare, GoWalla, Loopt and BrightKite mostly leave them cold. But what if check-ins triggered group buying discounts? That’s the concept behind GroupTabs, a new service launching in…
The latest attempt to make hyperlocal a sustainable reality came today with Allbritton Communications’ launch of TBD.com, a hyper metro site for the Washington, D.C., area. Allbritton, which has sunk “under $5 million” into the project to date, hopes it…
Redbeacon, the six-person San Francisco-based service referral company, announced today that it has raised a heady $7.4 million in Series A financing from Mayfield Fund and Venrock. CEO and Cofounder Ethan Anderson tells us that the company needed such a…
College students are a rich market for local businesses in college towns. Indeed, advertising has become more important to local SMBs as colleges increasingly compete for the business and try to keep students (and their money) on campus. CampusLive, the…
Restaurants are among the top categories for group buying deals. Now OpenTable, the restaurant reservations service, is getting in on the game. On its blog today, OpenTable announced that it is launching a weekly “Spotlight” offer that provides diners with…
EBay is pushing to do more to integrate the flagship auction site and its Marketplaces products with ProStores, its online storefront software company. The effort to integrate ProStores is part of a broader effort to integrate its properties (i.e., eBay…
The Sacramento area is fast becoming Ground Zero for local blog networks. McClatchy’s Sacramento Connect, a project carved from The Sacramento Bee, is a content connector for 70+ area blogs and Web sites. It started incubating last summer and was…
Large companies with lots of local touchpoints, such as retailers and restaurant chains, often have trouble adequately representing the local end. That’s the goal of Kenshoo Local, a recently launched division of Kenshoo, the worldwide enterprise online "demand generation" firm…
Groupon has been working to bust out of the limited inventory that seems inherent in its "deal a day" space. First, it added a “side” deal in many markets. Then it started breaking out some of the larger markets into…
We know certain Web phenomena are women driven. Groupon and DailyCandy, for instance, are heavily dominated by women; Facebook, to a lesser degree. Gilt Groupe, the high-end “flash sales” fashion site, is more of a women’s thing (although a surprising…
ReachLocal delivered its first quarterly report as a public company today, noting that its active advertiser count has climbed 27 percent from 13,200 to 16,700, and that its consolidated revenues grew 47 percent from $47.97 million to $70.362 million. It…
Scripps’ HGTV Network, which reaches 99 million U.S. households on air, and 5 million unique visitors per month online, announced today that it is partnering with Cox’s Kudzu in a broad agreement with many moving parts. The deal will provide…
We note with interest the new partnership between New York Magazine and Foursquare, the location-based service now in 21 cities that lets friends see where you have “checked in” and lets you vie to be mayor (hail Outside.in’s Camilla Cho,…
Yelp has added to its international portfolio, following up on its May launch in France with a launch in Germany. Berlin and Munich are Yelp’s first German markets. Fifteen additional German markets have been seeded with “scout” reviews, but won’t…
