Kelsey Local Media Blog
Success models for city sites have been elusive. But entrepreneurs still believe they can provide a local edge to city sites that can't be done by portals like Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, Ask and AOL. And they hope their "not-so-secret sauce"…
If newspapers are to grow, they're going to have to leverage their local, regional and national credibility to reach into advertiser segments where they don't have much of a presence today. This means B2B and SME. But somewhere it is…
Comments came into my personal site last week suggesting that AutoTrader CEO Chip Perry, in his keynote at Kelsey's ILM conference in Philadelphia, may have hyped up his company's considerable lead over Cars.com and other auto portals. "Based on my…
The power of road mapping and direction sites like MapQuest and Yahoo! Maps is now being channeled by HopStop, a New York-based start-up providing the same type of complete info for walkers and subway and bus strap holders in major…
Zillow announced today that it will allow users and agents to post homes for sale for free. Zillow has gained a great deal of traction and has become the poster child of vertical search in the 10 months since its…
There are calls in the press today for more online mapping standards after the tragic disappearance of CNET Senior Editor James Kim. Kim was on a family vacation last week in Oregon when he took a little-used logging road in…
The blogosphere and news media are abuzz today over the management overhaul at Yahoo!. Starting Jan. 1, the company will be organized into three main groups: a customer-focused group, an advertiser and publisher group, and a technology group. CFO Susan…
IAC's Ask.com rolled out AskCity this week in a bid to use IAC's content to differentiate itself from Google, Yahoo!, MSN and AOL. The site, which succeeds AskLocal, proves to be an excellent local research tool and effectively integrates listings,…
Media General, the publisher of The Tampa Tribune, Richmond Times-Dispatch and Winston-Salem Journal, in addition to 22 community dailies, is the eighth newspaper company to join Yahoo!'s HotJobs consortium. With the addition of MG's 25 papers, the consortium's roster now…
R.H. Donnelley issued its 2007 financial guidance today at the Credit Suisse Annual Media & Telecom Conference. The directory publisher is forecasting "positive sales growth" for the full year, with revenues reaching US$2.67 billion, and EBITDA of US$1.44 billion, a…
YellowPages.com, the joint venture between AT&T Yellow Pages and BellSouth Intelliventures, appears poised to shake up the world of directory assistance by picking up inFreeDA, the provider of 1-800-411-METRO. InFreeDA Founder and CEO Michael Loftus, who spoke at Kelsey's ILM…
Historically speaking, MapQuest lost a beat by not pushing out its API. Instead of featuring MapQuest, most Web sites instead highlight Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft maps. Even without the buzz factor, however, MapQuest has retained its strong brand identify among…
As we wrote about briefly last week, AskCity has launched today. I will get a chance to play around with the new features today and will provide more detail in this week's Local Media Journal. In the meantime, Loren Baker…
AutoTrader is expanding beyond "new" and "used" car ads into "auto services" and "used parts." The move promises to put a lot of pressure on other online auto sites, especially eBay Motors, which is preparing a relaunch that will move…
I feel like I'm undergoing a blogging rite of passage in posting from an airport gate. We're mostly traveling today, but will be back Monday with more posts on some of the key takeaways from ILM. Thanks to all who…
Google's head of SME product development, Dan Rubinstein, speaking at The Kelsey Group's ILM event in Philadelphia, said the company is going to meet SMEs halfway to get them to actively market themselves on the Internet. Google is developing several…
Online real estate has gone through its "classical" period, from 1995 to 2000, and its "dark ages," from 2001 to 2005, but is now in the midst of its "renaissance" due to "data enlightenment" and "consumer driven industrial change," per…
IAC/InterActiveCorp Chairman and CEO Barry Diller announced yesterday at a Reuters Media Summit that Ask.com will launch a new local search destination Dec. 4, called AskCity. The key here is that the new local search play will be the glue…
Monster has fallen off its leadership perch, hit hard by CareerBuilder's heavy media spend and its extremely effective bundling of print/online ads. But by most counts, it is still fairly equal with CareerBuilder. It is certainly well ahead of Yahoo!…
Interactive advertising platform provider WebVisible has produced a report with the help of Nielsen/NetRatings that dives into Internet usage patterns for local merchant search. The report, titled "I searched, I clicked, I contacted I Transacted: Measuring a Website's Ability…
