Kelsey Local Media Blog
I've believed for a while that My Yahoo! was a powerful model for personalization. To varying degrees the other major portals/search engines are now pursuing a similar strategy. Google recently added more feeds to its personalized home page. Here's MSN's…
The folks at PEW have come out with another report that has some generally intuitive but important information for those who are eager to see online trends slow or reverse (read: some in traditional media). Not going to happen. The…
Seattle-based Marchex, which is the parent of TrafficLeader, the SEM/SEO firm behind several YP (and newspaper) simplified search marketing programs, has announced the roughly $30 million acquisition of IndustryBrains, which operates a vertical/contextual ad network. At the end of April,…
As widely reported, Yahoo! bought desktop software maker Konfabulator (what a great company name!). Local search and local apps (weather, maps, etc.), among other things, can be taken beyond the browser onto the desktop. Nothing new there conceptually. But unlike…
The would-be meta-social networking tool, GoingOn, was covered last week by a few folks (mostly the Mercury News and blogs). Advocates said nobody wants to fill out more profiles; skeptics questioned whether the existing social networks would want to play.…
I don't buy either of these two arguments. Marketing works and dollars spent are additive. In 1979, AT&T decided that long-distance advertising should no longer be handled by each of the 21 individual operating companies. In a wildly unpopular move…
MSN's Answer to Google and Yahoo!'s dynamic Web-based mapping tools, Virtual Earth, went live this morning. Needless to say it works better with IE than Firefox (the browser I typically use). It doesn't have the "wow factor" of Google Earth,…
An article that has received a good deal of attention, from yesterday's NY Times, is "How Effective Is This Ad, in Real Numbers? Beats Me." The piece cites marketers' inability to determine which of their ads/campaigns are actually effective and…
Let's put aside Yahoo!'s FUSE (Find, Use, Share, and Expand) strategy for the moment and look at what the company is doing with vertical and horizontal search (horizontal search being, well, search). Yahoo! recently launched a specialized Travel site to…
Very briefly: Here are the NY Times' earnings release and Dow Jones/WSJ's. Online products (including the About and MarketWatch acquisitions) gave a boost to these newspaper titans, while the traditional pubs struggled. This is consistent with the bump that Scripps…
According to a widely reported new survey by PEW, Americans don't know the technology terms "RSS," "Podcasting" and others. So what's the take-away? Use the technology; don't use the terms. Awhile ago, before the launch of Backfence, I spoke to…
According to Amy Healy of the YPA, the public policy committee covered this topic in its Las Vegas meeting. She said that there are towns that have "do not deliver" proposals pending, but they stemmed from an effort to reduce…
Here's the press release. Here's the after-hours performance. Even though Google beat estimates, expectations were really really high. Maybe everyone will take a deep breath now.
This is a potentially big deal, although there were many such free Web site offerings as recently as 2000-2001. To my knowledge, all of them failed. But none of them were Yahoo!, which can subsidize the service as something of…
Idealab's new search engine, Snap.com, offers advertisers a cost per action model and is presenting itself to would-be search-engine marketers (and those using existing PPClick models) as an antidote to click fraud. The notion of "action" varies by business model…
"In the three short days that we owned [Shopzilla], the business contributed about a million dollars in revenue and about $350,000 in segment profits," said Scripps CEO Ken Lowe (quoted in MediaPost). Scripps bought Shopzilla for US$500+ million in June.…
Successor to Friendster among the highly coveted youth demographic, MySpace seems to have found a business model. Sites such as LinkedIn and Insider Pages have combined social networking with "traditional" models, such as classifieds and directory advertising. However, MySpace has…
In the emerging tradition of "old media" buying "new media," Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. announced today that it was acquiring Intermix Media Inc., which owns the wildly popular MySpace.com (the new "it" site for the youth demographic). According to comScore,…
I got a press call today about Blinkx's newly announced RSS video/multimedia feed. That quickly led to a broader discussion about video search and the online advertising marketplace. Blinkx is an impressive upstart that has, through scrappy innovation, been able…
A9.com, the search subsidiary of e-commerce giant Amazon, has launched a Yellow Pages/local search directoryA9.com, the search subsidiary of e-commerce giant Amazon, has launched a Yellow Pages/local search directory that features millions of photo images of businesses and buildings in…
