Kelsey Local Media Blog
GoodGuide was one of our favorite start-ups launched at the TechCrunch50 show back in September. It was also one of the few companies in the mix with a local search business model (see write-up here). This week, the company took…
Yellowbook announced today that it has formed a partnership with YouTube to use it as an auxiliary distribution source for the SMB videos it produces. This essentially gives it broader distribution beyond its own walls (Yellowbook.com). This is good for…
In April, we covered Yelp's launch of a suite of marketing tools that let small businesses manage their listings. This is essentially a back-end tool that allows any business with a Yelp listing to claim his or her profile, add…
Related to the integration of location awareness into Firefox that we've blogged about, the browser has just reached 20 percent market share. This is pretty impressive for a browser that doesn't come bundled with the majority of PCs and laptops…
Marchex, during its 3Q earnings call today, reaffirmed its focus on providing ad solutions for the local and vertical search space, noting that it currently works with 80,000 local advertisers via 110 local partner relationships, including AT&T and Idearc. The…
Headlines of layoffs and shutdowns are increasing, as is the general schadenfreude that we begin to see when the success stories of yesterday become the failures of today. The tech world got to see its fair share of this eight years…
Google announced today that it has decided to walk away from its ad partnership with Yahoo, citing that legal battles with federal antitrust regulators won't make it worthwhile to pursue. The deal would have placed Google text ads throughout Yahoo's…
Spot Runner announced that it is laying off 115 people, or less than 30 percent of its staff. It confirmed that a big chunk of the layoffs are coming from its local sales division, formerly known as Weblistic. Company officials say…
Presidential elections always represent sea changes in the use of marketing tools (including local marketing tools). The Internet is an increasingly big part of it. Mostly, it is used for raising money. This time around, it has also been exciting…
Stuart McKelvey is no longer CEO of TMP Directional Marketing, a position he had held since 1998. He is leaving the Yellow Pages ad agency founded by his father, Andrew, in 1967 to join Health Diagnostic, also founded by the…
Press releases are rich in content -- richer than most ads. Many local events, businesses and services routinely write them. But they often don’t get past the “about us” sections on their own Web sites. The releases aren’t easily found,…
Today, The Kelsey Group's second wave of the Mobile Market View consumer survey was released, supporting many of the claims we've been making here about the changing mobile environment. The biggest takeaway was that 18.9 percent of survey respondents (n=512)…
Here are the highlights from the TKG blog last week, in case you missed any posts. Click below to read each post in full. New Kid on the Block for Canada Local Search New Canadian local search destination Weblocal.ca has…
New Canadian local search destination Weblocal.ca has launched. The site is the product of a partnership between Canadian publisher Transcontinental and social/local pure play YellowBot (see profile). The site is one of Transcon's first moves into online local search. As…
Local publishers, seeing the boom in text messaging and the Web surfing capabilities of the iPhone, are taking mobile more seriously as a channel for their content and advertising. Clearly, the mobile opportunity for local publishers has now gone beyond…
TKG has a relatively new Twitter page. After going on a binge of following people this week, the ratio of following to followers is woefully out of whack. If I haven't been able to find and follow you yet, jump…
Today at the Canadian Marketing Association’s Digital Digital Marketing Conference, there was quite a bit of buzz around Blyk, a Finnish mobile phone company with an interesting hybrid model for distribution. Blyk is a free mobile operator targeting young people…
When we think of emerging local verticals, “green” is one of the most promising, as environmental concerns have pushed up the interest of consumers in having safe, healthy products that have minimal impact on the environment. MSN, Yahoo, Hearst and The Washington Post…
The Kelsey Group has learned that effective Nov. 1, AT&T Advertising & Publishing will become AT&T Advertising Solutions. But there is more to this than a cosmetic name change. AT&T has also reorganized the company and expanded its portfolio to…
Are classifieds fated, by definition, to be "dumb" all-you-can-eat listings? Or can certain categories be remade as performance-based listings a la Google that bring best matches to the top, offering higher revenue in return for a better match and conversion? That's…
