A new report, written by me and called “The Newspaper Online Shopping Report: Online Relationships with Retailers,” is out today. It is a fairly comprehensive work that gives readers a 360-degree view of what newspapers are doing (and should be…
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 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…
ShopLocal, the shopping service owned by Tribune, Gannett and McClatchy, often gets overlooked in the glare of Amazon, eBay and the pricing comparison engines. But the service’s three networks are now getting over 200 million page views a month, which…
Classified aggregator Oodle has partnered with increasingly popular social network Facebook. A post on the Oodle blog last night from CEO Craig Donato goes into detail. This distribution channel for Oodle makes sense, given the classified activity that happens in…
Cox’s Palm Beach Post.com, fighting to stave off Craigslist and slackening ad trends for newspapers in general, has focused on creating a super site for shopping. The site is replete with free ads, new features such as video, free direct-connect…
Classified aggregator Oodle has offered to integrate its listings into community site iPoste. The press release doesn't mention if listings will flow in the other direction, but they should based on Oodle's aggregation model. Classified aggregation is all about in/out…
vFlyer today announced a new line of "widgets" that companies and individuals can use to display products on their Web sites or blogs. Previously, vFlyer's main product was a multimedia-rich "virtual flier" that let anyone create a professional looking classified…
Fresh off its partnership with Nokia, which we wrote about here and in this week's Local Media Journal, AdStar has partnered with classified aggregator Edgeio. Edgeio will use AdStar's software to offer print advertising upsells (on behalf of newspapers) to…
AP reports (via WSJ Online) that The New York Times Co. and Monster.com are partnering to sell recruitment ads. This will bring the Monster brand to 19 of the publisher's sites (including NYTimes.com and Boston.com). There is little information given,…
Following up on the previous introductory post on Monster Worldwide's partnership with The New York Times, there is a lot more that can be said about the deal and the quickly changing newspaper environment it both represents and contributes to.…
The newspaper consortium ("the amigos") that teamed up with Yahoo! for Hot Jobs is planning to invade used autos next, according to a post by newspaper insider Ken Doctor. If it pans out, such an alliance would probably signal that…
The decline of their ad share with retailers has newspapers worried to death. But several execs speaking at the NAA Marketing Conference last week in Las Vegas said they can bring retailers back into the fold with special vertical sites.…
Newspapers can't expect to beat Yellow Pages or Google in broad local advertiser categories, but they can focus on niche areas and invest in human editors and SEO to bring out their real strengths in the local marketplace, according to…
The highlight of Day 2 of the NAA show was a local search panel. The length of sessions (90 minutes) results in a lower number of sessions than I'm used to attending, but the quality has in most cases made…
There have been lots of newspaper news and announcements in and around the NAA show so far, and I imagine much more to come. Here is a sampling: LostRemote reports that The San Francisco Chronicle is experimenting with podcasts…
I'm at the Newspaper Association of America's annual Marketing Conference in Las Vegas this week, where there have been lots of interesting sessions that I'll break down in individual blog posts later. Most of the sessions were breakouts involving five…
Yell.com, which calls itself the United Kingdom's local search engine, is working with Oodle.co.uk, a search engine for local classified advertisements, which will enable people who access Yell.com to post their own free advertisements on the site. While Yell is…
When Freedom Communications recruited Michael Mathieu, the monetization leader from United Online (Classmates.com, NetZero, etc.), it was opting for change with a capital "C." Freedom, of course, is the longtime libertarian owner of 70 properties, including The Orange County Register,…
Oodle, the listing aggregator service, is completing its transition from a Google dependent site with the rollout today of a comparison feature for autos. Real estate and rentals will be rolled out next. In October, Oodle made its first move…
