The new breed of content aggregators is among the biggest bets in online media. These companies are assembling content from hundreds of thousands of contributors, optimizing it on the search engines so it is easily found and syndicating it. Demand…
Allmenus.com, the online ordering portal with 255,000 restaurant menus around the country and 3,500 online ordering relationships, will focus on specific local markets via a new partnership program that gives a portion of revenues to newspapers or other local promotional…
Bono and Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman As widely reported last week, Yelp has confirmed that it will receive a $25 million investment from Elevation Partners, which is widely known for the involvement of U2 frontman Bono among its seven partners. …
Digital media is more cannibalistic than complementary and is seriously eating into the demand for traditional news sources such as newspapers, TV and news magazines, according to the third annual survey of news users done by Outsell Inc. The survey…
Rumors have been flying that Google is poised to buy Trulia, “the real estate search engine” that competes with, among others, Zillow (which just said it is aiming to IPO in 2011). But according to reports by attendees, no information…
Three years ago, BIA/Kelsey created the Marketplaces research program and conference because we saw that local advertising was quickly "verticalizing." Indeed, money and talent have poured in for the new breed of vertical products that would take their place among…
ReachLocal’s S1 filing to raise $100 million includes valuable details about the company. With grosses of $146.7 million for the first nine months of 2009, and operations in the U.S., Canada, the U.K. and Australia, the local search and display…
EBay is expected to dramatically boost its efforts in classifieds in 2010, so we welcome clues into its historical and current thinking into classifieds via eBay vs. Craigslist. EBay has been seeking redress from Craigslist, which has diluted its 28…
Kicking off this afternoon's Mobile SuperForum, BIA/Kelsey analyst Mike Boland walked through a number of key trends he sees affecting the development of mobile local search. These include rapid hardware improvement, the increasing local focus of mobile, the growing appreciate…
Chris LaSala, director, SMB reseller partnerships, Google, updated the audience at ILM:09 on how Google's approach to local monetization is evolving. LaSala walked through a number of new or recent product innovations that raised the ante in Google's effort to…
Google CEO Eric Schmidt addressed newspaper publishers this morning at the NAA Annual Convention in San Diego, giving a high-level, thought-provoking talk (without apparent notes) about the future of information and the role that newspapers, search and consumers will play…
Next week is the Newspaper Association of America’s Annual Convention in San Diego. I’ll cover Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s keynote on Tuesday, in which he’ll express his support of the newspaper industry despite Google’s very public axing in January of…
We all live in Google’s world now. Nobody would dispute that there are many positives associated with that. But how do industry practitioners really feel about it?. Can it be improved? We asked three executives who cover different parts of…
AOL Yellow Pages has greatly benefited from search engine optimization, with 50 percent of its traffic coming from SEO, according to Chris Spanos, GM, local search, who was speaking today at Kelsey’s Marketplaces conference in Los Angeles. “We have a…
At the end of the second day of Marketplaces 2009, my colleague Matt Booth made a statement and then asked a follow-up question. He said, "most of what I've been hearing from the podium is optimistic. Don't people realize that…
Tim Armstrong, AOL’s new CEO, is a very big believer in local, with personal investments in a New York-area hyperlocal site (Patch) via his Polar Investments. Moreover, in his previous role as head of sales for Google, he frequently commented…
In the second major product launch in as many days, Google has released Google Voice. This will be an online calling service that utilizes voice over IP (VoIP) technology to deliver free and cheap calls. Similar to services like Skype,…
Google today announced a noteworthy addition to the relevance algorithm that dictates what ads you see throughout its AdSense network. Known as Interest Based Advertising, essentially what it does is add behavioral targeting to a formula previously ruled by contextual…
Cazoodle, a new listings-based service, has launched from the incubator at The University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana (yes, Marc Andreeson’s former territory). The site currently crawls for apartment listings and shopping. Additional vertical categories such as events are anticipated, notes…
One of the homespun stories of interactive local media is the rise of HelloMetro, a city guide company that started in 1999 as an entrepreneurial effort in Louisville, Kentucky, and has since grown to include 15 staffers, including five direct…
