Topix CEO Chris Tolles has a well-reasoned piece in iMedia Connection. He writes that media usage and ad dollars are quickly moving online (which we know), but local content and ads aren't moving as fast as comparative national metrics. But we're…
The relationship between personalization and local has always been a close one, but now Outside.in is banking that consumers want to marry them together. The placeblogger site, which recently received $3 million in new funding from a group of high-profile…
Is there room for a new, locally oriented social network if it is more practical than Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, LinkedIn, et al? That’s what Norwest Partners and Keynote Ventures are betting $6.5 million on with the launch this week of…
Boston-based CitySquares, which just celebrated its second anniversary, is getting about 70,000 unique visitors per month and now has a base of 700 advertisers, averaging $1,200 per year, reports CEO Ben Saren. He believes they have even more potential via…
Pegasus News, the hyperlocal site in Dallas owned by Fisher Communications, is a state-of-the-art site with local reporters and bloggers, lots of user-generated content and a full roster of other Web 2.0 capabilities. So what’s most important for driving traffic?…
Some industry bloggers like to throw “Google” in the title to get some attention. For me, it is “Hyperlocal.” And somewhere in the middle of any discussion of hyperlocal is Rob Curley. The hyperlocal maestro has taken his Web 2.0…
You’ve got to figure if anyone is going to lead the local revolution in the newspaper space it is going to be The Washington Post. To me, the paper signaled its seriousness about getting hyperlocal when it hired two of its…
SmallTown, the Bay Area hyperlocal company, is changing its core focus and will concentrate mostly on getting wider distribution of its WebCards microsites for small businesses. While the nine-person company will continue to maintain its hyperlocal sites, which are now…
The final day of The Kelsey Group's Drilling Down on Local conference featured a keynote by Merrill Brown of MMB Media. Brown is an industry guru with a history of developing groundbreaking media strategies and operations. Among other things, he…
The first day of the Kelsey Drilling Down on Local conference included a somewhat unusual panel with four entrepreneurs in verticals. They talked about the nuts and bolts of building truly local verticals. These vertical pioneers shared their war stories…
In a session called "The Online City: Close Up on Seattle" here at Drilling Down on Local, The Seattle Times' Patricia Lee Smith reiterated a point made earlier by the LA Times' Rob Barrett, which is that online newspapers cannot…
Matt Booth and I had the chance to meet with Topix at its Palo Alto headquarters last week to unearth some of its user data, as well as some heretofore unannounced content partnerships. Late last year, the site redefined itself…
In light of BostonNow’s closure this week (apparently for investment-related reasons), I’ve been mulling over the future of free metro papers in the U.S. The Chicago Tribune, The Washington Post and The San Diego Union-Tribune are among newspaper companies that…
There are a number of new or re-energized hyperlocal efforts out there, trying to crack the code. New efforts are expected shortly from Outside.in and SmallTown. Ongoing efforts are being made with AmericanTowns, which counts Idearc as a lead investor,…
I’ve spent quite a bit of time over the Easter holiday talking with friends and family about the economy and how they are dealing with the budget crunch we are all experiencing. One of the common threads of all these…
More and more, people are looking at what Google can’t (or won’t) do. One thing Google isn’t doing is selling a lot of ads on a hyperlocal basis. If you look for a plumber in Tribeca, you are likely to…
The CBS-TV owned and operated stations are making a pitch to local bloggers and hyperlocal sites to add value to their sites with various news headline and video widgets, and take a share of ad revenues. The CBS effort to…
Yelp! has announced that it got $15 million in a fourth round of funding led by DAG and existing investors. The company also sent some growth metrics: October '07 -- 5M Unique Visitors December '07 -- 6M UVs January '08…
When a local team headed by ad agency and PR veteran Brian Tierney bought The Philadelphia Inquirer and related holdings 18 months ago, it was seen as a possible model for how “new thinking” could transform the newspaper industry. Since then,…
I liked the 2003-2007 concept of a “local info hub.” The idea was to think beyond the original business boundaries of newspapers (and Yellow Pages). Now that concept has been fancifully enlarged to a “local info and connection utility." The…
