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.…
Even as Yahoo! pushes hard to fully partner with newspapers online, Google has taken a different tack, offering to sell advertising for newspapers in print. The Google Print Ads program began in June 2005 with magazines to decidedly mixed…
The New York Times reports that Comcast attributes its strong fourth-quarter earnings in which profits tripled on bundled services (voice, video and Internet). Competition is heating up in the triple-play space, as we keep saying. It should be…
ZDNet reports on two different mobile usage studies here and here. Both show usage and revenues growing dramatically over the next three to five years, with entertainment services (games, music, TV) having the steepest incline. Though search wasn't mentioned, increased…
GigaOm reports on a new local city guide-like product being tested by Yahoo!. It's called Our City (sounds an awful lot like Ask's new local search product, AskCity) and is being tested in Bangalore and New Delhi. From the looks…
Here is a new article from Stuff in New Zealand reporting that 10 bidders are expected to make a run at Yellow Pages Group New Zealand, among them Sensis (via parent company Telstra) and a rash of media and private…
It has been a month now. At the beginning of the year, as everyone who is reading this certainly knows, The Wall Street Journal reduced the width of the paper to save $18 million. My visceral reaction was negative, but…
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…
I've seen several announcements in recent days and weeks in the online Yellow Pages space that are worthy of your attention. First, the European directory publishers PagesJaunes Groupe and Seat Pagine Gialle have both launched beta online classified services, offering…
Newspaper sites have done a lot of window dressing with "hyper-local" by adding neighborhood blogs and whatnot. But now some papers are challenging themselves to embrace hyper-local in all things, as they seek to tame Google and Yahoo! in search,…
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…
Fox Interactive Media, the home of MySpace, Fox Sports, Fox News and other sites, definitely has local on its agenda and is rolling out several new features to bring users more in touch with their communities, says Dan Strauss, VP…
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…
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…
Back in 1999, Microsoft sold a small business called Sidewalk because it didn't fit into its core software business at the time. In a lengthy story in Sunday's New York Times, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer admitted: "but Sidewalk was really…
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,…
AP reported that Copiepresse, a copyright protection group that represents 17 French and German-language Belgian newspapers, asked Yahoo! to remove links that point to the newspapers' content. At issue is whether a cached page (a copy of content that is…
There is a marketing guy who is trying to build his business by telling people that the best way to get more golden eggs is to kill the goose that laid them. Larry Bodine's LawMarketing Blog recommends that lawyers do…
The Los Angeles Times Online will roll out two new e-commerce-oriented verticals in the midst of a ripping internal report that says its online strategy is nowhere near where it needs to be for the paper to have a future,…
