"AOL has a huge bet on local and Patch in particular," said Mark Josephson, senior vice president of revenue at AOL Local during our afternoon session at ILM East. Patch hyperlocal sites reach 865 communities that Josephson describes as "under…
BIA/Kelsey's top analysts kicked off this week's ILM East conference in Boston with some data-supported insights into their respective coverage areas. Some examples: * Social Local Media program director Jed Williams walked the audience through his recent detailed assessment of Facebook's…
"We aren't [as a culture] wired for long-term investment, and SEO is long term. We'd rather take a statin drug than use diet and exercise to stay healthy." That's how Search Influence CEO Will Scott described the SEO dilemma. It's…
Last week, BIA/Kelsey issued its annual U.S. Local Media Forecast, which included our five-year view on Yellow Pages revenues. The bottom line is U.S. Yellow Pages revenues will be about $7 billion in five years. Roughly 60 percent of those…
Thomsonlocal.com, the U.K. local print and online directories company owned by Italy's Seat PG, has changed CEOs. Effective April 1, Elio Schiavo will move over to run Seat's Telegate (directory assistance) operation full time. Schiavo has recently been dividing his…
IAC announced today that SeamlessWeb founder Jason Finger will take over as CEO of its CityGrid Media unit April 12. CityGrid Media includes the CityGrid ad network and Citysearch, Urbanspoon, Insider Pages and BuzzLabs. Finger was a founder of SeamlessWeb…
Google has been taking out major newspaper ads to promote its new "Get Your Business Online" initiative, a partnership with Intuit that lets SMBs claim a place and update information and also provides a free website. It is a strong…
In the past 12 months, local radio and television stations have made significant strides to bolster their online activities, and it is generating noticeable revenues. As will be detailed in BIA/Kelsey's upcoming Investing In Television® and Investing In Radio® publications,…
Yellow Medya, Turkey's Yellow Pages publisher, announced this week the release of its Brand SoLoMo location-based engagement platform. It allows brand owners to geo-code every point of sale, whether physical or virtual. In addition, it maintains a point of sale…
Time Warner Cable's ad division recently launched Enhanced iTV, which lets advertisers target interactive television ads to viewers in different local markets based on the time of day. The idea behind interactive television is combining the power of Internet ads…
The vision for Hyperlocal -- if you believe in it -- boils down to two camps. The first camp says it is a labor of love that must be hand-curated to work with merchants and engage the citizenry, town by…
The Australian telecom Telstra announced yesterday that Bruce Akhurst, CEO of its Sensis directories unit, has resigned. Akhurst had once been seen as a rising start at Telstra, but his failure to complete the transformation of Sensis from a traditional…
The arrival of Groupon and LivingSocial four years ago appeared to be a no money down, fail-safe way to get a hold of small-business accounts. But the followup hasn’t been easy, and the race to win SMB accounts is still…
Since its launch, Manta has been clear about its place in the fragmenting social media ecosystem. Whereas most networks are person-centric (i.e., Facebook for consumers; LinkedIn for job seekers) and many cater to brand advertisers (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn), CEO Pamela…
Inventory hasn’t yet emerged as a “must have” for merchants, but the strategic importance of tracking store inventory remains undiminished. Merchants will potentially use inventory levels to drive users to specific locations, build promotions to get rid of overage (or…
Bloomberg News is reporting today that AT&T is close to a deal to sell a majority stake in its Yellow Pages operation (AT&T Advertising Solutions, the world's largest directory company, in a deal that prices the business at US$1.5 billion.…
Here’s what we’ve been waiting to announce: Google Offers’ head Nitin Mangtani will join our great list of keynoters at ILM East March 26-28 in Boston. We believe Mangtani’s appearance marks one of the first public debuts of Google Offers,…
Where, a location-based mobile ad network, launched its first political product this week called Donate Now. It allows people to make donations to political campaigns from a mobile ad unit. According to S&P Capital IQ Analysts, political ad spending across…
In the past month, Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project, comScore and Nielsen released data that demonstrate increased smartphone penetration in the United States. More than 100 million U.S. mobile subscribers are using smartphones in Q1 2012, up…
The Local Search Association and BIA/Kelsey have assembled an agenda for this year's Search Starts Here conference (April 21-24 in Boca Raton) that focuses heavily on industry transformation. The agenda features 17 sessions with more than 20 speakers representing 17…
