Real estate advertising revenues will give way to transaction revenues, at least in SoCal, as the Los Angeles Times Media Group teams with several partners to launch Zetabid, a new site that will display and auction foreclosed homes and other…
The development of verticals is an obvious growth strategy for newspapers, Yellow Pages, search engines and as standalones. The Kelsey Group projects that verticals and classifieds will make up 25 percent of interactive local revenues by 2012. But nothing happens…
Since launching self-service EZ Ads in April 2007, Zillow.com has set a new standard for simple-to-buy, one-price ads, and 13,000 (mostly) local advertisers responded. Typical ad spends were about $50. Now as Zillow begins to have its inventory sold to…
Cox Enterprises has announced that it is putting most of its newspapers on the block, as well as Valpak, its direct mail giant. Newspapers, TV and radio currently now make up just 20 percent of the company’s revenues as it…
Real Cities, the national ad network owned by McClatchy, has been sold to fast rising Centro. Or at least, the Real Cities brand has been sold, along with access to Real Cities’ list of 250 national advertisers. The network’s local…
Matchpoint will soon be rolling out a new set of ad products to complement its flagship online lead-gen forms. On its own site, it will integrate more of an IYP setup with searchable business listings. With each search results page,…
Classified Ventures, the holding company for Cars.com, Homescape, Apartments.com, RentalHomesPlus and HomeGain that is jointly owned by McClatchy, A.H. Belo Corp., Gannett Co., Tribune Co. and The Washington Post Co. is now valued at $338 million. The valuation, contained in…
Online menus are a good thing, and a number of companies, mostly regionally oriented, have tried to aggregate them and sell advertising and delivery services around them. I am a big user of MenuShark in my area.At least two companies…
WellcomeMat isn't the latest player to enter the SMB video space, but it is starting to get more attention as the medium itself picks up. As TurnHere, Mixpo and a few others do to varying degrees, the three-year-old company focuses mostly…
Scripps Network Digital's new real estate site, FrontDoor.com, has developed an impressive list of ways real estate pros can use video. Presenting at Inman's Real Estate Connect conference last week in San Francisco, VP Kelly Rourke said video is critical…
This week Canada's Yellow Pages Group acquired directory-related assets from Volt Information Sciences for US$178 million. Volt has been a technology partner to YPG for seven years. It offers technology for database management and customer relationship management, and it also owns the independent…
To save costs and reduce reading time, many newspapers have begun to downsize the daily print edition, cut back pages and delete stock tables. They’ve also downsized editorial. Now, several have begun to fold in dedicated sections for various verticals,…
New media pioneer Deanna Brown, who is running Scripps Networks Digital after stints at CondeNet, AOL and Yahoo, told Inman Real Estate Connect attendees last week that their responsibility is to make sure real estate brokers are “on mobile, the…
Social media may not be worth much as an advertising medium right now, but it has become a critical part of real estate marketing, according to speakers at the Inman Real Estate Connect conference in San Francisco. “It is not…
Craigslist is arguably the No. 1 real estate site with real estate-oriented page views in the “low billions per month." So it makes sense to have founder Craig Newmark address the first day of the Inman Real Estate Connect conference…
Ad agencies look at a number of factors when they’re placing local media, such as “reach,” “targeted,” “easy,” “CPMs,” “environment,” “contextual,” “behavioral” and “geo-centric,” said Shawn Riegsecker, CEO of Centro, who was speaking at this week’s ShopLocal summit in Chicago.…
AdBrite VP of Marketing (and former Yahoo Local GM) Paul Levine has joined the board of local event site Zvents. Since its launch in 2005, Zvents has raised about $7 million and has made some strong moves in local events,…
NBC Universal, along with Bain Capital and The Blackstone Group, has agreed to acquire The Weather Channel from Landmark Communications for a figure reported to be $3.5 billion. The deal is the first of several sell-offs for Landmark, which also hopes…
Telstra, the parent company of Sensis, the Australian-based Yellow Pages company, has acquired 55 percent of Autohome/PCPop, which runs Autohome.com.cn, a Chinese auto portal, and Norstar Mediatwo, a Chinese CNET-like tech site. The two properties complement Telstra’s 51 percent share in SouFun,…
TeachStreet, which lists and profiles local independent teachers for everything from test prep to tennis lessons, is close to its official launch out of beta in Seattle and readying a second market in Portland, Oregon, according to founder Dave Schappell.…
