Leads for home and trade and real estate come in many flavors. Some come from intuitive URLs. Reply.com, a marketplace for local and category specific leads, reinforced the latter today, acquiring FastRoofingBids.com, FastRoofingLeads.com and LeadToRealty.com. Reply.com CEO Payam Zamani, in…
We’ve just announced the initial lineup for ILM East in Boston, March 21-23, which follows hot on the heels of our Interactive Local Media 2010 conference in Santa Clara -- possibly the largest local event ever, with 681 attendees. ILM…
One of the bigger questions is how the local portals will fully leverage the emerging social deals platform, with deal a day, coupons, flash sales, et al. Local.com, which reaches 22 million unique visitors via its destination site and network,…
When Amazon made its deal to invest $175 million in LivingSocial, it wasn’t entirely clear how Amazon played in the local deal space. Sure, Amazon has its own non-local deals. And it owns Dallas-based Woot, a product-based deals provider. Still,…
Among the most challenging but potentially lucrative verticals is “Legal.” Long dominated by legal listings leaders such as Martindale Hubbell and Reuters Thomson, legal has opened up a little with the rise of social media and social media driven review…
Alt weeklies have certainly taken a hit from city guides (and especially from classified sites such has Craigslist). There has been a great deal of consolidation in the space. Yet the biggest consolidator, Phoenix-based Village Voice Media, with 14 local…
On average, people only move every six years or so. So there isn’t likely to be as strong a list of reviews of real estate agents as there is for pizza. But that hasn’t stopped Zillow from adding reviews of…
The Washington Post continues ramping up its vertical strategy, launching Service Alley to provide leads for home and trade professionals. The site, which is a standalone and not directly linked to Washingtonpost.com, follows the launch of other Post verticals, such…
Rating and review sites for things like dining, nail salons and events (i.e., Yelp) are inevitably going to battle it out with Google. CityGrid Media’s Insider Pages wants to go in a different direction. Since last year, the site has…
Local consumers are looking beyond pure search when they are looking for family fun. That’s the unmet need that Boston-based Goby.com is trying to meet in its 350-category, events and family fun search site. The site is now reaching 500,000…
Local and vertical content is eagerly sought by national players, from The New York Times to Yahoo, MSN/Bing to AOL. Now, Thompson Reuters is leading the local, vertical charge for wire services. In an aggressive push to lure traditional U.S. media…
Local food festivals (“Taste of Seattle,” “Taste of Hillcrest,” et al) are a great way to taste samples from many restaurants at one time. Usually, they require a single ticket, with proceeds often going to charity. A more recent phenomenon…
India’s auto classifieds marketplace is heating up, as the country’s burgeoning middle class becomes more auto dependent. In August 2009, MotorExchange acquired CarTradeIndia.com, apparently leading to investment in MotorExchange by Canaan Partners. Now, Axel Springer, the German media company, and…
SB Nation (Sports Blog Nation) presents a fan-centric, highly verticalized (i.e., local) view of sports from dozens of bloggers. The site has completed a new $10.5 million "C" round of funding, pushing it past the $23.5 million mark. The new…
With the rise of consumer-facing real estate sites such as Realtor.com, Zillow and Trulia, it seems only natural that Multiple Listing Services would break out from behind the Realtor and brokerage firewalls, and provide truly local, for-profit real estate sites,…
Avvo, the Seattle-based vertical site that launched its lawyer ratings service in 2007, has now added doctor ratings, using the proceeds, in part, from a $10 million raise it did in March. In launching a doctors site, it goes head…
AutoTrader.com is paying a reported $500 million to acquire the assets of Kelley Blue Book. The deal is expected to close by the end of 2010. On the surface, the acquisition of KBB is fairly straightforward. While AutoTrader provides its…
As "the media capital of the world," New York is rife with daily newspapers, high-culture magazines and lifestyle publications, yet Trevor Sumner says he had "no idea what was going on in my neighborhood. I couldn't even keep up with…
At BIA/Kelsey's DSB ’10 conference, Fisher Communications CEO Colleen Brown emphasized that local broadcasters can utilize the "long tail" of content to create richer offerings and open new advertising channels. The Seattle-based media group already does this through clusters of hyperlocal community Web sites…
Scheduling is seen as the next wave of online marketplace services for SMBs, encouraging sticky usage, premium features and, in some cases, highly contextual advertising. Scheduling vendors such as Agendize, Full Slate, MaxiPage and X Time are actively syndicating solutions.…
