Insider Pages founder Stu MacFarlane has been replaced as CEO by Mitch Galbraith, a veteran of Yahoo!'s small-business division who was recently brought in as VP of advertising. The change at the top appears to have been initiated by Insider's…
There has been no shortage of coverage and commentary on Google's acquisition of YouTube this week. Without content assets or unique technology, the acquisition has been viewed with a skeptical eye by many in the media and analyst communities. This…
And they just keep plugging away and plugging away at microsites. A new Bay Area company, Smalltown, has launched a microsite service in San Mateo and Burlingame that serves as kind of a commerce-oriented city guide/Yellow Pages. The service has…
Related to last week's discussions on the challenges and opportunities of user-generated content (and somewhat related to yesterday's news of Google's acquisition of YouTube), eMarketer has some positive data on the revenue-generating potential of UGC.
TV station Web sites and other local media will be hosting local "best of" contests developed by CityVoter, a new company started by Forrester Research alum. The "best of" contests are using a tried-and-true format popularized by city magazines such…
Call it sour grapes. But a year after famous talking head Michael Kinsley was thrown out as the Los Angeles Times' editorial page editor, he finally lets loose on Tribune Co. and its problems "fixing" the Times. In various comments,…
After many days of swirling rumors about a Google acquisition of YouTube, the companies announced today that this will happen. Read the press release here, a recording of the conference call that followed the announcement here, and more to come…
Craigslist will be adding $25 fees Oct. 22 for recruitment ads in four more markets: Boston; Seattle; Washington, D.C.; and San Diego. The markets join New York City, Los Angeles and San Francisco as cities where fees have been imposed…
Related to my post yesterday, Hitwise has some interesting data (via Greg) on the growth of UGC directories (i.e., Yelp, Judy's Book, Insider Pages, etc.) versus that of IYPs. It's an interesting comparison that supports the notion that UGC is…
Sept. 28 was an interesting day on several fronts in the local search and online ad spending business, but I'm not sure that it has gotten sufficient coverage. My colleague Michael Boland did write a brief blog titled "Local Search…
While trying to think and type as F-16s roar past my window (it's fleet week here in San Francisco), I'm beginning to notice an uptick in the conversation surrounding user-generated content in local search. Also known as "social search" (as…
Print and Internet advertising aren't perfect substitutes for each other. The way that ads are priced, it takes at least 10 Internet users to make up for a single print user. So it doesn't make too much sense to suggest…
Store locators, the only "local" part of many national retail sites, are an increasingly important part of both national and local retail sites, according to "Expectations of The Cross Channel Customer," a new study released by authoritative retail analyst Lauren…
As the previous post pointed out, college towns can represent strong markets for hyper-local community sites because of the activism (conducive to user generated content), buying power (sometimes), and high turnover of apartments, furniture, books, merchandise etc. My former colleague…
Four months after it landed on the West Coast, hyper-local Web site Backfence.com has established its first community site in the Midwest. The Evanston, Illinois, site will join Backfence's community sites in the D.C. area (the site started in Reston,…
The report on Newspaper Next, a Harvard Business School-influenced blueprint for transforming newspapers into local ad hubs, has been released by the American Press Institute — or at least a stripped-down, free version of it (i.e., very little data). Included…
It was widely reported today that A9, the search engine operated by Amazon, has pruned its branches by getting rid of several features and products, largely focused on location.This is from a Reuters article earlier today: The A9 Toolbar, maps,…
Last week, I got 22 comments within a two-day timeframe on a several-month-old post regarding Merchant Circle. I took all the comments off the blog after noting irregularities among them. Basically, I saw a deliberate attempt by one or more…
There is vast opportunity for local niche players in a world that is otherwise dominated by the leading search engines. Moreover, the emergence of search, in all its variations, creates a wealth of local inventory for advertisers smart enough to…
Geo-tagging is becoming a significant part of the local ecosphere and is a very popular feature on Yahoo!'s Flickr service, according to Yahoo! Local GM Paul Levine, who spoke at SES Local on Sept. 28 in Denver. Levine said that…
