BIA/Kelsey senior analysts Peter Krasilovsky and Abid Chaudhry batted around these two hot topics today on the latest in our ongoing Analyst Roundtable series.

“Newspapers need money,” Krasilovsky said, answering the basic questions of why Classified Ventures (a consortium of five newspaper groups) would sell the No. 2 auto site.

Krasilovsky then posed the bigger question, “Who would buy this property?” The property could potentially be sold from anywhere from $2.8 billion to $3.6 billion — a level accessible only to the biggest media and technology players. Peter suggested Gannett and Google could be potential buyers, with Autotrader, the No. 1 player, being a potential dark horse.

Next, Chaudhry shared his insights on the recent Yahoo-Yelp partnership.

“This is a pretty big development,” Chaudhry said. “It provides more fuel to the fire to all the speculation that Marissa Mayer and her intentions to rebuild Yahoo’s search engine business.”

The big question is how will Yahoo compete with Google? Chaudhry doesn’t see Yahoo taking Google on directly. Instead, he expects Yahoo to carve out a niche for itself in the mobile search market. He highlighted Yahoo’s efforts to incorporate more native and streaming advertising from Yahoo’s Gemini platform.

Click on this video to enjoy today’s Analyst Roundtable in its entirety.

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The clock is ticking!  We are just one month from Leading in Local: Interactive Local Media, which is Dec. 10-12 in San Francisco. The event has shaped up to be the most exciting local event in recent memory – a 2 1/2 day extravaganza that focuses on local:  The Internet’s last and biggest frontier.

We’ve already announced a powerful lineup of 48 speakers, including local leaders at Google, Facebook, Go Daddy, eBay, Groupon, Hubspot, Intuit; and major thinkers and leaders, including Lt. Governor Gavin Newsom, AllThings D‘s Kara Swisher and Startup Rising author Chris Schroeder.

Want more? We have some exciting new confirms.

• Amit Kumar, VP, and Head of SMB, Yahoo. Kumar is set to brief attendees on Yahoo’s local and SMB initiatives under CEO Marissa Meyer.
• Ralf VonSosen, Marketing Leader, LinkedIn. VonSosen is set to discuss LinkedIn’s approach to leveraging its vast network for marketing
• Joel Hughes, SVP, Constant Contact. Hughes joins SureFire Social’s  Chris Marentis to discuss ways to make social media really powerful for local.
• Jeff Folckemer, President, Local Edge. Folckemer joins a great Digital Agency session and will provide insight into Hearst’s view of what really works.
• Anna Zornosa, President, Ruby Rails. Zornosa, the longtime industry leader with prior stints at Knight Ridder Digital, Dealix and Women.com joins our special Women Leading in Local networking session.

Of course, it isn’t just about what’s on stage. We are staging the San Francisco edition of our Future Stars contest, which rewards talented local startups; and not one, but TWO great precon tours set. A limited number of attendees will be visiting with Yelp at its brand new headquarters in the historic PacBell building; another group will be meeting a super group of Bay Area startups at WeWork. More info on signing up is coming.

Will we see you in San Francisco?   Register here:

We’ll be touring Yelp’s new headquarters.

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The seven year old Newspaper Consortium with Yahoo is getting a new lease on life as “The Local Media Consortium,” and is re-signing members to a new five year group deal that will seek out digital opportunities with Yahoo and additional technology and content players as they arise.

Under terms of the new deal, members may opt in and out at will, rather than facing penalties for withdrawal. All local media members will now also be able to join and participate across the board. Previously, TV stations were not given access to certain features.

Roughly 85 percent of the original consortium membership has re-upped, including McClatchy, Hearst Corp., Morris Communications, Digital First Media, Lee Enterprises Inc., Berkshire Hathaway’s BH Media Group Inc. and A.H. Belo Corp. There are also new members such as Deseret Digital Media and Ballentine Media. More members will be announced at the end of October. Combined together, the consortium represents over 200 million unique users and garners 1.7 billion monthly page views.

By signing up for new terms, the newspaper companies are sending a clear message that they are making money via the consortium’s display ads and other activities. They also see many advantages to banding together and exploring mutual opportunities in a way that might be more efficient than building entirely new consortiums for various projects.

Newspaper products that have been developed outside the consortium in recent year, for instance, include such projects as Wanderful Media, a national shopping play; and the Zillow newspaper-real estate consortium.

We talked this morning with McClatchy VP of interactive media and Consortium Chairman Chris Hendricks, along with Consortium Executive Director Rusty Coats, a longtime newspaper vet most recently with E.W. Scripps and Media General. “It is a much different approach,” says Hendricks. “This is more of a ‘cult of the willing.’ We are looking to see how we can collectively work together on multiple fronts. We are looking at the world through the prism of scale, which is what really matters.”

Over the years, Hendricks notes that Yahoo has been able to provide a number of functions to the Consortium, including ad serving, content and search. It has also been able to extend its audience for display ads. But the Consortium now wants to investigate more wide ranging “plumbing” functions with a wide range of players, plus content and ad exchanges, he says.

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In a move that is surprising a lot of people, Marissa Mayer, arguably the face of “local” at Google, will leave immediately to take the top job at online media company Yahoo. The appointment as Yahoo’s new president & CEO, announced today, takes effect tomorrow. Long transition periods tend to go by the wayside when one is jumping to a competitor.

Mayer was Google employee number 20, and has risen steadily through the ranks, leading the charge on a number of popular Google products, including search, email, news and images. She was also part of the company’s operating committee, the definition of Google’s inner circle. Mayer has recently led Google’s efforts in local. However, in recent months her role has been a bit less clear, following a reorganization that placed Jeff Huber directly responsible for local. Mayer has since shown signs of restlessness, for example joining corporate boards (notably Wal-Mart).

Mayer’s legacy includes instrumental roles in building Google Places and in pulling off the Zagat’s acquisitions. Some misses include the failures to acquire Yelp and Groupon.

The Yahoo job makes sense for Mayer in that it allows her to take a leadership role, one that may never become available at Google. Yet the move involves risk, since Yahoo is a company in flux, trying to find a business model that will rescue it from the position it now finds itself in, a second tier online player operating in the shadows of Google and Facebook. Yahoo still has a strong brand, particularly in areas like sports and finance, but it has failed to keep pace with its rivals and revenues have stagnated.

Yahoo is certainly in need of some strategic vision and leadership. The company has recently seen a revolving door of CEO, with the most recent chief, Scott Thomson, leaving just four months into his tenure amid allegations that he lied about his academic credentials. Thomson had announced a new strategy built around marketplaces and e-commerce (a move away from advertising), but the strategy died with with departure. Yahoo has been lead by interim CEO Ross Levinsohn since Thomson’s departure.

Over the years, Yahoo has become a company that is much more about content than search, having outsourced search to Microsoft in 2009. This may be an adjustment for Mayer, who is more familiar with search from her years at Google. Acting CEO Levinsohn is a veteran of News Corp., CBS and Saatchi and Saatchi. Mayer might be wise to leverage Levinsohn’s savvy and experience in the ad world as she acclimates to her challenging new role.

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Zagat is Google’s great equalizer against Yelp. Google has now demonstrated why it paid $151 million for Zagat last September by including Zagat, which formerly cost $4.95 a month (or $24.95 per year), as part of its new rollout of Google+ Local. The newly branded service replaces Google Places.

As a result of the integration, which will also feed into Google search results and maps, Google+ users will now be able to see reviews from their friends (and “acquaintances”) when they are looking up local information

While Zagat is known mostly for its 30-point restaurant reviews — more nuanced (and time consuming) than Yelp’s five-star system — it now uses the same 30-point platform for 13 categories. More than 100 cities are currently served by Zagat. Outside the restaurant space, Zagat had previously licensed its system to companies such as Anthem Blue Cross for medical reviews.

At ILM West last December, Head of Local Consumer Marketing Jeff Aguero said “the local experience is mostly disconnected. It is not consistent across user experience,” whether people are engaged in researching, finding, experiencing, reviewing or sharing. Google’s goals are ultimately to “get more local searches, more customers, more reviews, better content, higher engagement and more businesses online.”

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That was quick. Yahoo’s radical shift to a new Commerce/ Marketplaces strategy — announced in mid April — has abruptly ended with the resignation of CEO and former PayPal head Scott Thompson, and SVP Sam Shrauger, his PayPal colleague, who had been brought in last month to implement the plan.

As an advocate of pursuing “non-advertising” revenues and closed loop marketplaces, I liked parts of the big data-heavy plan, although it was vague. For instance, unique content was being de-emphasized. I also liked that such a radical new vision would buy time with an impatient investor community. A couple of quarters, at least.

But Yahoo appears to be locked into several things that would have made it difficult to implement. It controls very few verticals on which to base a marketplaces plan. Autos, health care, real estate, travel, jobs, personals and shopping have been rented out to various companies, and the lengths of the contracts have not been disclosed. It also wasn’t clear what Yahoo was going to do with Yahoo Merchant Solutions, which already provides many of these services. Nor was it clear who would sell the data efforts — a complex and strategic sale.

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Google made up 66.5 percent of the U.S. market share in explicit core search in April, a 0.1 percentage point rise from the previous month, according to comScore’s qSearch analysis. Microsoft came in second at 15.4 percent and Yahoo rounded out the top 3 at 13.5 percent, slipping 0.2 percentage points.

ComScore excludes contextual searches from core search since they do not reflect user intent. Out of the 17.1 billion core searches Americans conducted in April, Google sites ranked first at 11.4 billion. Microsoft sites ranked second at 2.6 billion followed by Yahoo at 2.3 billion.

In April, 68.7 percent of searches carried organic search results from Google (up 0.1 percentage points versus March), while 25.9 percent of searches were powered by Bing.

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Group software seems obsolescent in the social revolution. Or is it?

A few weeks ago, John Battelle’s Federated Media acquired Big Tent, the women’s group enabler with 1.3 million users. It apparently plans to target women with very specific advertising.

Oodle, the mega-classifieds platform, has now followed course, buying Grouply, which is described by TechCrunch as “a do-it-yourself social network built on top of Google Groups and Yahoo Groups.” Oodle isn’t disclosing how much it paid, but Grouply had been funded by VCs (including LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman) to the tune of $2.6 million.

So, what can you do with group software? Oodle CEO Craig Donato sees it as a first step to moving social media beyond just friends. He notes that groups bring in different kinds of conversations in a social context, whether people are giving things away, want to talk to other mothers, or share tips on recycling. Among “first degree friends,” there simply isn’t enough liquidity to engage in robust commerce, he hints.

While the social graph is still mostly about friends, the graphs are getting more complicated, adds Donato. “There are lots of circles, and lots of different affinities. The texture to the graph is incredibly important for commerce. The sweet spot is two or three degrees of separation. This might include friends of friends, college classmates or people from your hometown.

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Zillow, after five years and $87 million raised, says it is now in the black for the first time, after focusing more on revenues. It also announced that Spencer Rascoff has been appointed CEO, replacing  Expedia Founder Rich Barton, who becomes executive chairman and focuses on a heavy portfolio of vertical investments, such as Avvo.com, the legal site.

Rascoff and Barton, in a phone call yesterday, told us that the company is currently driving revenues on Zillow.com, Yahoo Real Estate and Mobile from five key revenue streams, including its Mortgage Marketplace, display, national advertising, local advertising and mobile advertising. The latter channel has become especially critical and now accounts for 20 percent of usage on weekends, says Barton.

“Real estate is the ultimate local shopping experience,” suggests Rascoff.

The mortgage marketplace, especially, has become one of the company’s fastest growing areas as well, with 314,000 mortgage leads being processed on the site, up six fold from August 2009 , when it was introduced. This compares in the balance to 4 million homes being listed, and 150,000 rental listings.

Twenty-five percent of home shoppers are now looking at home rentals as a point of comparison, says Rascoff.

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Groups have been using the Web since the mid-1980s for a wide range of activities, such as scheduling, discussions, photo sharing, referrals etc. Groups have been a special strength for Yahoo.

BigTent, a group software company based in San Francisco, has recently been vying with Yahoo for the same market, focusing largely on women. It now has more than 1 million members, who reside in more than 50 percent of U.S. ZIP codes. The question for BigTent and Yahoo, in the age of Facebook and other social media, is what will keep users on a dedicated platform? And what will be their own revenue model?

BigTent CEO and Founder Donna Novitsky says the answer is easy: Facebook is great, but BigTent’s groups, which range in size from 10 to “hundreds of thousands,” tend to require a lot of customization and special features. BigTent groups now range from simple mailing lists to groups with discussions, events, memberships, payments, classifieds, reviews and more.

“Many BigTent groups are local and use the technology to schedule events every week and track participation, in addition to hosting lively discussions 24×7 online, by e-mail and on mobile devices,” says Novitsky. “As groups have grown, they need subgroups to maintain intimacy, so we provide that as well, with all the functionality of the top level groups. It’s all about continuing to scale and deliver value to more local clubs, schools, parenting groups, neighborhoods, sports teams and scout troops,” she adds.

From a business perspective, one of the core challenges for BigTent, a free service, is how to leverage its aggregated user base. The answer: advertising with national brands that want to target women, such as Clorox and Old Navy, and various marketplace opportunities.

Novitsky notes that one marketplaces effort the company is doing is a partnership with Redbeacon, which helps members find local service providers like babysitters, plumbers and painters. “Much of the discussion in our local groups is seeking referrals and recommendations from other group members so this is win-win-win for the members, partners and BigTent,” says Novitsky.

Deal referrals are another big marketplaces opportunity for Big Tent. The majority of deal-a-day subscribers, after all, are educated women. “Our audience loves deals,” confirms Novitisky. “But the deals space has gone crazy with too many different providers sending too many e-mails — it’s deal overload. So BigTent is working with several of the deals providers such as Groupon and The DealMap to bring together the best deals and sort them for our audience. This is respectful of our members’ time and attention, and delivers better results for everyone.”

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