Street Fight Daily: 05.04.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups.… E-commerce giant eBay said in February that it is eying deals that more closely link the online and brick-and-mortar shopping experience. Hyperlocal has become a common phrase for the company as it targets firms that can connect shoppers to local merchants. (The Street)…
AOL HuffPo is launching three new Patch sites geared towards Latino readership in Southern California by the end of the year. No decisions have apparently been made yet regarding which communities those sites will cover. (FishbowlLA)…
“People love getting advertising that is applicable to them, and 90% of every dollar is spent offline within 10 miles of the home,” says Topix CEO Chris Tolles. “Great hyperlocal advertising works to connect consumers to applicable business where they live.” (The Next Web)…
CityGrid’s Herratti: Local Is Becoming More and More Fragmented
Jay Herratti has been working in the local advertising space for decades. Previously the CEO of IAC-owned destination guide CitySearch, he currently serves as CEO of CityGrid Media, a “location-aware” advertising network that aggregates local advertisers and extends them across a network of 300+ publishers, including Urban Spoon, Insider Pages, and many others. Street Fight caught up with Herratti recently to talk about the fragmented nature of the local online advertising marketplace and why the Groupon phenomenon is an example of the kind of “closed-loop” advertising model that small businesses love.
HuffPo Harnesses Patch Hyperlocals for Bin Laden News
In the months since AOL bought The Huffington Post, the company’s execs have talked a number of times about plans to incorporate coverage from Patch’s network of hyperlocal sites into HuffPo’s national report. Arianna Huffington herself recently said she expects Patch will be a key element of HuffPo’s coverage of the 2012 presidential election, and Patch local reports from California were recently used in stories about the Japanese tsunami. But last night we really saw that collaboration in action, as HuffPo drew on Patch’s network to flesh out out its coverage with hyperlocal reactions to the death of Osama bin Laden…
Healing What Ails Local
Local has always been regarded as the sleeping giant in digital advertising, with so much heavy lifting required and so few solutions available at scale. But, at long last, a solution may be at hand. Local publishers are now participating in centralized, single point-of-entry buying platforms that give national brands the tools and data needed to buy premium local audiences with national scale.
Study: FB ‘Likes’ Driving Buzz for Local Biz
The Facebook “like” button, which has been around for just over a year, has already become an important cultural phenomenon. A couple of months ago, a study by Yahoo Labs’ Yury Lifshits looked at how “likes” affect traffic to news stories by reinforcing memes, making the most popular content even more popular as it is passed around.
Hyperlocal 1.0 Heavy Bob Smith: ‘The Way It Was’
It’s difficult to pinpoint when online hyperlocal came into being. The idea was there with BBSs (electronic bulletin board services) since the early 1980s or even earlier, when local dial-up services allowed callers to access files, games, chat and so on. Long distance charges caused many to dial in to local boards. And thus local communities developed, with some system operators focusing on delivering local information and news. A few local newspapers tried getting into the game with bulletin boards of their own, or via Usenet Newsgroups…
Read the first in a series of interviews with leaders of what we’re calling Hyperlocal 1.0, as well as a bit of a response from a Hyperlocal 2.0 chief.