Street Fight Daily: 10.07.11

A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups.

Groupon said in a regulatory filing that it plans to “significantly” reduce online marketing spending over time as such investments yield insufficient returns. Marketing spending may become less attractive because of “changes in subscriber economics, achievement of subscriber saturation levels in various markets or a determination that subscriber growth objectives can be satisfied though alternative means.” (Bloomberg)

“AOL’s management may be committed to Patch for now, but the company can’t continue pouring money into an unprofitable entity forever, no matter how much Webster talks about a “long-term” investment,” writes Mathew Ingram. “AOL doesn’t really have the luxury of thinking long term at the moment — Armstrong has to show some positive movement to investors or his job is likely in jeopardy, and without him Patch loses its biggest champion.” (GigaOm)

With its new focus on becoming an all-in-one platform for deals, 8coupons is now leveraging its relationships with Groupon, LivingSocial and companies like restaurant.com to offer a full array of geo-tagged deals from your local area.  And now it has teamed up with CityPockets to enable daily deal enthusiasts to track and manage their purchases. (TechCrunch)

The Huffington Post will launch two new city pages in November: HuffPost Detroit and HuffPost Miami. The launch of these two local sites renews the concerns about another AOL property: Patch, the company’s costly venture into local news. (AdWeek)

According to a new survey, if you can help someone save money, they may not mind being pushed a contextually relevant coupon on their smartphone. In fact, many seem ready to share their location with a retailer in order to get the savings.  (MediaPost)

Although crowdsourcing local business content online can be a quick and perceived easy task for some local search platforms and businesses, there are many reasons why it should not be the foundational tool for building and managing local search business listing databases. (SearchEngineWatch)

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