Street Fight Daily: 12.15.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups.
EBay’s PayPal Counts on Its 103 Million Users to Target Groupon (Bloomberg BusinessWeek)
PayPal is aiming to challenge Groupon and LivingSocial in the market for online daily deals. The company plans to start offering coupons tailored to users’ buying habits and mobile-phone locations in the first quarter of 2012, partnering with some of the top 200 U.S. merchants.
Examiner.com Will Provide Content For CBS Local Digital Media (PaidContent)
Hyperlocal content network Examiner.com is partnering with CBS Local Digital Media to provide exclusive content for CBS’s locally targeted properties in 25 cities. The stories, by Examiner.com writers local to those markets, will focus on “Best Of” guides and “Top Spots” lists. The content will appear on a few CBS Local sites this month and spread to all of them in the first quarter of 2012.
NBC Maps the 2012 Election Campaign Trail With Foursquare (Mashable)
NBC and Foursquare are joining forces to map the 2012 U.S. presidential election. The “Campaigns Check-In” feature will be part of NBC’s new NBCpolitics.com, which launched Wednesday. The site serves as a hub for all the network’s political coverage.
Belly’s Digital Customer Loyalty Focuses On QR Codes, Personalization (ReadWriteWeb)
Chicago-based Belly launched a new digital loyalty program that aims to help small- and medium-sized businesses better customize their loyalty/rewards programs, both to the merchant and the customer. Belly uses a single universal loyalty card, and is also available as an iPhone or Android app, which uses a QR code to scan.
Yelp’s Future Looks Like A Stormy Red Sea (Business Insider)
Alex Cocotas: Although Yelp’s losses are clearly narrowing, falling from 26% to 13% as a percentage of revenue in one year, they are surprisingly large considering the company’s 80% year-over-year revenue growth. We believe Yelp will face a difficult path to profitability in the coming years.
Groupon Gets Average Grades on Analysts’ First Report Cards (AllThingsD)
A handful of analysts issued report cards on Groupon raise concerns about how the 3-year-old daily deals company will evolve over the next couple of years. Most of the analysts’ evaluations were concerned about risks, such as the company’s short operating history, the prospects for growth now that it has gotten so large, and intense competition coming from peers like LivingSocial, Amazon and Google among many others.
Get Street Fight Daily in your inbox! Subscribe to our newsletter.