Street Fight Daily: Whole Foods Prices Cut for Prime Members, How Patch Makes Local Profitable

A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology…

Amazon and Whole Foods Reveal New Price Cuts for Prime Members (The Verge)
Amazon and Whole Foods today detailed a new set of discounts for Prime members that involve price cuts on Thanksgiving items like turkeys and a whole slew of other in-house Organic 365 items and those from partnered organic brands.

Facebook Local: The Launch We’ve All Been Waiting For? (Street Fight)
Damian Rollison: Last week’s rebranding of its Events app as Facebook Local could be Facebook’s long-awaited foray into serious competition with the Googles and Yelps of the world for market share in local search. Meanwhile, another Facebook local product, Marketplace, has proved to be a sleeping giant. 

­­How Patch’s CEO Makes Hyperlocal Profitable (AdExchanger)
Patch is in the midst of executing a turnaround and has been profitable for the past 15 months. It now serves 1,200 communities with a staff of 148.

Google Maps Gets a Redesign (TechCrunch)
Google has updated driving, navigation, transit and explore maps to better highlight information that the company thinks will be most relevant.

AccorHotels Has a Community Hub Strategy with a Local Services App (Skift)
Hotels don’t want to just be hotels. Instead, they want to be platforms for offering you experiences whenever and wherever you may be.

What Is Uber Really Worth? (WSJ)
SoftBank is shooting for a multibillion-dollar stake in Uber by paying one price to the company and a lower one to its shareholders—an unusual approach at such a grand scale that raises the question of what the world’s most valuable startup is actually worth.

Snapchat’s New Test: Grow Like Facebook Without the Baggage (NYT)
In today’s social media industry, you essentially have two options: Die young, or live long enough to turn into Facebook.

The Role of Publishers’ Content Studios Is Ever-Expanding (Digiday)
On any given day, Time Inc.’s branded content studio, The Foundry, is churning out campaigns for advertisers, to the tune of more than 1,000 over the past two years.

It’s Time to Put the Customer Front and Center in the Publisher-Advertiser World (MediaPost)
Sebastien Filion: All the discussion about programmatic advertising has typically focused on the relationship between advertisers and publishers with the consumer a distant third.

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