Street Fight Daily: Black Friday Was a Bonanza, SoftBank Tries to Buy Uber Shares at a Discount

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

Black Friday Sales, Click Rates Soar (MediaPost)
Email and ad engagement rates leaped in the week before Black Friday, contributing to a 23% hike in sales on Thursday and Friday, compared with the prior year, according to a study released on Monday by Rakuten Marketing. Digiday: Home Depot saw more mobile traffic than desktop on Black Friday.

Mobile Strategies That Retail Brands Are Using to Fuel Holiday Sales (Street Fight)
This holiday season, retailers with physical locations are working feverishly to compete against e-commerce giants like Amazon. Technologies that capture historical, location-based data from devices have become the next great hope for these brands, even as the physical and online shopping worlds continue to merge.

SoftBank Will Try to Buy Uber Shares at a 30% Discount (Recode)
SoftBank is preparing to buy shares of Uber at a price that values Uber at only $48 billion, a steep 30 percent discount rate for ownership in the company, which was last valued at almost $70 billion.

Sponsored Content: Managing a Coordinated Local Presence Management Strategy (Street Fight)
Surveys of both SMBs and enterprise local marketers show that both use a variety of marketing channels, so evaluating each channel’s effectiveness on its own, and then coordinating marketing programs across those channels, is important. But marketing channels fuel each other and produce multiplier effects.

How Much Should We Still Care About Duplicate Content? (Street Fight)
Mindy Weinstein: There has been a belief that duplicate content — although it is not cause for a penalty, unless it appears deceptive — hurts the overall quality of the website. Therefore, for years, duplicate content has been on a website audit checklist as an item to fix. But is that still the case?

Amazon Expands Its Influence on Video Infrastructure (AdExchanger)
Amazon wants to own a greater chunk of the video supply chain. Amazon Web Services released a suite of video tools called AWS Elemental Media Services on Monday, designed to help live and on-demand video content providers manage workflow.

Here Are the Concerns Ad Buyers Will Have About the Time Inc Sale (AdWeek)
With Time Inc. reaching more than 230 million people across print and digital, and Meredith’s publications reaching more than 200 million American consumers across digital, television, print, video, mobile and social platforms, the reach of these combined companies will be staggering.

Waymo Seeks Delay in Court Fight with Uber Over Trade Secrets (NYT)
A battle between two technology titans that could impact the future of self-driving automobiles may be delayed after new evidence surfaced in a court filing on Monday.

WeWork Is Buying Meetup in an Increasingly Disconnected World (Wired)
Jessi Hempel: Ask CEO Adam Neumann what he’s building, and he’ll describe a community-manufacturing machine — a startup that, according to its mission, is a place where people “work to make a life, not just a living.” 

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