Daily Voice CEO: We’re ‘Far Closer’ to Profitable Than the Competition Is

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Zohar Yardeni has served as CEO of the The Daily Voice — a hyperlocal news network of 52 sites in suburban New York and Connecticut and central Massachusetts formerly known as Main Street Connect — since November, 2011. Street Fight checked in with Yardeni recently to see how he and the Daily Voice were competing in their hotly contested local digital space…

Will Retargeting Destroy Hyperlocal Chain Models?

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Ad retargeting damages the economics of hyperlocal networks hoping to make any real ad revenues selling to larger buyers. These same buyers can – and increasingly do – use retargeting to get the same Internet users at a fraction of the cost. This is another example of how hyperlocal actually scales down better than it scales up…

Street Fight Daily: LivingSocial Co-Founder Steps Down, Foursquare Adds Bios

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

LivingSocial Co-Founder And President Steps Down (Startup Stats)…

Foursquare Adds Bios To Profile Pages, Evolving As A More Self-Contained Social Network (TechCrunch)…

Is Hyperlocal News a Failed Business Model? (NetNewsCheck)…

Media Surveys Give Hyperlocals Short Shrift

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What’s needed is a survey that’s as thorough as Pew’s but which is confined to those communities with at least one credible independent site as well as a network site — like a Patch or Main Street Connect outlet — and at least one “legacy” (newspaper or local TV) site…

Street Fight Daily: 02.28.12

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

Groupon Reports Mobile App Growth, International Expansion Plans (Mashable)…

How This Month’s Google Search Changes Affect Local Businesses (ReadWriteWeb)…

Will an App for Broadcasting Our Future Locations Really Work? (Shiny Shiny)…

Street Fight Daily: 02.27.12

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

3 Things Retailers Can Learn from Mom and Pop Facebook Stores (Mashable)…

Print is Dead! Long Live Print? (TechCrunch)…

Patch: We’re nothing like Main Street Connect (Jim Romenesko)…

Westchester’s Hyperlocal News Market Is a Four-Sided Shootout

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Prestigious, affluent Westchester County, just north of New York City, is on the verge of becoming a hyperlocal version of the Gunfight at OK Corral – squared. Within months, four major-media companies will be competing community by community for dominance in this prized media market…

Main Street Connect Announces New CEO, $7 Million in Funding

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Main Street Connect, the network of hyperlocal news sites, announced yesterday that Thompson Reuters’ Global Head of Product Management Zohar Yardeni would come on as CEO, replacing founder Carll Tucker who will become chairman of the company’s board of directors. The company also announced $7 million in new funding, matching an inaugural round raised a year ago…

Owens, Tucker Spar Over Indies’ Profitability

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Last week, The Batavian’s Howard Owens penned a post on his personal blog about why independent hyperlocal sites were better positioned to be profitable long-term than scaled hyperlocal networks. Main Street Connect’s Carll Tucker, who believes that he has come upon a scalable formula for hyperlocal profitability, responded to Owens’ post last week, setting off a lively debate in the posts’ comments section over whether indies or scaled networks really have the upper hand when it comes to profitability…

Patch vs. Main Street Connect: How Will Hyperlocal Scale?

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Does size really matter in hyperlocal? Publishers debated the point on a panel during the first day of the Street Fight Summit. Patch CEO Warren Webster, naturally, said yes: “2010 was all about scaling up. We do believe that size is important.” Main Street Connect CEO Carll Tucker disagreed, saying that his publication started small and built outward, not wanting to “mass produce and see the wheels fall off.”

Realtor Reaches Clients Through SEO Marketing, Hyperlocal Blogs

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Realtor Karen Benvin Ransom’s listings have moved far beyond the newspaper classifieds. With a Twitter account, a Facebook page, a personal Web site, and a series of articles she’s written about her local community online, Ransom has honed in on the exact sites and search terms that her clients at Houlihan Lawrence are using to shop for homes in Westchester County, N.Y.

Main Street’s Need for Speed

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The single-best deal, assertion, investment or other strategy this week.

Who: Main Street Connect

Why: For its plan to scale up to 6,000 hyperlocal sites across the country in a few short years

Advertisers typically want to reach more than a single town. If independent community news site proprietors are making good dough, why aren’t they propagating, sharing their news prowess with neighbor towns? That’s what we’ll be doing with our profits — reinvest, reinvest, reinvest, so our products and processes get more and more excellent..Carll Tucker, Main Street Connect CEO

Street Fight Daily: 06.02.11

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups.Hyperlocal network Main Street Connect has rolled out 32 community-based news sites in Westchester County, N.Y., in its biggest launch to date. The move comes a few weeks after MSC added CentralMassNews, which owns ten local news sites in central Massachusetts, to its network. (Paid Content)… Groupon, as everyone knows by now, is growing like crazy. How crazy? CEO Andrew Mason revealed at the D9 technology conference that he now employs 8,000 people, which is up from 1,500 a year ago. Approximately half of these employees are in sales. (TechCrunch)…

Main Street Connect’s Tucker Responds to Criticism

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In an interview published two weeks ago, Main Street Connect’s founder Carll Tucker told Street Fight that hyperlocal Web sites need the efficiencies of scale to truly become profitable businesses rather than “passion or hobby” sites. His words clearly touched a nerve, sparking a slew of impassioned comments, as well as reactions on Twitter and elsewhere. Ahead of his network’s Wednesday launch of 32 new sites in Westchester County (N.Y.), Tucker wrote a long comment in response to some of the criticism that was lobbed his way…

Street Fight Daily: 05.20.11

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups.… Main Street Connect, which owns 10 hyperlocal news sites in Connecticut, just picked up CentralMassNews, which owns ten local news sites in central Massachusetts. That means the company will soon have 52 sites — when you include 32 sites that the company says it is launching next month in Westchester County, N.Y. (Paid Content)…

What can Foursquare tell us about how people live? New infographic data from the location-based social network, gives a pretty good picture of life for a certain demographic in New York and San Francisco. (Wall Street Journal)…

Main Street Connect’s Tucker: Hyperlocal Needs Scale

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A veteran in the community news business, Carll Tucker founded the community news company Trader Publications in 1981, built it up, and sold out to Gannett in 1999. Then, two years ago, he came to the conclusion that the community news model he’d been so successful at offline hadn’t really been replicated on the Web. And so he founded Main Street Connect, a small-but-growing collection of community sites that began in Connecticut and soon will expand into Westchester (N.Y.), and beyond…