Journal-Register’s Brady: Local Advertisers Have a Tech Gap
Jim Brady made a name for himself turning WashingtonPost.com into a serious player on the Web before he went to TBD.com last year, going all in on hyperlocal. But TBD shifted course on strategy last fall and let Brady go at the same time. In March, he was scooped up by Journal-Register Company, which has been a leader in transforming local papers into digital properties.
Street Fight recently spoke with Brady about the future of hyperlocal, including mobile’s key role, the hold daily deals companies have on the local ad market and why Patch should be applauded.
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Yipit’s Jim Moran: Lots of Winners in Hyperlocal
With so many daily deals sites popping up in the past year (following the mad success of Groupon), it’s natural that consumers would want a way to sift through, aggregate, and personalize these e-coupons to fit their needs. Enter Yipit, which launched in 2010 and draws on over 400 local deals sites (including Groupon, LivingSocial, and Scoop St.) to deliver customized lists of nearby deals...
Street Fight caught up with the company’s CEO, Jim Moran, for a quick Q&A about Yipit’s mission in the hyperlocal space, and whether the daily deals craze might be a “bubble.”..
A Chicago Retailer is Skeptical of Services Like Groupon
Shelley Young is the chef and founder behind The Chopping Block, a recreational cooking school and retail store in Chicago. Since opening her doors in 1997, Young has seen a dramatic change in the advertising landscape. Whereas she once employed a publicist, she now manages multiple social media accounts in-house and offers check-in specials on Foursquare. She remains skeptical about the long-term viability of daily discount sites.
Baristanet’s Debra Galant: How Patch Is Like Wal-Mart
Since its 2004 launch, Essex County, New Jersey-based Baristanet has often been held up as a hyperlocal news success story. Veteran journalists Liz George and Debra Galant created their local information site to be like a coffee shop where people in the three suburban towns they covered could learn about small-scale news and events around them.
Street Fight spoke recently with Galant about the site’s scope and history, whether stories about potholes can really be monetized, and what she thinks of AOL’s Patch...
Street Fight Daily: 04.19.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups…
Groupon is buying Pelago, maker of local discovery app Whrrl, in a bid to improve its ability to bring together consumers and local discount offers. This could also mean a broader direction for Groupon as it looks to expand beyond daily deals to more mobile and personalized discounts. (GigaOm)…
LocalResponse is a “social advertising platform” that lets small businesses sift through the stream of public check-in and review data to see who their most loyal customers are, and send them coupons and messages on Twitter. (NYT/Bits)…
Foursquare has added a feature that will bring some context to your historical check-ins. Now, when users look back at their check-ins, they won’t see only their pictures, but also pictures taken by friends who were also checked in at the event. (ReadWriteWeb)…
Topix CEO Chris Tolles: Community Over Content
When hyperlocal news and community site Topix was founded in 2004, the company’s plan was to take all the local news out there and aggregate it into niche news Web pages around hundreds of thousands of topics. The site’s algorithm sorted through 50,000 news sources and created feeds around all kinds of subjects, creating niche content aggregation. But in 2007, the company shifted gears after finding what it thought was an even more compelling product: harnessing the flood of user-generated commentary and debate around their topic areas. Street Fight spoke with CEO Chris Tolles about how hyperlocal has evolved, Patch’s place in the pack, and how journalism is actually just a means to an end…
Street Fight Daily: 04.18.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups.… LivingSocial’s February revenue was reportedly $50 million, and projected revenue for 2011 (assumed calendar) is a cool $1 billion. That makes it roughly half the size of Groupon. (TechCrunch)… Naveen Selvadurai, one of the founders of Foursquare, talks about how the company has quickly grown from nothing to a user base of over 8 million people, with 35,000 new users joining every day. (PC Mag)… Earlier this month, LivingSocial announced that it had raised $400 million in new funding to pursue “aggressive domestic and international growth and continued product innovation.” But approximately $200 million of that is being used to partially cash out early investors and members of company management. (Fortune)…
My Green Lake’s Duncan: Hyperlocal Means Shop Local
Seattle is one of the hotspots of hyperlocal blogs. Its West Seattle Blog boasts 30,000 visitors per month. Capitol Hill Seattle Blog says it gets more than 120,000 visitors per month. My Green Lake is another Seattle blog, with about 16,000 visitors each month, twice the population of the neighborhood it serves, notes its founder, Amy Duncan. Duncan, a former librarian, started the site in 2009 and runs it as a for-profit business currently featuring more than twenty neighborhood-based display ads and participating in three city-wide advertising networks.
Recently, Duncan, who manages both editorial and advertising at My Green Lake, answered a few questions by email...
Can Groupon Guilt Save My Local Sushi Joint?
I may have just helped put my little local sushi joint out of business. A place we had eaten at before and liked in my town sent out a killer Groupon deal: $50 of tasty fish for only $25. The economist in me knew the proper path. Maximize the heck out of that puppy and buy two for me (the maximum), two for my wife (as a gift) and two for each of my two children. That would bring my family Groupon savings to a cool $200 and still keep us within the legal limits of the deal.
It would also completely hose the little sushi restaurant we were fond of and do exactly the opposite of what Groupon seeks to do – provide an introduction to new customers. We’d eat there eight times in a year, which is probably more than we would otherwise – and they’d lose money on us every time…
Check-in Challenges
The single-best deal, assertion, investment or other strategy of the week.
Who: Mark Watkins, CEO and co-founder of Goby
What for: A smart call-to-action on the check-in services.
“There’s real opportunity here, and the check-in services have a lot of data they could harness for this. But unless ‘normal’ people find direct, personal value in the service, they’re not going to adopt it and the service will remain as a toy for the tech-obsessed.” —“2011: The Year the Check-in Died,” a guest post on ReadWriteWeb, April 12, 2011
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Street Fight Daily: 04.15.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups.… Groupon is expected to pick Goldman Sachs Group and Morgan Stanley as its two lead underwriters for a planned public offering later this year. The IPO is expected to value the company at between $15 billion and $20 billion. (Wall Street Journal)… Google’s mobile search business has grown incredibly quickly. Sales chief Nikesh Arora said Google may build out a local salesforce to take advantage of the new mobile and local advertising opportunities. (TechCrunch)… strong>What types of articles work best for news organizations on Foursquare? Opinions, reviews and evergreen content — but maybe not the news. (Nieman Journalism Lab)…
Boulder’s Om Time Yoga: ‘Inspiring Content’ Works
For Shannon Paige Schneider, marketing locally to customers of Om Time Yoga, the popular yoga studio she founded in Boulder, Colorado, is about connecting. Schneider has found that her clients respond more to inspiring online content – which she posts daily on Facebook and Twitter – than daily deals and web-based promotions. Schneider recently responded by email to questions from Street Fight for its series of conversations with local retailers.…
Where ‘Hyperlocal’ Is a Movement, Not a Business Model
I’ll bet you £10 that “royal wedding” is the first thought that jumps to the mind of an American journalist asked about Britain today. Yet with the ever-present fixation on their profession’s future, perhaps journalists in the U.S. should look past the palaces to the real action happening at the hyperlocal level…
Backfence Founder Mark Potts: Hyperlocal Takes Patience
News veteran Mark Potts is best known in the industry for his (failed) site Backfence, which pioneered a hyperlocal model that leveraged user-generated content. … Here Potts speaks with Street Fight about which companies are closest to solving the hyperlocal conundrum, how daily deals companies are changing the equation, and whether it’s really viable to do small-scale news with professional journalists.
EIC Brian Farnham on Patch’s Local-National Dance With HuffPo
AOL’s Patch was, handily, the brainchild of Tim Armstrong before he became the media giant’s CEO. In 800 local communities across the country, Patch is one of the bright spots in hyperlocal business models, with each “Patch” manned by a single editor and an ad sales person, and supported by a network of regional editors. But how will AOL’s acquisition of Huffington Post impact Patch? Well, just yesterday Arianna Huffington announced that she is planning to hire as many as 800 new full-time employees to beef up content on Patch’s network of sites and reduce the use of freelancers. Street Fight spoke recently with editor-in-chief Brian Farnham about Patch’s mission, the importance of pothole stories, how to help local businesses navigate online advertising, and the local-national strategy it’s developing with HuffPo.
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After Three Years, Examiner.com Looks to a Future Off the ‘Farm’
Rick Robinson’s Turf Talk column appears every Wednesday.
Tumbling into toddler-hood and growing-like-nuts, Examiner(we’re-not-a-content-mill).com celebrates its third birthday this week. Over that short time the network of sites has generated nearly a billion and a half page views. Street Fight turned to woolly-chinned Examiner CEO Rick Blair to get a little insight on the direction of the 3-year-old company…
Zaarly: Toll Taker on a ‘Buyer-Powered Commerce’ Highway?
Zaarly – it’s not a new verb expressing something extra cool. Not yet, anyway. But it’s got a pretty good start if you’re judging by its remarkable first two months alone. In that time they’ve pitched and launched the product, wowed celebrity judges at a startup competition in LA and accepted a million bucks in seed funding from, among others, Ashton Kutcher and venture fund Lightbank created by Groupon’s founders. And that’s all before the semi-official launch at SXSW or making a single dime.
Street Fight recently caught up with with the 32-year-old CEO behind this i-need-it-you-got-it service, Bo Fishback…