The ‘Wishes and Dreams’ of Hyperlocal News Consumers

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The data explosion offers plentiful opportunities to develop new news. But to blend that data into a compelling content cocktail, hyperlocals have to be continually innovative, and that’s not happening. Social networking is a big part of the new news, but it is nowhere near connecting to the user’s meaningful preferences…

Case Study: Santa Fe Sports Shop Scores Big With Groupon

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When Santa Fe Mountain Sports owner Dan McCarthy first got a call from Groupon, he wasn’t sure what to expect. Despite some initial trepidation, McCarthy was able to craft a deal that cost him very little and was purchased almost exclusively by new customers. All things considered, he says Groupon deals are the cheapest way he’s found to get new people through the front door at his shop.

Street Fight Daily: 06.30.11

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups... The next phase of growth for local deals will be mobile. Groupon knows this, and so does Yelp, which is rolling out Yelp Deals to its iPhone and Android apps. (TechCrunch)… Groupon competitor LivingSocial met with bankers this week to discuss a $1 billion public offering. The IPO could value LivingSocial, which expects to generate $1 billion in revenue this year, at $10 billion to $15 billion. (Paid Content)…

Inside National Public Radio’s Play for Local Online

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I’ve been writing about large media brands and their hyperlocal efforts for the past few weeks, looking at Gannett, Tribune and PBS for example. Balancing things out with another not-exactly-for-profit property, I recently asked NPR’s digital services GM, Robert Kempf, to talk about his organization’s forays into hyperlocal…

Street Fight Daily: 06.29.11

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

A few months after being named COO of the Huffington Post Media Group, Jon Brod’s responsibilities are being narrowed to focus on running AOL’s Patch network of hyperlocal sites. Brod co-founded Patch with Tim Armstrong and was CEO when it was acquired in 2009. (Paid Content)…

Location-based service advertising will grow to over one-third of all mobile advertising in four years. By 2015, location-based advertising will be $6.2 billion, according to Pyramid Research. (MediaPost)…

Making Deals More Relevant

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In considering the future of daily deals and group buying, one theme that keeps coming up is the idea that increasingly sophisticated targeting (and thus relevance) will, over time, make the deals proposition better for both merchants and consumers. As with traditional advertising, the better targeted a deal is for a consumer’s preferences and geo-location, the better value the promotion is for the merchant who runs it…

ReachDeals’s Razgaitis: Mobile Is a ‘Key Catalyst’ in Deals Space

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DealOn, a group buying company that launched in late 2009, was always meant to be more than just a Groupon clone. The site offered deals, but it also had plans for a white label deals solution for publishers as well as an “offer exchange” which sought to “empower the deals ecosystem,” according to Rich Razgaitis, who was the company’s CEO until it was acquired by ReachLocal last year…

Case Study: Optometrist Uses Foursquare to Court Tech-Savvy Patients

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For self-avowed tech junkie Nathan Bonilla-Warford, Foursquare is more than just a tool for discovering new restaurants and keeping up with friends. It’s also one of the primary ways he markets his business as an optometrist and the owner of Bright Eyes Family Vision Care in Tampa, Florida…

Street Fight Daily: 06.28.11

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

“How can LivingSocial beat a better-funded competitor with more name recognition who has a 22-country head start on them?” asks Sarah Lacy. “Ironically by moving more slowly, throwing around less cash and being smarter with local hires, not pricey consultants and MBAs.” (TechCrunch)…

“You can’t just jump into a crowded local news market with a product that’s about as good as the existing ones,” writes Erik Wemple. “Even marginally better won’t get the job done. It’s got to be so much better that you can eat the lunch of legacy outlets.” (Washington Post)…

TIPPR: Quality of Audience Is What Matters in the Deals Space

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In the wake of Groupon’s recent S1 and the subsequent wave of criticism that has been aimed at the daily deals giant, deals platform and technology providers like Tippr are stepping in to the fray with new models to power group buying. Street Fight caught up with Tippr’s COO Samy Aboel-Nil at DIGIDAY: LOCAL last week to discuss how the company’s Powered by Tippr is hoping to change the game…

Local News Isn’t Local Enough for Meporter’s Andy Leff

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Meporter, a citizen journalism platform for mobile phones that was launched in May, combines the check-in function of Foursquare with crowdsourcing and old-fashioned reporting. Using the app, journalists of all stripes can check in to a location or an event and then share their on-the-fly news report with the world at large…

Street Fight Daily: 06.27.11

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

LivingSocial seems to be following Groupon’s lead in acquiring local daily deal sites to serve as a foundation for discount distribution on a global scale. (TechCrunch)…

Could Offers become a massive new revenue stream for Google — the “second huge growth engine” that Google has long searched for in vain? SAI spoke to reps of merchants who have signed on to offer Google Offers in New York, as well as Google’s Eric Rosenblum, the lead engineer on Offers, and Google spokesperson Nate Tyler. (Silicon Alley Insider)…

Hyperlocal’s Automated Future

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At the hyperlocal level, the value is in the information, not the presentation. You read the local to learn, above all, what’s going on in your town or your nabe. If a computer can help collate and present that to you in a more digestible fashion, more the better. Will this kill the community journalist? I doubt it. The journalist still must be present.

Street Fight Daily: 06.24.11

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

In the automotive space, the responsibility for advertising is shifting from car makers to car dealers, and that means significant boost for local media, especially online, according to a report looking at the auto category from Borrell Associates. Online is pulling ad spending from car companies and dealers at a more accelerated rate, and display is likely to remain a key beneficiary. (Paid Content)…

In the quest for a unified database of places, geo-location startup Factual is making big strides. Yesterday it announced a partnership with SimpleGeo to maintain and power its places database, which up until now has offered a competing database of places in the eyes of developers. (TechCrunch)…

Loopt: Re-Energizing the Deal Business

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Our pick in this week’s Street Smart Moves is Loopt. Daily deals is a hackneyed formula already, but Loopt is trying to bring some innovation to the fore by letting consumers pick their own deals. What Loopt is doing is almost exactly the answer to John Wannamaker’s famous quote about not knowing which half of his advertising worked (but knowing half did): By letting consumers suggest the items they want deals on, merchants will know what will sell.

Taking ‘Broccoli Journalism’ Hyperlocal

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Mediameister Jeff Jarvis is the pluperfect phrasemaker. “There’s no why there,” he memorably summed up the Mark Zuckerberg-Facebook biopic The Social Network. But I wish his jibe about “broccoli journalism” didn’t prove so hardy. Jarvis coined the phrase in 2009 – in an attack on a report calling for federal subsidies to prop up the cost of reporting “serious” news stories…

Case Study: Why Static Ads Don’t Work For a Seasonal Business

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Neal Schwartz is the director of Tutoring Club, a learning center for students in Armonk, New York. Although he advertises regularly on a number of hyperlocal news sites, he finds it’s difficult to assess the value in online advertising and gets frustrated with local publishers who aren’t responsive to his needs as the owner of a seasonal business…

Street Fight Daily: 06.23.11

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

Foursquare is introducing its largest partnership to date: a national deal with American Express to offer discounts to cardholders when they check in on their cellphone at certain shops and restaurants. Substantial deals like those being offered to American Express cardholders may bring Foursquare and other location-based services further into the mainstream. (New York Times)…

Foursquare simply doesn’t have the salesforce to craft the same kind of deals that Groupon can. Groupon’s deals tend to be more alluring with deeper discounts. AmEx is helping Foursquare here by sourcing many of these deals itself through its own salesforce and existing relationships with local and national merchants, but it also gets to keep all the revenue. At least for now. (TechCrunch)…

Loopt Experiments With Inverted Daily Deal Structure

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Loopt yesterday announced the debut of Loopt u-Deals, which turns the concept of the daily deal on its head. Instead of passively receiving daily discount offers and deciding whether to buy in, Loopt users will be able to hone their DIY chops by selecting their own “deal” (from among three available choices), requesting that Loopt approve it, and gathering friends for buy-in pending its approval…

St. Louis Beacon: Revenue Beyond the Banner Ad

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The St. Louis Beacon, a local Web site that covers the region, was founded in 2007 by a group of veteran St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporters who perceived a serious lack of in-depth reporting about the communities they lived in. After building up the site, they snagged a couple of grants and partnerships that made the project viable. But, like many local news sites started by high-minded journalists, the Beacon was initially all about the journalism. “They didn’t have anybody on staff who was thinking about business models or technology strategy, or any of that sort of stuff,” says Nicole Hollway, the site’s general manager, who came on board in 2008…