Street Fight Daily: 06.09.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups.
One Patch salesperson – candidly self-described as a “disgruntled employee” — said that “people in the sales teams that are successful have to sell the product to an ignorant lot of small business owners that can’t differentiate between branding and performance-driving results. When it gets down to paying the editors, paying the sales staff, paying the management and the requisite expenses that go along with that, the numbers just do not compute.” (Business Insider)
A new forecast from eMarketer puts online ad spending at $31.3 billion this year, up 20 percent. That is double the 10.5 percent growth rate it put out last December for 2011. The new forecast shows online ad spending reaching nearly $50 billion in 2015. (TechCrunch)
Two universal characteristics distinguish the true New Orleanian: defiant exceptionalism and ferocious local loyalty. Without much competition on the hyperlocal front (AOL’s Patch is notably absent), NOLA.com is in the process of reorganizing an extensive network of community news writers and sections already under their employ. (NetNewsCheck)
On an individual subscriber level, Groupon’s revenue is actually falling. Revenue per subscriber as of June 30, 2009, was about $21.69. By March 31 of this year, that had plummeted 64.2 percent, to just over $7.76. (DealBook)
What do Neiman Marcus, HP and Buffalo Wild Wings have in common? Not a lot, except that they’ve all created marketing campaigns on SCVNGR. Mashable talks with SCVNGR SVP of marketing Chris Mahl to go over some case studies. (Mashable)
Want! brings the concept of Facebook’s Like button to the mobile device by letting you use the camera to indicate something you “want”. At the very least it could be a gauge for the Groupons of the world to see what categories and locales are trending in terms of the basic things people want. (Local Media Watch)
Digital coupon company Coupons.com has closed on a $200 million funding round brokered by boutique investment bank Allen & Company. CEO Boal said that daily deals sites such as Groupon are more sales certificate businesses than coupon providers, and as such don’t present direct competition to his company. (GigaOm)
Yahoo PR exec Bradford Williams takes over as VP of global communications at Groupon. Williams, who worked at Yahoo during its ugly takeover fight with Microsoft, will need his even-keeled personality more than ever now, as the social buying phenom heads into its upcoming IPO. (AllThingsD)
Hansell spoke at great length about AOL’s hyperlocal blog network: “Patch is like building a railroad 150 years ago.” “Give us a couple years to try stuff and if we don’t run out of money we will find interesting stuff,” he said. “If you’re not doing an experiment in this world, what the hell are you doing?” (The Awl)
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