With Strong Earnings, Yelp Nears Profitability
The reviews site brought in $55 million in revenue during the quarter on a $878,000 loss, the closest the company has come to run-rate profitability since going public. The results come on the heels of a busy past few weeks for the company as it began to stake its position in a local market that’s increasingly shifting toward commerce technologies…
7 Ways CPG Brands Can Leverage Location-Based Marketing
Location-based marketing tools make sense for retailers trying to drive customers into their stores, but what about brand advertisers? Here are seven strategies that brands can use to take advantage of location-based marketing tools right now, even without having their own physical establishments…
Street Fight Daily: OpenTable Tests Payments, New Life for EveryBlock
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology… OpenTable Begins Testing Mobile Payments (New York Times)… Five Months After Everyblock Shuts Down, A Media Company Revives The Product (PBS Media Shift)…
Groupon’s Restaurant Reservation Service Goes Mobile (Mashable)…
Behind Big Retail Brands’ Complicated Relationship With Loyalty
More and more, loyalty startups are looking beyond the SMB market, and to larger brands as a potentially lucrative market with substantially lower sales costs. But, the outcome could be more complicated than it first appears. In a recent conversation with Street Fight, Dawn Maire, creative director at Rockfish Interactive, suggested that retailers might be better acquirers than partners for many loyalty companies…
How the GeoWeb Will Change Consumer and Business Behavior
Digital location-based technologies are now a transformative force for consumers and businesses, particularly when coupled with the rapid adoption of mobile and the growth of big data. I’m a big believer in the future for “GeoDisruption” — the potential for consumers and businesses to interact in fundamentally new ways to take advantage of increasingly precise location-based technologies…
8 Tools For the In-Store Delivery of Mobile Coupons
Sixty-three percent of shoppers say they would be more likely to make a purchase if they received a coupon during their shopping experience. Still, only 27% of companies have plans to implement location-based marketing in 2013. Here are eight straightforward tools that retailers can use to satisfy consumer demand and drum up additional sales with the delivery of mobile coupons…
Sponsored Post: Case Study in Finding a Robust Ad Serving Platform
It is common for large publishers to face a challenge in finding an ad serving platform that is simultaneously scalable, reliable, secure, simple in usage, and can meet the specific needs of a company. After evaluating some alternatives, Wooga decided to start testing Epom’s Ad Server with Asynchronous Tags in a controlled environment to analyze and compare the new Ad Server efficiency. With successful results, Wooga decided to move all advertisement inventory to Epom.
Street Fight Daily: Google Revamps Zagat, Groupon Loses Mobile Chief
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology… Google Unveils Revamped Zagat Website, Apps (TheNextWeb)… Groupon Loses Mobile Head David Katz (TechCrunch)… New Facebook for Business Hub Launches With Tips, Tools, Case Studies (SearchEngineWatch)…
Powering the Payment Stream
For years, local search has fed consumers to a technological black hole. The systems on which local businesses rely to manage day-to-day operations have remained offline, relegated to legacy tools or silo-ed in digital products not built for the web. But that’s changing. Thanks to a number of new companies that are reimagining the way consumers shop and reprovisioning the systems that business owners use to monitor and transact the exchange of goods locally, that “source code” is coming online, filling a critical gap in the local commerce stack…
Is Foursquare’s SMB Monetization Here for Real?
The company may discover that SMBs paradoxically prefer the simplicity of flat pricing over relatively complex (albeit more efficient) performance-based ads. The latter requires some degree of ongoing maintenance which challenges non-tech-savvy or time-starved (read: majority) SMBs. This is one reason for famously high churn for SMB self-serve advertising…
Street Fight Daily: Top Patch Exec Resigns, Mobile Payments At Starbucks Increase
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology… Top Executive At AOL’s Local News Business, Patch, Resigns (BuzzFeed)… Mobile Payment At U.S. Starbucks Locations Crosses 10% (TechCrunch)… I’m Still Waiting for My Phone to Become My Wallet (New York Times)…
5 Keys To Making Local Listings Count
Local listing sites have mushroomed in recent years, sending local businesses scurrying to get their digital houses in order. In a Street Fight webinar Thursday sponsored by YP, David Mihm of Moz, and YP’s Deepak Thakral discussed the growing impact of listings in local search, and outlined a handful of first steps that local businesses can take to improve their presence online…
New Tool From Drawbridge Helps Marketers Bridge the Gap Between Desktop and Mobile
Seven months after bringing its flagship cross-device and audience retargeting products to market, Drawbirdge has launched a new mobile retargeting product that enables marketers to target existing users based on a previous activity – say, an app download – as they move across apps, mobile web, and desktop browsers.
Broadstreet’s Mission: Liberate Sites for What Matters Most
Serving ads can be a big pain for the entrepreneurial publisher of a small community site. Broadstreet Ads’ mission is to make the pain go away. Then, says Broadstreet co-founder Kenny Katzgrau, the publisher can focus on important things like revenue generation, improving editorial content, and enhancing audience engagement.
Local M&A Activity Hits $7.2 Billion In First Half of 2013
Whether it’s through acquisition or investment, money keeps flowing into the local space. The first half of 2013 saw total investment activity, which includes both M&A and private financing, grow from a year earlier, as the number of deals stayed flat but total reported deal value jumped from $5.2 billion to $7.2 billion over the same period, according to a new report from BIA/Kelsey…
Case Study: Loyalty Program, Targeted Emails Lead to Daily Sales Spikes
At Gelato Fiasco in Portland, Maine, director of marketing and public affairs Bobby Guerette says his team initially developed the company’s digital loyalty program — dubbed the Red Spoon Society — as a way to promote individual Gelato Fiasco locations. What they later discovered was that the card-less program could be useful in promoting the wholesale side of Gelato Fiasco’s business, as well…
How a Big Agency Merger Could Benefit Local Ad Sellers
While I certainly believe that big data is our future, nuance at the local level is a part of accuracy when it comes to the providing of filters. This is an advantage that we have in local media, and we should not be shy about making that known to small and medium-sized businesses in the communities we serve.