Street Fight Daily: Groupon’s Big Redesign, Local Ad Tech Moves Outdoors
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology
Groupon Builds New Website, Eyeing Marketplace Growth (USAToday)
Groupon is launching a new website as the daily deal pioneer tries to turn itself into a more persistent online marketplace for discounted local goods and services. As Groupon turns 5 years old, Lefkofsky is leading a transformation that he hopes will turn the company from a provider of a limited number of heavily discounted vouchers via e-mail into a leading e-commerce marketplace that shoppers check regularly before making purchase decisions.
Is Groupon’s Deal Marketplace Undermining Merchants? (Street Fight)
Sean Barkulis: It has been my understanding that the purpose of daily deals is purely customer acquisition — to bring in new customers, not to target your existing ones. However, recently did a search for some of Groupon’s top NYC marketplace offers and I found that the company seems to be cannibalizing the local businesses’ existing customers by using Google AdWords to bid on nearly every Marketplace deal’s local business name.
Vistar And Verve Link DOOH, Mobile Screens, Create Location-Based Programmatic Platform (MediaPost)
Verve Mobile, a location-based mobile ad network, and Vistar Media, a programmatic location-based video platform, on Thursday announced a partnership that will link digital-out-of-home and mobile inventory to create a multiscreen real-time trading platform for location-based marketers. The partnership will bring Verve’s location-based data to Vistar’s platform and available inventory, which Vistar claims is on over 100,000 digital screens across the U.S.
Why Fixing Local Marketing Means Making Tech Disappear (Street Fight)
Steven Jacobs: Today, the local web — the network of technologies that help business and consumer interact locally — is far too opaque. Amid the rush to innovate and revolutionize the way we buy or sell goods locally, the industry has amassed a muddled soup of software that’s marked more by it’s complexity than its capability. If the last decade was about building the technologies that bring our local experiences online, the next ten years will focus on making those technologies go away.
Square Market Is Attracting Sellers That Have Never Taken A Reader Payment (GigaOm)
Square Market launched as a means for Square’s small business sellers to quickly establish and online storefront and easily promote their goods with social media tools, but Market is showing signs of evolving into an independent online marketplace, competing with the likes of Etsy and Fab. A fifth of the 500,000 merchants listed on Square’s new internet marketplace are using Square solely for online sales and marketing.
What to Do When an Online Community Starts to Fail (Harvard Business Review)
If there is one maxim that dominates the fate of digital communities it is that of network effects — the more users participating in a community, the more valuable it will be to new users. And yet scale is no guarantee of sustainability, as one recent examples illustrates. Yelp faces a class action suit by users in California alleging that they deserve to be paid for their contributions, along with allegations by researchers that up to 20 percent of its reviews are fake
Google Replacing “Android ID” With “Advertising ID” Similar To Apple’s IDFA (MarketingLand)
As part of a cluster of other announcements including the Android OS update, KitKat and Nexus 5, Google is replacing the unique Android ID (similar to Apple’s old UDID) with a new “Advertising ID.” The latter largely duplicates the approach of Apple’s Identifier For Advertising (IDFA).
Report: Basic Local Optimization Steps Boosted Google Visibility By 179 Percent (SearchEngineLand)
Digital agency and technology provider SIM Partners released a report discussing how use of several basic Local SEO tactics can dramatically improve visibility on Google. According to SIM Partners, at the beginning of the study “only 26 percent of their combinations ranking [ranked] in any of the top seven positions, with only 8 percent of combinations ranked in the top two positions, prior to optimization.”
LBMA Podcast: NeoPost Acquires DMTI, ByteLight’s Series A (Street Fight)
On the show: Superpedestrian works to commercialize the Copenhagen Wheel; Square is up against the patent wall; privacy’s voice gets stronger with the Future of Privacy Forum and Chuck Schumer; iZettle let’s you pay the homeless with your credit card; and location-based CPR assistance arrives.
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