Street Fight Daily: Google Experiments With Local Services Concierge, Yext Reports 48% Revenue Growth

Share this:

 

google-1200-2A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology…

Yext Sees $88.8 Million Revenue, 48% Growth for Location Data (TechCrunch)
Yext is announcing $88.8 million in revenue for the 2016 fiscal year, a 48 percent increase from last year. Yext can now update location data across 100 maps, apps, search engines, and directories, including Apple, Facebook, Bing, and Yahoo. “What Salesforce is for customer data, Yext is for location data,” said CEO Howard Lerman. “Yext is the system of record for location.”

Don’t Call a Plumber — Call (or Text) Google Concierge (Blumenthals)
Mike Blumenthal: Google seems to be experimenting with an enhancement of their Home Service Ads product that allows consumers to call Google directly when looking for a plumber, rather than searching for one themselves. Interestingly, the ad for the new service replaced local results.

Borrell on Local Dailies and Their Tiny Digital Ad Share: They Need a New Story (Street Fight)
Tom Grubisich: Local digital ad revenue will grow from $48 billion in 2015 to $66 billion in 2016, Borrell Associates projects in its new benchmarking report covering 10,395 sites in all media. That’s an eye-popping increase of 37.5 percent. But newspapers will see only a 6-7 percent revenue increase.

Yahoo Labors to Carry On With Core Business While Exploring Sale (New York Times)
Yahoo has a dual personality these days. One is the battered Internet giant that is up for sale, with dozens of potential bidders looking to pick up all or parts of the company on the cheap. The other is the independent company that is carrying out yet another strategic turnaround plan as if the auction process does not exist.

Openings and New Hires at xAd, Placed, Upserve, and Schedulicity (Street Fight)
Every two weeks, Geoff Michener covers some of the latest job changes taking place in this dynamic industry. This week’s edition includes moves and new openings at Xaxis, Signpost, and Buzzfeed.

Inside Instacart’s Fraught and Misguided Quest to Become the Uber of Groceries (Quartz)
Instacart is being sued for allegedly misclassifying its employees. It’s facing heightened competition from the likes of Amazon and Google. It raised delivery fees and hiked the price of its membership program by 50 percent. It also laid off 12 full-time recruiters and announced plans to slow hiring in 2016. All signs indicate that the company is scrambling to get its act together. What’s going wrong?

Raise Report: Blippar, AppCard, Ninjacart Reel in Fresh Rounds (Street Fight)
Every two weeks, we round up some of the biggest fundraises taking place in hyperlocal marketing, commerce, and tech. This week’s edition includes new cash infusions for ICX Media, Staff Finder, and Mariana.

Target Looking to Hire 20 People for Mysterious Startup Called Goldfish (Minneapolis Star Tribune)
Target is looking to hire engineers and product managers for a tech startup, “Goldfish.” “We are ambitious and bent on disrupting the way people shop,” said one of the job postings. Goldfish is the brainchild of West Stringfellow, who joined Target last year as one of three entrepreneurs-in-residence charged with pushing Target’s innovation agenda. Target then promoted Stringfellow to VP of internal innovation and operations.

The Future of Location-Based Services (Marketing Land)
Aaron Strout and Mike Schneider: Location-based services have become a feature, and more of a passive sport than an active one. For the most part, all of the major social networks have adopted location-based features in a meaningful way. And yet we are still only scratching the surface of what’s possible.

Get Street Fight Daily in your inbox! Subscribe to our newsletter.

Tags: