Street Fight Daily: Lyft Seeks a Buyer Without Success, Google Expands Local Business Cards

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

Lyft is Said to Be Seeking a Buyer, Without Success (New York Times)
The company, which is based in San Francisco, has in recent months held talks or made approaches to sell itself to companies including General Motors, Apple, Google, Amazon, Uber and Didi Chuxing, according to a dozen people who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the discussions were private.

Google Local Business Cards or Posts About to Roll Out to Thousands of SMBs (Search Engine Land)
In March, Google started showing “Local Business Cards” as part of the Google Posts system. This allows content providers or businesses or candidates to control the content that appears in the carousel near the top of search results. Now it has been reported that Google will dramatically expand availability of Google Local Posts from a “few dozen” to “thousands” of small businesses.

Tackling the Problem of Measurement in Local (Street Fight)
“Google’s always had the disadvantage of being a more complex and opaque product than Facebook,” writes David Mihm, “but it feels like they’ve made almost zero progress on this front in the last eight years.”

How the Wall Street Journal Plans to Reach 3 Million Subscribers (Poynter)
Like many newspapers, The Wall Street Journal is betting that reader support will be a lynchpin of its business as print advertising continues to fade. So Dow Jones, the Journal’s publisher, has staked out an ambitious target: Reach 3 million subscribers by the end of 2017.

Why Augmented Reality Will Eventually Take Over Local (Street Fight)
Michael Boland: Soon, graphical overlays to the physical world will amplify everything from retail shopping (store navigation and product info), to finding a restaurant (ratings & reviews) to buying a home (values & specs). Utility will lead; marketing departments and jargon police can follow.

Facebook Suspends Domain Insights, Changing Rules of the Road for New Publishers (Digiday)
On the last day of June, Facebook dammed up a stream of audience data that publishers once used to see how their content performed inside Facebook. Late last week, it acknowledged that it may not turn the tap back on, either. Specifically, Facebook noted that it was cutting off new access to Domain Insights, a tool that gave website developers access to rudimentary information about how a site’s externally hosted content performed when users shared it inside Facebook.

Local Deals Startup Retale Taps Into Messenger Bots (VentureBeat)
Location-based shopping company Retale launched its Facebook Messenger RetaleBot today. Retale connects 25 million monthly active visitors a month to deals and discounts at stores near their location.

B2B Executives Use Marketing Analytics to Boost the Bottom Line (eMarketer)
More B2B marketers are tapping into the world of marketing analytics in an effort to improve ROI and try to more efficiently allocate their marketing dollars. In fact, as executives at B2B firms increasingly realize, many of these marketing analytics efforts are having a noticeable impact on their bottom line.

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