Eversave’s Doyle: Creating Deals That Aren’t ‘One-and-Done’
Eversave, the third-largest online daily deals company in the U.S. (behind Groupon and LivingSocial), can trace its online deals business back over a decade, when its parent, Prospectiv, launched a service offering printable online coupons. The company’s daily deals service, which launched last year, runs offers in 17 different cities around the country, mixing local-specific deals with discounts on larger national brands aimed specifically at women…
Street Fight Daily: 06.08.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups.… Foursquare has teamed with 7-11 to offer a trip to suborbital space as a prize in an online contest. While the US spaceflight program is getting its budget shut down, there’s something rather poetic about this opportunity. (ReadWriteWeb)…
A study of U.K. salon owners found that only 1% of Groupon buyers go on to become regular customers. Moreover, Groupon’s churn rate could be as high as 90%. (Dylan Collins)…
Street Fight Daily: 06.07.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups… Groupon is joining two marketing-services and analytics firms to get deeper into the traditional grocery coupon business with a test today. In a first for Groupon, today’s deal in Massachusetts uses supermarket loyalty cards to conduct the transaction. (AdAge)…
“Augmented reality” apps put a layer of locally relevant data on top of the scene around you. But who owns the rights to ad space within augmented reality platforms? Currently there’s nothing keeping multiple brands from owning the same space. (Mashable)…
Street Fight Daily: 06.06.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups… 
If Groupon slams the brakes on marketing costs, the value of hyperlocal online inventory will fall after a recent surge in demand, writes Jeff Bercovici. On the other hand, if Groupon is wrong and it has to keep spending to attract customers the way it is now, then it will likely never be profitable and those ad dollars will go away anyway. (Forbes)… Since Groupon filed its S-1 on Thursday, there have been hundreds of negative articles written about Groupon. While some of the concerns brought up about Groupon are legitimate, many of them are unfounded, writes Vinicius Vacanti. (Yipit Blog)…
Street Fight Daily: 06.03.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups…
In its long awaited S-1, it’s clear that Groupon has impressive topline growth. However, when looking at it’s oldest markets, it appears that their business model is deteriorating. (Yipit Blog)…
Several more perspectives on the Groupon IPO: a Twitter debate over the company’s doomed-ness, a look at who owns what stake in the company, a warning to investors by Andrew Mason, and some red flags for potential investors. (GigaOm, TechCrunch, PaidContent, Business Insider)…
Roost’s DIY Social Media for Small Businesses
As more and more companies vie for marketing dollars from small business owners, many businesses find the growing options confusing. They barely have time to keep up with the demands of online marketing on sites like Facebook and Twitter — and it’s unclear whether it’s best for them to place an ad on a hyperlocal site or offer a daily deal where they lose 75% of the sale…
Street Fight Daily: 06.01.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups.… What’s next in the evolution of geolocation? Foursquare’s most attractive qualities — the social game of checking in and the availability of local deals — arguably provide a foundation. But will we need more value if checkins are ever to hit the mainstream? (Mashable)… Google is beginning the roll-out of its Daily Deals service, Google Offers, today. The news that Google is getting into the daily deals space is not a surprise. Google attempted and failed to acquire Groupon for $6 billion last year. Google claims that Offers will take the heavy lifting of marketing off of the business owner, allowing the business to simply focus on the customer. (Mashable, The Next Web)…
Main Street Connect’s Tucker Responds to Criticism
In an interview published two weeks ago, Main Street Connect’s founder Carll Tucker told Street Fight that hyperlocal Web sites need the efficiencies of scale to truly become profitable businesses rather than “passion or hobby” sites. His words clearly touched a nerve, sparking a slew of impassioned comments, as well as reactions on Twitter and elsewhere. Ahead of his network’s Wednesday launch of 32 new sites in Westchester County (N.Y.), Tucker wrote a long comment in response to some of the criticism that was lobbed his way…
Street Fight Daily: 05.31.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups.… Groupon is either creating a new approach to commerce that will change the way we eat and shop and interact with the physical world, or it is a sure sign that Internet mania is once again skidding out of control. Or both. (New York Times)… Amazon is entering the daily deal space with myhabit.com, a members only daily deal site focusing on designer clothing. (Daily Deal Media)…
Street Fight Daily: 05.27.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups.… Google yesterday introduced Google Offers, its new daily deals service. Aimed at local small businesses, the service will launch in Portland, Ore., then spread outwards to other cities. (The Next Web)… Online ad spending surged in Q1, rising 23 percent over last year’s figure, according to the Internet Advertising Bureau. At the moment, every major media company is trying to figure out how to better tap local online advertising dollars, especially with the explosion of local deals that have brought in smaller merchants. (Paid Content)…
WSB’s Tracy Record: You Can’t Do Hyperlocal on a Template
When West Seattle Blog launched, the site didn’t carry any ads — not even Google Adsense ads which co-founder Tracy Record thought were “ugly and cluttery.” At the time, the site was more of a passion project than a business. But when they finally got advertising two years later, Record says it didn’t take very long before she and her partner were turning a profit: “It was rather rapid in terms of people embracing us and we were in the black in the first year.” …
Street Fight Daily: 05.26.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups… Facebook’s local chief Emily White says that local businesses should post to their wall three times per week. She also talks about the network’s push for check-in deals on Facebook Places. (USA Today)… Google is keenly interested in location data, and it seems like its work in maps and location is paying off, particularly on mobile phones. Google Maps on mobile devices, which makes up about 40 percent of all Google Maps usage, is on pace to eclipse desktop usage for the first time next month. (GigaOm)…
Street Fight Daily: 05.25.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups.… Groupon seems to be dancing around the issue of mobile. Location-based social networks like Foursquare can be great partners, but they can also be competitors. (Business Insider)… Real estate website Trulia is set to roll out a new feature that will allow users to view crime statistics for 50 metro areas in the U.S. The crime maps are based on data collected from more than 1,000 different sources, aggregated into more than 5 million data points on the maps. (GigaOm)…
Street Fight Daily: 05.24.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups… Dennis Crowley says Foursquare is growing at a rate of 1 million users per month. The company currently boasts 600 million check-ins total, averaging 3 million per day from its nearly 10 million users. (The Next Web)…
Patch President Warren Webster says the company’s criteria for growth in new communities is sound and sustainable, as is its locally centric business model. He says early reader metrics are exceeding expectations. (NetNewsCheck)…
Deals Get Personal With Tenka’s DIY Platform
Self-service hyperlocal advertising platform Tenka was founded when Google vets Nhon Ma and Tim Zhou, who had previously focused on display advertising, saw a “huge opportunity” in leveraging data to enhance the value of daily deals. The idea was to make Groupon-like offers more relevant, more personalized — and more local — by empowering merchants to create their own offers and distributing those offers via location-based services and social media platforms…
Street Fight Daily: 05.23.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups.…
Groupon’s new partnership with Loopt looks like an aggressive move to extend its mobile availability before Facebook Deals gets out of the gate. This sort of partnership could work well for Location Based Services like Loopt because it puts a dedicated sales force on the task of selling deals. (ReadWriteWeb)…
Groupon and Foursquare are in partnership talks. The arrangement is likely to see Groupon deals targeted to Foursquare users’ check-ins. (All Things Digital)…
Street Fight Daily: 05.20.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups.… Main Street Connect, which owns 10 hyperlocal news sites in Connecticut, just picked up CentralMassNews, which owns ten local news sites in central Massachusetts. That means the company will soon have 52 sites — when you include 32 sites that the company says it is launching next month in Westchester County, N.Y. (Paid Content)…
What can Foursquare tell us about how people live? New infographic data from the location-based social network, gives a pretty good picture of life for a certain demographic in New York and San Francisco. (Wall Street Journal)…
Street Fight Daily: 05.19.11
Google Places has announced a new feature that lets you import the places you’ve checked-in to on Foursquare into Google to rate and review. (ReadWriteWeb)…
Zaarly is looking to be a sort of Craigslist for local mobile users, helping buyers find a quick way to obtain what they’re looking for from neighbors and local merchants. (GigaOm)…
Memo From Patch EIC: More Articles = More UVs
In an email to regional editors last week obtained by Street Fight, Brian Farnham, the editor-in-chief of AOL’s Patch network of hyperlocal sites, suggested that the sites should increase unique visitors by upping post production, and touted an experiment at 14 Florida sites where increased posting resulted in more uniques. …