Street Fight Daily: 04.28.11

Share this:

A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups.

Guardian News & Media is ending Guardian Local, a project it launched in 2010 to try and figure out the future of local journalism. “Unfortunately, while the blogs have found engaged local readerships and had good editorial impact, the project is not sustainable in its present form,” writes the publisher’s digital engagement head Meg Pickard. (PaidContent)…

Though two years old, the Daily Deal market is now worth billions and specialty layers are forming to slice apart that value. Jim Moran offers “The Daily Deal Stack” a visual representation of the different segments forming within the market. (Yipit Blog)…

Sparkfly, a provider of promotion redemption and tracking technology has raised $2.5 million in funding for SparkQuest, its patented mobile engagement platform that connects consumers deal redemption with merchants at the point of sale. (Daily Deal Media)…

The Batavian’s Owens: Start Selling Ads the Day You Launch

Share this:

The veteran newsman says hyperlocal networks like Patch are at “a disadvantage” when it comes to selling local ads, because there is “a certain barrier of trust that must be overcome” in order to get local businesses on board as advertisers. He also weighs in on the long-term viability of advertising as a business model for local online content.

Street Fight Daily: 04.27.11

Share this:

A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups.

Consumer-reviews website Yelp is declining to seek another round of financing and instead has its sights set on going public, the start-up’s chief executive officer, Jeremy Stoppelman, said in an interview. (WSJ)…

Facebook Deals isn’t a Groupon-killer, writes Yipit co-founder Vinicius Vacanti. That’s because, among other reasons, Facebook doesn’t have a sales force and small businesses won’t self-serve. (Yipit Blog)…

Parsing the data on daily deals customers, Nielsen found that visitors to Groupon and Living Social are nearly two-thirds female and that they are more likely than the average U.S. Internet user to be affluent. (NielsenWire)…

Patch Takes a Page From Arianna’s Playbook

Share this:

AOL is bringing Arianna Huffington’s freebie content strategy to its Patch network of hyperlocals. Patch Editor-in-Chief Brian Farnham has tasked his 800+ editors each with recruiting five to 10 local bloggers to contribute unpaid content for their respective sites…

Street Fight Daily: 04.26.11

Share this:

A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups.

Facebook is planning to introduce a new service called Deals, an effort to tap into the consumer frenzy over online discounts. With Deals, the social networking giant is entering a crowded market led by overnight sensations like Groupon and LivingSocial. (NYT/Bits)…

Mobile advertising inventory still goes largely unfilled because the relevance and targeting isn’t that good. PlaceIQ sifts through tons of data about locations to give marketers a mini-zipcode-like profile of each block. (TechCrunch)…

Even experts acknowledge a serious lack of hard data about the commercial power of location-based services. “There are none of the data and feedback mechanisms that businesses need in order to know that location-based services are a good idea.” (BBC News)…

EveryBlock’s Adrian Holovaty: Enabling Community Conversation

Share this:

Journalist and programmer Adrian Holovaty has been building out local news databases for a while now. A former Washington Post staffer, Holovaty is also the creator of the open-source platform Django, as well as chicagocrime.org (which later was folded into EveryBlock).

His site, EveryBlock, was founded in 2007 and supported by a grant from the Knight for two years before being acquired by MSNBC in 2009. After several years of being focused on the data of hyperlocal, the site’s recent relaunch signaled a major change of course, with the understanding that community also needs to be part of the equation.

Here, Holovaty answers some questions by email with Street Fight about EveryBlock’s revamp, who is winning the hyperlocal game, and says it’s “too early to tell” on what local advertisers want from hyperlocal...

‘Newsonomics’ Author Ken Doctor: ‘The Play Is for Tablets’

Share this:

Media industry analyst and consultant Ken Doctor has been watching the local news space for decades, long before “hyperlocal” was coined. He spent 21 years at Knight Ridder, where he first observed that consumers are willing to pay for local content — and contends that they are doing so even now, as they pick up their local paper. Doctor, an analyst for Outsell, a global research and advisory firm, and for his own firm, Content Bridges, frequently appears at conferences about the transformation of the news industry, and writes regular columns both on his own Newsonomics blog and for Harvard University’s Nieman Journalism Lab. He is non-plussed by hyperlocal efforts like EveryBlock and Topix but sees potential in AOL’s Patch…

Street Fight Daily: 04.25.11

Share this:

A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups.… Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley is reportedly exploring a new funding round at a $500 million valuation. The company’s last round of funding, in the summer of 2010, valued it at $100 million. (WSJ)…

Both Foursquare and Gowalla are making inroads in marketing entertainment properties via mobile platforms to users who check in at various sites recommended by the broadcast television networks or their talent. (Variety)…

Michael Arrington thinks the massive valuations for Web services like Groupon signify that we’re in the middle of another tech bubble that is waiting to pop. (TechCrunch)…

Street Fight Daily: 04.22.11

Share this:

A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups.

Google Offers, the company’s long-awaited response to Groupon, has gone live with a signup for beta program in Portland, Oregon. The service promises “50% off or more at places you’ll love.” (Mashable)…

According to a survey conducted last month by Harris Interactive, 10 percent of the American adult population or approximately 23 million people purchased deals from sites like Groupon and LivingSocial last year. (Daily Deal Media)…

Groupon has hired Margo Georgiadis, a vice president of global sales operations at Google, to be its new chief operating officer. (NYT/Dealbook)…

Street Fight Daily: 04.21.11

Share this:

A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups… EBay is buying location-based service and ad network WHERE in a deal that gives it added ability to drive more local and offline commerce. (GigaOm)… Foursquare has grown to almost 10 million users by connecting them to where they are now. But the company now will focus on the future movements of its users, said Dennis Crowley.(GigaOm)… Whatser, the location-based service that lets users share their favorite locations with friends, is launching a “marketing platform” in which local merchants and brands can “claim” a location that they operate and then communicate with users. (TechCrunch)…

Journal-Register’s Brady: Local Advertisers Have a Tech Gap

Share this:

Jim Brady made a name for himself turning WashingtonPost.com into a serious player on the Web before he went to TBD.com last year, going all in on hyperlocal. But TBD shifted course on strategy last fall and let Brady go at the same time. In March, he was scooped up by Journal-Register Company, which has been a leader in transforming local papers into digital properties.

Street Fight recently spoke with Brady about the future of hyperlocal, including mobile’s key role, the hold daily deals companies have on the local ad market and why Patch should be applauded.
..

Street Fight Daily: 04.20.11

Share this:

A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups.

The activity in Foursquare gives local merchants special insight behind the check-in in order to improve customer relationships, such as understanding who these people are, how often they visit, where else do they go, do they come in with certain friends,” says CEO Dennis Crowley. (Fast Company)…

A new report from Borrell Associates has found that online employment want ads have become a $5 billion business, representing nearly 15% of all online advertising. (NetNewsCheck)…

Curbed, the online real estate news blog, and Eater, a sister publication which focuses on the “latest restaurant openings, chef squabbles, and industry gossip,” opened for business yesterday in Seattle. The city has long been a center of hyperlocal news experimentation. (GeekWire)…

Yipit’s Jim Moran: Lots of Winners in Hyperlocal

Share this:

With so many daily deals sites popping up in the past year (following the mad success of Groupon), it’s natural that consumers would want a way to sift through, aggregate, and personalize these e-coupons to fit their needs. Enter Yipit, which launched in 2010 and draws on over 400 local deals sites (including Groupon, LivingSocial, and Scoop St.) to deliver customized lists of nearby deals...

Street Fight caught up with the company’s CEO, Jim Moran, for a quick Q&A about Yipit’s mission in the hyperlocal space, and whether the daily deals craze might be a “bubble.”..

New Location-Based Developer Platform From Fwix

Share this:

Local information company Fwix has announced the release of a new API, which it called “the first holistic, open and free places database.” It’s billed as part of the company’s strategy to “organize the world’s information by location.”

Baristanet’s Debra Galant: How Patch Is Like Wal-Mart

Share this:

Since its 2004 launch, Essex County, New Jersey-based Baristanet has often been held up as a hyperlocal news success story. Veteran journalists Liz George and Debra Galant created their local information site to be like a coffee shop where people in the three suburban towns they covered could learn about small-scale news and events around them.

Street Fight spoke recently with Galant about the site’s scope and history, whether stories about potholes can really be monetized, and what she thinks of AOL’s Patch...

Street Fight Daily: 04.19.11

Share this:

A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups

Groupon is buying Pelago, maker of local discovery app Whrrl, in a bid to improve its ability to bring together consumers and local discount offers. This could also mean a broader direction for Groupon as it looks to expand beyond daily deals to more mobile and personalized discounts. (GigaOm)…

LocalResponse is a “social advertising platform” that lets small businesses sift through the stream of public check-in and review data to see who their most loyal customers are, and send them coupons and messages on Twitter. (NYT/Bits)…

Foursquare has added a feature that will bring some context to your historical check-ins. Now, when users look back at their check-ins, they won’t see only their pictures, but also pictures taken by friends who were also checked in at the event. (ReadWriteWeb)…

Topix CEO Chris Tolles: Community Over Content

Share this:

When hyperlocal news and community site Topix was founded in 2004, the company’s plan was to take all the local news out there and aggregate it into niche news Web pages around hundreds of thousands of topics. The site’s algorithm sorted through 50,000 news sources and created feeds around all kinds of subjects, creating niche content aggregation. But in 2007, the company shifted gears after finding what it thought was an even more compelling product: harnessing the flood of user-generated commentary and debate around their topic areas. Street Fight spoke with CEO Chris Tolles about how hyperlocal has evolved, Patch’s place in the pack, and how journalism is actually just a means to an end…

Street Fight Daily: 04.18.11

Share this:

A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups.LivingSocial’s February revenue was reportedly $50 million, and projected revenue for 2011 (assumed calendar) is a cool $1 billion. That makes it roughly half the size of Groupon. (TechCrunch)… Naveen Selvadurai, one of the founders of Foursquare, talks about how the company has quickly grown from nothing to a user base of over 8 million people, with 35,000 new users joining every day. (PC Mag)… Earlier this month, LivingSocial announced that it had raised $400 million in new funding to pursue “aggressive domestic and international growth and continued product innovation.” But approximately $200 million of that is being used to partially cash out early investors and members of company management. (Fortune)…

Street Fight Daily: 04.15.11

Share this:

A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups.Groupon is expected to pick Goldman Sachs Group and Morgan Stanley as its two lead underwriters for a planned public offering later this year. The IPO is expected to value the company at between $15 billion and $20 billion. (Wall Street Journal)… Google’s mobile search business has grown incredibly quickly. Sales chief Nikesh Arora said Google may build out a local salesforce to take advantage of the new mobile and local advertising opportunities. (TechCrunch)… strong>What types of articles work best for news organizations on Foursquare? Opinions, reviews and evergreen content — but maybe not the news. (Nieman Journalism Lab)…

Backfence Founder Mark Potts: Hyperlocal Takes Patience

Share this:

News veteran Mark Potts is best known in the industry for his (failed) site Backfence, which pioneered a hyperlocal model that leveraged user-generated content. … Here Potts speaks with Street Fight about which companies are closest to solving the hyperlocal conundrum, how daily deals companies are changing the equation, and whether it’s really viable to do small-scale news with professional journalists.