Patch vs. Main Street Connect: How Will Hyperlocal Scale?
Does size really matter in hyperlocal? Publishers debated the point on a panel during the first day of the Street Fight Summit. Patch CEO Warren Webster, naturally, said yes: “2010 was all about scaling up. We do believe that size is important.” Main Street Connect CEO Carll Tucker disagreed, saying that his publication started small and built outward, not wanting to “mass produce and see the wheels fall off.”
Street Fight Daily: 10.25.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
Hyperlocal task/errand site Zaarly has announced that it raised $14.1 million in financing, and that the company is gaining Meg Whitman as a board member. The site works by letting people post requests for an item or service, and then lets other people, businesses and companies bid to fulfill those needs. (New York Times/Bits)…
Stocks columnist Herb Greenberg looks at Groupon’s numbers, determining that the company is “technically insolvent.” (CNBC)…
Will Data Define Deals 2.0?
Industry data has become a commodity in the young, explosive deals space, with aggregators like Yipit selling reports on industry trends. For the most part, the data is publicly available. Aggregators use bots to scrape hundreds of deals sites, indexing the thousands of deals distributed each day across vertical, geography, and, until recently, number of deals sold…
Street Fight Daily: 10.24.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups…
Groupon Now! generated just $1 million of gross billings in September, despite being available in 25 markets — only $40k per market. In other words, the product that Groupon is telling investors to view as the future of the company, still represents less than 1% of Groupon’s total gross billings in North America. (Yipit Blog)…
Group buying sites in China are reaching 42 million customers according to figures released by The China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC). The figure represents an increase of 125% on the previous the year’s business, with the country’s group buying industry now estimated to reach 8.7% of China’s Internet users. (The Next Web)…
Local Quotables: BJ Emerson, Joe Meyer, Tim O’Shaugnessy and more…
In this week’s column, of all people, the VP of technology at Tasti-D-Lite, BJ Emerson, turned a sharp tongue on location-based services at the LocNav conference in San Jose (“they used to call it ‘stalking'”). Jim Brady talked scale; Joe Meyer described the realization that there was a business in local companies; and one small business owner cleverly noted that Twitter and Facebook don’t do a local merchant much good “if people don’t know where you are located.” Read all of this week’s the wise words and wise-cracks around and about the hyperlocal industry.
Street Fight Daily: 10.20.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
Groupon is seeking to sell shares in an offering that would value the company at close to $12 billion. The valuation is a steep comedown from earlier expectations that an I.P.O. of the Internet darling could value the company as much as $25 billion to $30 billion. (New York Times/Dealbook)…
Ownlocal has announcing a new round of investment from a string of investors including the Knight Enterprise Fund, Automattic, the makers of WordPress, and a number of prominent angels. The company creates web services for small businesses through partnerships with local media outlets and other organizations. (GigaOm)…
HopStop Launches Self-Serve Local Ad Play
Hopstop, the navigation service that pioneered point-to-point transit directions six years ago, has launched an advertising product aimed at local marketers. The self-serve platform allows local merchants to target HopStop users who search for directions to or from their neighborhood with a short call-to-action ad…
Jim Brady Reflects on WaPo, ‘Blown Up’ TBD and the Do or Die Future of Local
Combine digital community journalism and the New York Jets? Jim Brady might call that heaven. The longtime leader in online journalism and hyperlocal endeavors (though he avoids the term hyperlocal) seems to expend as much Twitter juice on the finer points of the team’s play as he does on crowdsourcing the news. But just barely. Fact is Brady is one of the most recognized editorial leaders in online news going back to washingtonpost.com (the first time … ya know, in the ’90s) then AOL, then Washington Post 2.0, next TBD and now the Journal Register Company. Before he gets picked up by the Jets as a mid-season PR QB, I thought it a good time to catch up…
Street Fight Daily: 10.19.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
Daily deals are coming to the radio. Clear Channel, the media giant that owns 850 stations, has made an exclusive deal with LivingSocial to offer its discount offerings on 500 of its stations, the companies announced on Tuesday. (New York Times/Media Decoder)…
Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley expects the company to remain independent for another year, but admits he’s open to an acquisition: “The only thing we want to do is build a product,” Crowley said. “If we do it independently that’s great, if we do it as part of a company that’s another story.” (Business Insider)…
Street Fight Daily: 10.18.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
New York state tax administrators have concluded merchants should collect sales tax on the full face value of items purchased with vouchers from Groupon, LivingSocial and other Internet discount deal sites —if the vouchers are for a specific dollar amount. (Forbes)…
New York City’s Gothamist is thriving with an average 2 million unique visitors each month reading its eclectic brand of voice-forward reporting and aggregation geared to the young and well-heeled. Its success has allowed it to spin off sister sites across the country and around the globe. (NetNewsCheck)…
Don’t Miss Next Week’s Street Fight Summit – Ticket Giveaway
Hundreds of top executives from hyperlocal, location-based and daily deals companies will come together next week in New York City for Street Fight Summit 2011, where they’ll discuss the latest ideas and insights about how digital companies can target the $150 billion local advertising market. Street Fight is giving away a free ticket today to the first person who writes us.
Selected Directory of Hyperlocal Publications in NYC
PUBLICATION CATEGORY M.O. Bay Ridge Journal Neighborhood. Heavy on press releases and second-hand crime stories. Bensonhurst Bean Neighborhood. Recently created by Ned Berke, founder/editor/publisher of SheepsheadBites, site relies heavily on Huffington Post-style re-purposing of content originated by other publications. Bikeblog Specialty site. Founder Michael Green, a film maker who sees the bike as “humankind’s greatest […]
BiteHunter CEO: Learning From Kayak
BiteHunter launched amid the height of deal mania this Spring, as an aggregator for dining deals. With the June launch of its iPhone application and subsequent addition of instant deals to the mobile product last week, the company has grown into a real-time search engine for dining deals. Street Fight recently spoke with the company’s CEO, Gil Harel, a veteran in the dining vertical, about the aggregation industry and the variable future of the deals space…
#SFS11 Company Profile: JiWire
Calling itself a “mobile audience media” company, JiWire connects advertisers with laptop, tablet and smartphone users taking advantage of public wifi connections. The company sells off of a comprehensive list of free and fee-based wifi connections across the country. Users who connect to those wifi hotspots see relevant location-based ads from JiWire partners…
Street Fight Daily: 10.17.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
Huffington Post’s purchase of Localocracy is further evidence of the “neighbor connect” online space heating up. At least two dozen significant startupshave popped up in the past year focused on facilitating conversation among people who live near each other. Some, like Localocracy, aim at niches (local ballot issues and related), while others intend to promote a general sense of community. (MediaShift)…
HopStop, the online service that provides door-to-door subway and bus directions for major cities in the U.S. and abroad, has kicked off “HopStop AdLocal,” a new program that offers businesses up to 12,500 free advertising impressions over a 30-day period, a value of $250, the company says. (Entrepreneur)…
Daily Deals Biz: A Race to Own Local, Not Coupons?
I think we may be witnessing a race to see who can capture the consumer on his own time and his own turf — and his preferred context — with content (and deals) of specific interest to him a few moments before he realizes he wanted it. The daily deals are just a foot in the door to the broader hyperlocal market. Whatever territory and mindshare the likes of Patch have, Goup-Social wants. All this will be chewed on in my panel session at the Street Fight Summit tomorrow, October 25, with Jonty Kelt, CEO of Group Commerce, Chad Billmyer, CEO of Dealbird, and Perry Evans, CEO of Closely.