Edmunds’ Drive for a Daily Deal
The single-best deal, assertion, investment or other strategy this week…
Who: Edmunds…
Why: For its bid to play in daily deals for cars…
“It helps automakers and dealers who have excess inventory or oversupply of specific models, or have a need to get rid of the past model-year vehicles through additional discounts. So it is intended to be very targeted to areas that need that focused conversation around certain vehicles.” — Michelle Denogean, VP of business operations at Edmunds.com…
Street Fight Daily: 06.17.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups.… eBay is beefing up its mobile arsenal with its first local shopping app, powered by the local shopping search engine that eBay acquired in June, Milo. (Mashable)…
AOL chief Tim Armstrong said yesterday that “certain” Patch outlets — there are 800 and counting — should be profitable by Q3 or Q4, though he didn’t offer specifics. (Paid Content)…
Patch Partners With Geomentum to Attract Big Brands
It’s widely known that AOL’s Patch network has been hemorrhaging money at a rapid clip — and that ad sales across its network of over 800 hyperlocal sites aren’t yet where they would need to be to ultimately make the company viable. But a new partnership with the country’s largest hyperlocal ad agency, Geomentum, could potentially turn into a major boost.
Social Purpose Hyperlocals: Go for Gumption
Grand Rapids, Mich., was decreed to be “dying” in January. The report, by Mainstreet.com, turned out to be greatly exaggerated. But exactly how healthy is the “Office Furniture Capital of the World,” the second largest city in a state that has been reeling economically since before the great recession? To find out, I went to The Rapidian, which bills itself as “a hyperlocal news source powered by the people of Grand Rapids.”
Street Fight Daily: 06.16.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
In explaining the relevance of its new product, Geotagger, Fwix says that “LatLong” — latitude and longitude — is going to replace keywords as the standard for online ad buys, as daily deals and mobile usage become a greater part of publishers’ traffic and revenue streams. (PaidContent)…
While Groupon may want to move its IPO forward quickly, to capitalize on the enthusiasm generated by a new wave of Internet-related stock debuts, it will likely have to wait until late summer, or possibly the fall, for its stock to be priced and trading publicly. (Marketwatch)…
TribLocal Quietly Blooms to 88 Hyperlocal Sites — And Growing
Tribune Company has long demonstrated its interest in reaching people on a local level — whether it’s through the company’s many local TV and radio stations, newspapers, magazines, their classifieds products or even their digital subsidiaries. The company was far ahead of other media in the early ’90s when they pushed content out over AOL and then the Web. And over the years they’ve also partnered with a number of local online efforts like Digital City. While that experience might be useful to carry over from Local 1.0, the fact is nobody from that period is present today at TribLocal, a relatively new (2007) effort that has online and sites and weekly print companions sprouting up in Chicago neighborhoods like colorful, polished digital plumes…
Street Fight Daily: 06.15.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups.…
According to a Rice University study, most businesses don’t feel any loyalty toward a particular daily deal site, and over the next few years daily deal sites will likely “have to settle for lower shares of revenues from businesses compared to their current levels, and it will be harder and more expensive for them to find viable candidates to fill their pipelines of daily deals.” (PaidContent)…
Groupon Inc. Vice Chairman Ted Leonsis’ venture firm is an investor in rival LivingSocial and has ties to its board, a relationship that could pose a conflict, according to corporate-governance experts. (Bloomberg)…
Fwix’s Shirazi: Layering Location on Top of the Web
San Francisco-based hyperlocal search database Fwix made news last week when it announced a new product called Geotagger that will allow publishers to tag Web pages with locations — in effect allowing them to create a layer of precise location information on top of their content, and giving them another method to index the information in that page by. The company is partnering with NBC to roll the service out onto the network’s local news Web sites. Street Fight visited Fwix’s offices in San Francisco last week and caught up with the company’s CEO, Darian Shirazi…
Skyhook’s Morgan: Leveraging the ‘Plumbing’ Behind Hyperlocal
With all of the focus on location-aware devices these days, the companies whose technology powers those locating systems have become even more important. Skyhook uses WiFi access points, cellular phone towers and GPS satellites to locate mobile devices with 10- to 20-meter accuracy. It then plots your position on a map that services like Foursquare and Facebook Places can translate to a place with a name, like the bar you’re in or near.
Street Fight Daily: 06.13.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups… Groupon’s Andrew Mason has been visiting Beijing, and is now responding to a few very obvious problems at Groupon China that seasoned observers have been noting since the group buy Web site first opened up shop in Beijing and Shanghai. (TechCrunch)… One current Patch editor, who says she was “hired as part of the 2010 end of year push to launch 750 sites,” sent a note she titled “5 Things to hate about working for Patch” — one of which is “The Patch model isn’t sustainable. (Business Insider)…
Twitter Local: @Tolles, @JimBradySP, @Vacanti, and more
All the tweets that fit… listening in on the hyperlocal Twitterverse.
This week, Groupon’s CEO poked fun at the “quiet period” the company is in now that it has filed for an initial public offering; SCVNGR’s Seth Priebatsch hates First Data – just fyi. Jim Brady of Journal Register thinks the Newspaper Association of America is getting “absurd” in its analyses. And more.
Patch’s Main Problem? Paltry Pay
When I was working at AOL a few years back, the recruiter for Patch.com came through the West Coast offices and I spoke to her a bit about building out the fast-growing hyperlocal news blog company that is something of a bet-the-future venture for AOL chief Tim Armstrong and company (along with HuffPo). The recruiter was very nice and gave me the pitch so I could pass on to friends. Included in the pitch was a plug for the compensation: Top regional editors were going to make $70k or so. Local Patch bloggers would make a whole lot less. This seemed like a great wage – for North Dakota. In the Bay Area? $70k is just above entry level for lots of tech sector jobs. Which led me to wonder, would Patch be able to pull in quality people to make the network worthwhile?..
The F.C.C. Solution for Community News is So Last Century
The new and much-quoted F.C.C. report on “Information Needs of Communities: The Changing Media Landscape in a BroadBand Age” is massive and well written, and its authors did their due diligence by holding workshops whose testimony from an array of media experts fills 711 pages. But the report’s back-to-the-future prescription for community news in the digital era is a big disappointment.
The report’s most fraught conclusion, and the one getting the most published attention:
“…in many communities, we now face a shortage of local, professional, accountability reporting. This is likely to lead to the kinds of problems that are, not surprisingly, associated with a lack of accountability—more government waste, more local corruption, less effective schools, and other serious community problems. The independent watchdog function that the Founding Fathers envisioned for journalism—going so far as to call it crucial to a healthy democracy—is in some cases at risk at the local level.”
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Street Fight Daily: 06.10.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups.… The FCC has produced a 478-page report on the state of the media in the digital age, and — no surprise — the report has found a big gap in watchdog and investigative journalism, and the local news hole hasn’t been filled by the proliferation of online news and non-profits. At the same time, the report doesn’t support any major government intiative to correct the situation. (Paid Content, Block-By Block, Nieman Lab, Romenesko/Patch)… Increasingly, location is getting baked into regular web pages as well. Fwix is taking its hyperlocal places database and exposing it to web sites in a novel way. “Our goal is to index the Web by location,” says Fwix CEO Darian Shirazi. (TechCrunch)…
Why Hyperlocals Are Missing Out on Engagement
“Engagement,” just about everyone agrees, is a must, especially for news websites, most especially hyperlocals. But engagement metrics for news – even allowing for sometimes wildly conflicting numbers produced from different methodologies – are mostly grim. The average Facebook user spends a half hour-plus on that paragon of digital engagement. News sites get minutes that can be counted on one hand. Taking into account murky Web analytics, only a fraction of that time – about three minutes for most hyperlocal news sites, according to Alexa – represents engagement where the site has captured the user’s undivided attention…
Realtor Reaches Clients Through SEO Marketing, Hyperlocal Blogs
Realtor Karen Benvin Ransom’s listings have moved far beyond the newspaper classifieds. With a Twitter account, a Facebook page, a personal Web site, and a series of articles she’s written about her local community online, Ransom has honed in on the exact sites and search terms that her clients at Houlihan Lawrence are using to shop for homes in Westchester County, N.Y.
Post-IPO, Will Pandora Go Hyperlocal?
Over a year ago I got a chance to sit down with Pandora founder Tim Westergren for a long interview about the company. In our conversation about business models and Pandora, the most compelling feature he discussed was a hyperlocal, blue-sky idea that sounded incredibly cool. It left me thinking back then that Pandora could become a hyperlocal powerhouse when that ad market developed…