News and Analysis
Google Faces Heat After Automated Threat to Shut Down a Cloud Client’s Project
This week’s tech giant in hot water? Google, whose abuse-prevention system apparently shut down and threatened to delete a Cloud client’s project in three days due to perceived misdoing on the client’s part.
Some of London’s Top Retailers Call for a Sales Tax on ‘Largely Online’ Rivals
Under the banner of The New West End Company, the several-hundred-strong collective of some of the U.K. capital’s top retailers is lobbying for a 1% sales tax on primarily online retailers to parallel the property-linked taxes they already pay.
Openings and New Hires at Arrivalist, Lotame, Get Five Stars
Every two weeks, Street Fight rounds up some of the latest hires and new openings in the hyperlocal marketing, tech, and media industries. This week’s roundup includes hires and openings at Yelp, Hootsuite, and dataxu.
Commentary
Local Media’s Data-Driven Future
New value creation is the purpose of media companies today, whether small or big. I genuinely feel sorry for those who believe there is a future in practicing content creation alone. Last week, I called for a strategic makeover. We need a new strategic plan that positions us as more than “just” a media company and behind which our employees can throw their energy. So here are ten things that I view as tactically supporting such a strategy…
Customization Failure: Why Hyperlocal Hasn’t Scaled (Yet)
Most customization that attempts to deliver hyperlocal, or even just local results, falls short. The problem is that they (and we) don’t have much more or better local content and advertising to output than we did in the days before social media and smartphones. A tool is built to operate on a national scale, but the landscape of finding the local information is messy and chaotic, lacking structured data, or consistent geographic coverage…
Local Media Companies Need to Evolve — And Do It Fast
Local media’s traditional big-man-on-campus chest-thumping doesn’t mean the same thing in digital that it does in the analog world. In fact, it’s downright laughable. So what do we do when we hit the wall, when we regularly miss revenue targets, when long term projections keep slipping more and more? So what do we do when we keep hiring more ad reps, only to discover that our revenue-per-rep begins to fall, when the evidence is undeniable that we’ve hit that wall? Here are five recommendations.
Latest Posts
From Ad Biz to Hyperlocal: Duo Takes Flyer in Fayetteville, Profitably
Today’s digital community news publisher-editors are increasingly likely not to have had experience working for traditional journalism outlets. But that hasn’t prevented them from making their mark — even when they’re competing against platforms that have strong print resources. That’s the case for Todd Gill and Dustin Bartholomew, co-founders of the seven-year-old independent Fayetteville (Ark.) Flyer. In this Q & A, Gill tells how he and Bartholomew achieved success in a market with a major print and digital daily newspaper…
Street Fight Daily: Facebook’s Ad Strategy, Square Eyes Caviar
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… How Facebook Sold You Krill Oil (New York Times)… Square Said to Be in Talks to Buy Food Delivery Start-Up Caviar (Street Fight)… OpenTable Takes Out Its Wallet for Restaurant Sales Analytics Startup Copilot (VentureBeat)…
Openings and New Hires at xAd, Reply!, AddThis and Newscycle
Every two weeks, Search Influence’s Kelly Benish — who knows practically everyone in hyperlocal — covers some of the latest job changes taking place in this dynamic industry. In this week’s edition, moves and new openings at Hubspot, Colony Logic, Local SEO Guide,AdMax Local, PlaceIQ and Signpost…
Case Study: Tampa Restaurant Boosts Business With Mobile Waitlist
By integrating mobile waitlist management platforms into their business operations, restaurants may be able to increase the length of time that guests are willing to wait for tables. This makes it possible to get more customers seated in the average day or night, and ultimately boosts the bottom line for restaurants…
Street Fight Daily: Foursquare Taps Expertise, SEOs Weigh ‘Pigeon’
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Foursquare’s Redesign Will Make Expertise the New Gamification (Pando)… Experts Weigh In On Google’s “Pigeon” Update Aimed At Improving Local Search Results (SearchEngineLand)… San Francisco Airport Tests Beacon Sensors to Guide Blind Travelers (Mashable)…
Outdoor Advertising, a Media Anomaly, Knocks on the Digital Door
Billboards, like most things in our lives, are getting smarter. A report released this morning by PQ Media estimates that digital out-of-home advertising in the U.S. generated $2.37 billion last year, or 32% of the $7.4 billion of the total outdoor advertising market…
Daily Voice Expands Into Roger Ailes’ Territory
The Daily Voice has expanded to Putnam County in the Lower Hudson Valley, creating the regional corporate network’s 42nd site in the affluent suburban New York-Connecticut market. Tucker said Putnam Daily Voice’ was launched “with zero expansion” of staff, which includes eight reporters covering a number of communities in the New York-Connecticut suburbs…
Street Fight Daily: Andrew Mason’s Next Big Thing, Square Bets on Chips
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Groupon Founder’s Next Big Plan: Audio Walking Tours (Businessweek)…Square Bets Big on Next-Gen Credit Card Tech (Wired)… Payments Giant First Data Acquires Gyft in an Effort to Bring Digital Gift Cards to the Masses (Pando)…
10 Years in, Yelp Turns a Profit
Yelp is now in the black. The company beat analysts’ expectations, reporting better-than-expected revenues Wednesday with strong top-line growth and a million dollars in profit for the first time in its history…
The Impact of Google’s Local Update Is Still a Developing Story
Google seems to be experimenting with driving more traffic to its local competition, meaning that it’s more important than ever for a business to secure its presence across a broad base of directories. The value proposition of local SEO does not change in a fundamental way, given that Google has long used citation consistency as a prominent local ranking signal…
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