News and Analysis

Street Fight Daily: Leave In-Store Shoppers Alone, Google Courts Publishers as Facebook Flails

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… In-Store Shoppers Lean on Tech, Want to Be Left Alone in Stores… While Facebook Battles Fires, Google Rolls Out Pro-Publisher Initiatives… Media Rating Council Considers Bumping up Video Ad Standards…

Report: Google Shopping Ads Taking Over Ad Spend from Traditional Formats

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A new report from search intelligence company Adthena shows how consumers are interacting differently with new advertising formats and points to ad innovation as an essential brand investment.

Street Fight Daily: Duopoly Dominance Declines, Macy’s Rolls Out AR & Mobile Checkout

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… The Duopoly’s Share of the Ad Market Could Decline for the First Time… Demonstrating Where Retailers Are Going, Macy’s Rolls Out Mobile Checkout & AR Feature… The Cambridge Analytica Scandal Won’t Stop Advertisers from Spending on Facebook..

Commentary

The Long Tail of Local Search

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Far from invisible tools that merely get you to the store or service you want, local search products actually tell a story about the needs local search companies think they are trying to fulfill, demonstrating in some cases a stark contrast between the actual habits of the local consumer and the assumptions of local apps and websites…

Why Leveraging Location Is the Key to Success in Mobile Advertising

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Both smartphone and tablet users are searching for locally relevant content at an increasing rate, so much so that mobile user experience as a whole has been affected by the need for location-based information. Mobile networks have seen a massive increase in local search traffic this year, affecting mobile advertising in a big way. Yet the vast majority of mobile advertising doesn’t grasp what it means to be truly local.

Mobile Local Monetization Is Starting to Happen — For Real This Time

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Facebook’s mobile Sponsored Story is already showing boosted performance over display ads. For many others, the mobile-first principle will come from location targeting, as its congruence with the use case similarly boosts performance and thus ad rates. For that and other reasons, I’ve forecast location-based ads to lead mobile ad revenues by 2016…

Latest Posts

LBMA Podcast: Google Glass on the Floor

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On the show: soon your food will text you its expiry date; The Wireless Registry launches; Source Metrics connects online ads with offline buys; Nearbytes lets you pay by sound; Banjo 4.0 hits the street; Ricoh plays catch up with Clickable Paper. And our Mobile Minute with Chuck Martin highlights some store traffic research by Euclid…

Foursquare

Street Fight Daily: Foursquare Teams With Seamless, Lawsuit Questions Square Story

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology.Foursquare Can Now Satisfy Your Appetite At Home With Integrated Seamless And GrubHub Ordering (Pando)… Lawsuit Questions Square’s Start-Up Story (New York Times)… PayPal Wants Role in Apple’s Mobile Payments Dreams (Recode)…

New England-based GoLocal Expands With New Site in Portland, Oregon

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Portland will be GoLocal’s third entry into a mid-sized market with a struggling legacy newspaper. Josh Fenton co-founded the first GoLocal in Providence, Rhode Island’s capital, four years ago, and expanded to Worcester in Central Massachusetts two years later. The two sites currently generate 7.5 million pageviews per month…

Sheepshead Bites Founder: If You Meet the Market’s Needs, It’ll Meet Yours

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Event sponsorships are becoming a double-digit percentage of revenue among some news sites in local digital. At independent hyperlocal news site Sheepshead Bites in Southern Brooklyn, publisher Ned Berke looks at event sponsorships from a wider perspective as he explains in this Q & A on how his six-year-old site is performing…

5 Tools for Creating Targeted Hyperlocal Lead Lists

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Rather than hitting up every business on the block, some hyperlocal sales teams are taking a more strategic approach. By using targeted lead lists from business intelligence companies, startups can pinpoint the specific merchants who are most likely to be receptive to their pitches. Here are five business intelligence tools that hyperlocal vendors can use to create targeted lead lists…

Street Fight Daily: Patch Lays Off Hundreds, Amazon Bets on Real-World Payments

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology.New Owner of Patch Lays Off Hundreds (New York Times)… Amazon to Offer Kindle Checkout System to Physical Retailers (Wall Street Journal)… Facebook Officially A Mobile Ad Firm With 53% Of Ad Revenue Now Coming From Its 945M Mobile Users (TechCrunch)…

How the Internet of Things Could Spawn a New Kind of Analytics

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A new set of technology companies are working to help transform the way businesses understand consumer behavior in the real world. Powering these new technologies is a burgeoning web of connected devices — from smartphones and thermostats to wireless routers and traffic cameras — that constantly collect a river of information about their surroundings…

As Online Shopping Booms, Will Amazon End Up Supporting SMBs?

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Amazon and the other large e-tailers and big box chains that have squeezed smaller retailers need to demonstrate a commitment to sustaining local retail as a community service. Amazon has won over the consumer, their next challenge is to win over the small business community simply by helping them making more money…

Street Fight Daily: Walmart Tests In-Store Pickup, LivingSocial’s Future

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology.Walmart Begins Testing Online Grocery Shopping With Local Store Pickup Option In Denver (TechCrunch)… Despite Its Woes, CMO Barry Judge Sees A Future For LivingSocial (Forbes)… Google’s Newest Secret Weapon For Local Ads (Digiday)…

Placemeter CEO: How ‘Computer Vision’ Is Making Our Cities Smarter

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Thanks to rapid developments in “computer vision,” a technology that uses machine learning to identify patterns in video streams, a small team of technologists at Brooklyn-based startup Placemeter have built a system that uses over 500 personal and private video cameras sited throughout Manhattan to measure everything from the crowd in Times Square to the line outside of Shake Shack…