News and Analysis
Street Fight Daily: Local Online Pubs Shirk Display, SMBs Key to Growth of Digital Ad Platforms
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Local Digital News Publishers Are Ignoring Display Revenue… IAB: Big Digital Ad Platforms Must Mine SMB Market to Keep Growing… Hearst Scored Record Profits for 7th Consecutive Year by Investing in Data…
As the Local News Industry Struggles, Publishers Ask Readers to Pay
The local news industry, fighting for survival, is turning its readers into customers. Sites are either charging readers for premium content — after up to 10 free visits a month — or setting up “membership” programs where readers make voluntary monthly or yearly payments.
Street Fight Daily: The Future of Facebook Video, Programmatic’s Year to Prove Itself
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… 2018 Will Be a Pivotal Year for Facebook’s Video Ambitions… Programmatic Faces a Turning Point in 2018… The Limits of Amazon…
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Street Fight Daily: Phone Firms Sell Data, A Day in Court for Yelp
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.… Phone Firms Sell Data on Customers (Wall Street Journal)… Another Day in Court for Yelp (New York Times)… Hyper-Local: Not A Behavioral Disease (Medium)…
Swipely Raises $12M to Expand Push Into SMB Payment Analytics
The payments space is starting to settle down. The flow of seed funding has slowed, and a handful companies have separated from the pack, raising meaningful capital over the past year. Add Providence-based Swipely to that list. The payments processing and analytics play has raised $12 million in new funding in a series B round led by Shasta Ventures…
Waze Builds Out Traffic Maps to Add Context in Location
Andy Ellwood, the company’s senior director of business development, will be appearing on a panel at Street Fight Summit West in a couple of weeks in San Francisco to talk about how the future of mapping tech plays into hyperlocal marketing. Street Fight caught up with him recently to talk about how Waze makes money, the vitality of context, and fighting off Google…
5 Tips For Optimizing Hyperlocal Sites For Tablets
The real question for hyperlocal publishers isn’t how important tablet readers are, but how best to cater to this group. The publishing standards that work on PC browsers don’t always translate to tablet screens. Here are five strategies that hyperlocal publishers should consider when creating content for readers on tablet devices…
Street Fight Daily: Seamless GrubHub Merge, Wanderful Media Raises $9M
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.… GrubHub, Seamless, and the Importance of the Purchase (Bloomberg Businessweek)… Newspaper Companies Invest Another $9M In Local Deal Startup Wanderful Media (TechCrunch)… What Patch Employees Were Told During the Friday Evening Conference Call (Romenesko)…
VP Ghaffary: Yelp Is the ‘Local Layer’ of the Internet
Mike Ghaffary, a grad school friend of CEO Jeremy Stoppelman who helped to write one of Yelp’s first advertiser contracts, now serves as the company’s vice president of business development (and will give a keynote address at Street Fight Summit West in San Francisco next month). Street Fight caught up with Ghaffary recently to discuss the relationship between content and data in local discovery, and why competitors will have a hard time “killing Yelp.”
In Push to Profitability, Patch Trims Staff and Promotes Kalin to CEO
AOL’s Patch network of community news sites made significant staff cuts on Friday among its regional news teams and promoted Steven Kalin to CEO, in what looks to be its biggest move yet toward reaching its long-promised goal of profitability by the end of 2013…
Moving Upstream, PayPal and Square Make a Play for the Local Merchant’s POS
There’s a not-too-quiet rivalry brewing between Square and PayPal over offline payments, and this week saw the unofficial opening of an important new theatre: the SMB point of sale (POS). It’s perhaps the stickiest problem for both companies to solve in order to make payments work, and their respective announcements demonstrate a strategic skism similar to what we’ve seen in desktop computers and mobile phones..
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