News and Analysis
Street Fight Daily: Lord & Taylor Sells Online With Walmart, Retailers Embrace Smaller Stores
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Lord & Taylor Agrees to Start Selling on Walmart.com… Retailers Embrace Small-Format Stores in Age of E-Commerce… Marketing Budgets Ebb as Brands Demand Results…
Google Local Service Ads: Ready for Primetime
“While I do think this is about a new revenue stream in new categories and cleaning up spammy industries the rebranding might just also be an effort (unusual for Google) brand clarity around their Google Home product,” Mike Blumenthal tells David Mihm in their bi-weekly column..
Deep Dive Into Facebook Finds Dim Revenue Hopes for News Sites
Grzegorz Piechota, a digital strategist for news media companies worldwide, talked with Street Fight recently about his research into Facebook for WAN-IFRA and what his findings may augur for publishers in their quest for more revenue from the platforms, especially at the local level.
Latest Posts
Patch Misses 2012 Revenue Target
AOL’s network of hyperlocal sites missed the $40 million to $50 million revenue target that the company had set for last year, a miss that CEO Tim Armstrong attributed to disruption from superstorm Sandy in the fourth quarter during a Friday earnings call. The company remains committed to achieving run-rate profitability for Patch by the end of this year…
Street Fight Daily: eBay’s Resurgence, Redbeacon Founder’s New Venture
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.… eBay is Back! (Fortune)… Redbeacon Founder Launches MyTime, A Booking And Ecommerce Platform For Local Services And Open Appointments (TechCrunch)… Why Credit Card Companies Need Some Madison Avenue Style (ReadWrite)…
EveryBlock Was Experiment in Data Journalism That Fell Short
When it was launched in 2007 by digital wunderkind Adrian Holovaty, EveryBlock was hailed as one sure part of hyperlocal’s future. As a result of Holovaty’s coding, the site was able to tease out for publication petabytes of government-collected data that otherwise might not ever see the light of day. EveryBlock was a pioneer in collecting, sorting, and filtering data. But it hadn’t progressed to turning its digital buckets of information into knowledge. Its vaunted coding, which located every overturned garbage can, couldn’t do that…
NBCU Shutters Pioneering Hyperlocal Network EveryBlock
EveryBlock’s original goal was to collect as much local data as possible, sort and filter it, and then present it to its audience. EveryBlock’s president, Brian Addison, who was hired by NBC in mid-2011, changed all that. In announcing the closure, Vivian Schiller, a senior vice president at NBC News, said, “The decision to shut down the site was difficult. But in the end, we didn’t see a strategic fit for EveryBlock within the portfolio.” Read more…
Study: 14.7 Million People Engaged ‘Locally’ with Retail Brands in Q4
A new report by the Location-Based Marketing Association and local analytics company Venuelabs looks at the amount and quality of “local” consumer interactions. As local activities like reviewing, checking in, or posting a photo become ubiquitous across platforms, the volume of location-specific (versus brand-specific) digital engagement with brick-and-mortar businesses has exploded…
Big Data and Local Search: The Netflix Precedent
We’ve entered an era when product decisions can be made not by analysis of demographics or user testing but by extremely fine-tuned measurements of current user activities. For local search, the question becomes just how many of our passive online activities can be converted into data points to be examined for purposes of marketing and product development?
Case Study: Bakery Relies on Hyperlocal Press, Yelp for New Customers
When Donna Lawson first opened the doors at Stuffed Cakes, she ran a series of daily deal promotions through CBS Local and Urban Dealight to spread the word about her Seattle-based bakery. Now two years later, Lawson relies primarily on press mentions on hyperlocal sites like the West Seattle Blog, as well as positive reviews on Yelp, to get new customers coming through the door…
Street Fight Daily: Aol Under Armstrong, Big Moves in Online Delivery
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.… At AOL Under Tim Armstrong, the Only Constant Is Change (AdAge)… Made To Order: Big Moves In Online Food Delivery (ReadWrite)… Report: Geo-Aware, Geofenced Ads Outperform Other LoMo Targeting (Screenwerk)…
Yelp Hits 100 Million Uniques as Users Shift to Mobile
Yelp reported mixed earnings on Wednesday as wider than expected losses tempered strong revenue growth in the fourth quarter. The reviews site brought in $41.2 million during the quarter, taking its annual revenue to $137.6 million for 2012. The overwhelming majority of its revenue growth came on the backs of local advertisers as brand spending remained flat…
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Meta Is Automating Ads, But Brands Still Face a Bigger Problem