News and Analysis

Borrell: Too Many Local Newspapers Remain Stuck in Their Newsroom ‘Church’

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Facebook collected $13.6 billion in local ad spending in the U.S. in 2016, according to the report — more than all local media put together — $12 billion. The report says Facebook, Google and other global pureplays will continue to dominate digital ad revenue that comes from merchants and other businesses at the community level.

Street Fight Daily: SMBs Struggle with Social, Pinterest’s Appeal for Brands Climbs

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Small Businesses Are Missing the Boat on Social… Pinterest is Quietly Gaining a Foothold Among Marketers… WaWa, Walgreens and Others Try to Clean Bad Map Data…

Street Fight Daily: Twitter Boosts Brands, Facebook Equips Publishers with Data-Based Ad Tools

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Twitter Created an Ad Format to Help Brands Directly Message Users… New Facebook Tool Handles Media Companies’ Video Ad Sales… Uber to Repay Millions to Drivers, Who Could Be Owed More…

Latest Posts

When Credit Card Companies Can’t Process Hyperlocal Risk

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If you are working with merchants in any capacity and processing payments for them, then you can probably expect credit card processors to give you a hard time. They might accept your account and then shut you down, or charge you prohibitive fees and cap the amount you can process, stifling growth…

Street Fight Daily: Village Soup Folds, Armstrong Defends Patch

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...

Village Soup’s Hot Pursuit of a Hyperlocal Model Goes Cold (Nieman Lab)…

The Geo-Social Revolution That Wasn’t (GigaOm)…

AOL’s Armstrong: Why Patch Is a Good Investment (Romenesko)…

Brady: If Print Is 85% of Your Revenue, You’re Terrible at Selling Digital

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Six months ago, online news guru Jim Brady (formerly of TBD and washingtonpost.com) took over as editor-in-chief at Digital First Media with the mandate of focusing the newsrooms of the company’s papers on a, well, “digital first” model. Street Fight recently caught up with Brady, to talk about what it takes to win hearts and minds of veteran journalists, and why the business side comes first…

Three Years After Its Launch, Foursquare Works to Become a Business

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Three years ago this morning, Foursquare launched what one pundit called its “where-am-I-now app” at SXSW – the name did not stick. Since its launch, the location-based service has attracted over 20 million users and upwards of 750,000 merchants, has outflanked a company worth $94 billion in the location space, and crushed a competitor that was sold to said company for its parts…

DataSphere Lands $8 Million in Additional Funding

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DataSphere Technologies has raised $8 million in investor financing to continue growing its business, which creates and maintains community websites for TV stations owned by Gannett, Meredith, and other major “legacy” media companies. The company’s 1,900 community and neighborhood sites now reach 50 million unique visitors monthly…

6 Mobile Payments Platforms for Merchants

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Only 4% of merchants currently accept mobile payments, according to a study by Javelin Strategy & Research, however 20% say they intend to adopt this technology within the next 12 months. Given that mobile payments are still in their infancy, and the landscape is still wide open, several players are vying for market dominance. It’s hard to say yet whether one will be a clear winner, or, as with cell phones and credit cards themselves, there will be a handful of leading options.

Advertisers, Agencies Force Chicago Indy Ad Network to Regroup

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The 15-site Chicago Independent Advertising Network has discovered it’s just not big enough. How many more partners does it need? “Dozens upon dozens,” says chief organizer Mike Fourcher, founder and publisher of Brown Line Media, which consists of three, soon to be four, North Side neighborhood digital publications…

Street Fight Daily: Tending to Patch, Fondu Redesign, Hyperlocal Panel at SXSW

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...

The Constant Gardener: My 2 Years Tending AOL’s Hyperlocal Experiment (CJR)…

Shoppers Prefer Using Mobile Web Over Retail Apps (Mashable)…

Solving the Problem of Mobile Location: More Consumer Education than Technology (Screenwerk)…

CityMaps Releases Mobile App, Wants to Be Kayak for Places Info

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After spending three months in a web-only beta, social mapping service CityMaps is making its move to mobile. The New York-based company has released its first mobile app on iOS this morning and has announced its expansion to San Francisco and Austin. The service is essentially a Kayak for local information, aggregating local signals from sites like Yelp, Twitter, and Foursquare as well as commerce companies like OpenTable, Fandango, and handful of daily deal sites…

Why Isn’t Mobile Display Advertising Huge Yet?

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Instead of trying to force web paradigms onto mobile, advertisers should be rushing to localize their message and take advantage of the 1-2 punch of smartphones’ portability and location…