News and Analysis

Insticator Uses Trivia to Make a Serious Case for Ad Revenue

Insticator says its quizzes and polls generate 15 billion ad impressions each month, increase average website revenue by 160% a month and heighten average user engagement by 44%. We reached out to Kiersten Toye, who is in charge of the marketing team that works with client publishers at the company.

Street Fight Daily: Blue Apron Prices IPO, How Retailers Can Respond to Amazon’s Disruption

A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Blue Apron and Delivery Hero Price IPOs Following Amazon’s Big Buy… How Retailers Will Have to Adapt to Avoid Getting Eaten by Amazon… The Race Is On to Challenge Google-Facebook Duopoly in Digital Advertising…

Report: Delivery Apps Don’t Cannibalize Restaurant Visits

Sense360’s analysis found no evidence that delivery apps lead to significant drops in restaurant visits. The analysis also found that consumers who download delivery apps tend to have higher incomes, and visit fine dining restaurants 2.5x more frequently, than those who haven’t downloaded these apps.

Latest Posts

New Mobile Privacy Requirements in Focus for App Summit

Operators of major mobile application stores may soon reveal the privacy requirements they will impose on developers. When and how this process will take effect and other privacy issues will be on the minds of app developers at an upcoming application developer privacy summit…

Pursuing the Influencers — Why Gilt Groupe Rewards High Klout Scores

The decision by Klout to team up with Gilt Groupe to award discounts to shoppers based on their Klout scores makes a lot of sense. Local merchants know that influential customers can drive a whole lot more sales than average customers…

When Credit Card Companies Can’t Process Hyperlocal Risk

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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)…