News and Analysis
TownNews’s ‘iQ Engage’ Sorts Through Signals to Help Publishers Keep Users Reading
TownNews.com has come up with a way for local publishers to cut their bounce rates — and the happy result is longer sessions and more click-throughs to advertising messages. That means more monetization for publishers and, ultimately, more users-turned-into-consumers buying products and services.
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What Works in One Local Market Won’t Necessarily Work in Another
I’ve learned, sometimes through epic failures, what works in Tracy (a suburb of Sacramento, Calif.) won’t work in Tampa. However, I’ve also learned, through epic victories, that when you harness the power of 200+ communities for a common goal great things can happen. Here are a few bits of wisdom I’ve picked up along the way.
Street Fight Daily: 12.12.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
AOL’s Patch Gets a Little Less Hyperlocal (Ad Age)…
The Gowalla-Facebook Deal Didn’t ‘Screw Over’ Gowalla’s Investors (Business Insider)…
How Can Local Businesses Structure More Effective Daily Deals? (TechCrunch)…
The Capitulation of a Social-Mobile High-Flyer
Two years ago it would have been hard to imagine Gowalla selling for anything less than a pretty penny. But a couple things have happened since then to devalue mobile apps. First, the location-based gamification juggernaut has not developed as quickly as some had predicted. Second, the competition for mindshare on handsets has magnified as many more eye-popping apps vie for attention. It’s a real street fight out there in the land of mobile apps and we will likely see more casualties, even among worthy players like Gowalla.
Local Quotables: Rick Waghorn, DJ Patil, Michael Fives, Emily Chang & More…
It’s not easy being a reporter on the daily Groupon deals beat these days. So says fatigued Emily Chang at Bloomberg West. And why did Foursquare win over Gowalla? Because if you can make it in New York, pretty much no one else stands a chance. Or, in the pith provided by one Gowalla investor on why that service lost: “Austin.”
Street Fight Daily: 12.09.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
Groupon in Talks to Acquire Clever Sense, the Startup Behind ‘Alfred’ (TechCrunch)…
Google Isn’t Done With Location, Launches Schemer in Private Beta (The Next Web)…
LevelUp Releases HTML5 Web App To Make Its Payments Solution Ubiquitous (ReadWriteWeb)…
Opening Up the ‘Walled Garden’: Content APIs and the Location Layer
For small-radius media, in which location plays a far greater role than niche or national media, walling off content will substantially impede industry growth. Ignoring LBS as a viable distribution channel is tantamount to leaving the industry’s most valuable asset grossly under-leveraged.
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