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How San Angelo LIVE! Makes Programmatic Work in West Texas
When the West Texas oil bust hit San Angelo hard in 2015 and LIVE!’s CEO Joe Hyde turned to programmatic advertising to make up the difference in lost sales from struggling local merchants. To maximize that impact, artificial-intelligence platform Ezoic showed Hyde how to create longer revenue-generating sessions with users.
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Paycloud Brings Merchant Loyalty Cards to Your Phone
Earlier this month, Sparkbase launched its new mobile rewards application Paycloud, which allows small and medium-sized merchants to offer and track mobile loyalty programs to customers in the vicinity of their shop. The company’s CEO Doug Hardman talks about scaling local merchant acquisition and why the company’s recent move into the mobile wallet space may have a year or two headstart on the competition…
Street Fight Daily: 08.22.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
Imagine if Groupon starts instructing its sales force to start focusing on opportunities other than restaurants, spas, massages and pilates classes. Theoretically, the company could leverage its enormous international subscriber base to venture into offering deals for groceries, household items and other goods regularly purchased offline. (TechCrunch)…
“Patch is AOL’s last, best chance to build a growth engine,” writes Maxwell Wessel. “Investors shouldn’t be calling for AOL to back off the business. They should be calling for AOL to double down — not by increasing Patch’s $150M+ yearly cash burn, but by increasing commitment. ” (Harvard Business Review Blog)…
Ex-‘Rocky’ Editor Weighs in on YourHub
Street Fight Columnist Tom Grubisich’s recent piece about the trials and tribulations of the Denver Post’s YourHub hyperlocal network sparked plenty of debate among readers in our comments and over social media. Among those throwing the topic back and forth on our pages was John Temple, the former editor of the now-defunct Rocky Mountain News, and one of those behind the original incarnation of YourHub…
Bloomspot’s Guarantee Shows the Future of Daily Deals
A week ago daily-deal service Bloomspot dropped the interesting announcement that it would roll out a “performance-based business model that takes responsibility for the profitability of its merchant partners.” The company will guarantee profitable spending levels from customers. Our post on the Bloomspot news gave a nod to the long-term implications of this announcement. My two cents: This is a clear signal that the daily deals business will quickly morph into something else and that the balance of power has shifted to the merchants…
Patch and Profitability
Deep-ish into a story about AOL’s growth this week. The Wall Street Journal tucked this tasty nugget of information: AOL is spending about $160 million a year on Patch, which equates to about $150,000 to run each individual Patch site annually, according to an analyst’s estimate.
It begs the obvious question of whether AOL will–or even can–make a profit from this enterprise…
Street Fight Daily: 08.19.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
Foursquare announced new features on Thursday that allow check-ins at events, like concerts or movies, instead of just the places where those events are happening. The company said the new features will simply formalize the existing behavior of its users. (New York Times)…
Groupon has not only faced questions about its controversial accounting practices, but is now also having to respond to questions from members of Congress about its privacy policies. (AllThingsD)…
Denver Post Unveils ‘New’ YourHub. But Is It New Enough?
Six years ago YourHub was major media’s first big foray into hyperlocal. It was the answer to newspapers desperately looking to replace shrinking print revenues with digital gold. But digital gold, like the real stuff, is not easy to find. What happened in Denver is a sobering case study about metro newspapers and hyperlocal publishing.
Case Study: Connecticut Pub Casts a Wide Net With Patch Ads
Like many entrepreneurs, Daneen Grabe, owner of Little Pub restaurant, has little time to research all the advertising platforms that are available in her town of Ridgefield, Conn. She now spends most of her marketing budget on ads in six local Patch sites, in the hopes of attracting some of the hyperlocal news network’s most plugged-in readers. Here’s why.
Street Fight Daily: 08.18.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
According to a new report from location-based media company JiWire, 53% of the “on-the-go” U.S. audience is willing to exchange their location in exchange for more relevant content and better information, including mobile deals. (TechCrunch)…
Groupon is running seriously low on cash. The company is not broke, by any means. It can also presumably raise additional capital in the private markets if its IPO gets further delayed. But Groupon’s cash cushion relative to its liabilities is small — and the gap between the two is going the wrong way fast. (Business Insider)…
Datasphere’s Cowan: Hitting the Hyperlocal ‘Sweet Spot’
Street Fight recently spoke with Gary Cowan, Datasphere’s SVP of product and marketing (who will be joining us at the Street Fight Summit in October) about the company’s content strategy, the future of the banner ad, and why his company’s sites aren’t “cookie cutter.”
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