Will Retargeting Destroy Hyperlocal Chain Models?
Ad retargeting damages the economics of hyperlocal networks hoping to make any real ad revenues selling to larger buyers. These same buyers can – and increasingly do – use retargeting to get the same Internet users at a fraction of the cost. This is another example of how hyperlocal actually scales down better than it scales up…
Street Fight Daily: LivingSocial Co-Founder Steps Down, Foursquare Adds Bios
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
LivingSocial Co-Founder And President Steps Down (Startup Stats)…
Foursquare Adds Bios To Profile Pages, Evolving As A More Self-Contained Social Network (TechCrunch)…
Is Hyperlocal News a Failed Business Model? (NetNewsCheck)…
Street Fight Daily: 02.28.12
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
Groupon Reports Mobile App Growth, International Expansion Plans (Mashable)…
How This Month’s Google Search Changes Affect Local Businesses (ReadWriteWeb)…
Will an App for Broadcasting Our Future Locations Really Work? (Shiny Shiny)…
Street Fight Daily: 02.27.12
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
3 Things Retailers Can Learn from Mom and Pop Facebook Stores (Mashable)…
Print is Dead! Long Live Print? (TechCrunch)…
Patch: We’re nothing like Main Street Connect (Jim Romenesko)…
Main Street Connect Announces New CEO, $7 Million in Funding
Main Street Connect, the network of hyperlocal news sites, announced yesterday that Thompson Reuters’ Global Head of Product Management Zohar Yardeni would come on as CEO, replacing founder Carll Tucker who will become chairman of the company’s board of directors. The company also announced $7 million in new funding, matching an inaugural round raised a year ago…
Owens, Tucker Spar Over Indies’ Profitability
Last week, The Batavian’s Howard Owens penned a post on his personal blog about why independent hyperlocal sites were better positioned to be profitable long-term than scaled hyperlocal networks. Main Street Connect’s Carll Tucker, who believes that he has come upon a scalable formula for hyperlocal profitability, responded to Owens’ post last week, setting off a lively debate in the posts’ comments section over whether indies or scaled networks really have the upper hand when it comes to profitability…
Patch vs. Main Street Connect: How Will Hyperlocal Scale?
Does size really matter in hyperlocal? Publishers debated the point on a panel during the first day of the Street Fight Summit. Patch CEO Warren Webster, naturally, said yes: “2010 was all about scaling up. We do believe that size is important.” Main Street Connect CEO Carll Tucker disagreed, saying that his publication started small and built outward, not wanting to “mass produce and see the wheels fall off.”
Realtor Reaches Clients Through SEO Marketing, Hyperlocal Blogs
Realtor Karen Benvin Ransom’s listings have moved far beyond the newspaper classifieds. With a Twitter account, a Facebook page, a personal Web site, and a series of articles she’s written about her local community online, Ransom has honed in on the exact sites and search terms that her clients at Houlihan Lawrence are using to shop for homes in Westchester County, N.Y.
Main Street’s Need for Speed
The single-best deal, assertion, investment or other strategy this week.
Who: Main Street Connect
Why: For its plan to scale up to 6,000 hyperlocal sites across the country in a few short years
Advertisers typically want to reach more than a single town. If independent community news site proprietors are making good dough, why aren’t they propagating, sharing their news prowess with neighbor towns? That’s what we’ll be doing with our profits — reinvest, reinvest, reinvest, so our products and processes get more and more excellent.. — Carll Tucker, Main Street Connect CEO…
Main Street Connect’s Tucker Responds to Criticism
In an interview published two weeks ago, Main Street Connect’s founder Carll Tucker told Street Fight that hyperlocal Web sites need the efficiencies of scale to truly become profitable businesses rather than “passion or hobby” sites. His words clearly touched a nerve, sparking a slew of impassioned comments, as well as reactions on Twitter and elsewhere. Ahead of his network’s Wednesday launch of 32 new sites in Westchester County (N.Y.), Tucker wrote a long comment in response to some of the criticism that was lobbed his way…
Street Fight Daily: 05.20.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups.… Main Street Connect, which owns 10 hyperlocal news sites in Connecticut, just picked up CentralMassNews, which owns ten local news sites in central Massachusetts. That means the company will soon have 52 sites — when you include 32 sites that the company says it is launching next month in Westchester County, N.Y. (Paid Content)…
What can Foursquare tell us about how people live? New infographic data from the location-based social network, gives a pretty good picture of life for a certain demographic in New York and San Francisco. (Wall Street Journal)…
Main Street Connect’s Tucker: Hyperlocal Needs Scale
A veteran in the community news business, Carll Tucker founded the community news company Trader Publications in 1981, built it up, and sold out to Gannett in 1999. Then, two years ago, he came to the conclusion that the community news model he’d been so successful at offline hadn’t really been replicated on the Web. And so he founded Main Street Connect, a small-but-growing collection of community sites that began in Connecticut and soon will expand into Westchester (N.Y.), and beyond…
Daily Voice CEO: We’re ‘Far Closer’ to Profitable Than the Competition Is
Zohar Yardeni has served as CEO of the The Daily Voice — a hyperlocal news network of 52 sites in suburban New York and Connecticut and central Massachusetts formerly known as Main Street Connect — since November, 2011. Street Fight checked in with Yardeni recently to see how he and the Daily Voice were competing in their hotly contested local digital space…