Street Fight Daily: 11.30.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
Yelp’s IPO May End Up Yelping (CNN/Money)…
The Big Merchant Survey (Daily Deal Media)…
On Zaarly, You Can (Usually) Get What You Want (Entrepreneur)…
Street Fight Daily: 11.22.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups... 102,000 Cupcakes! Small Bakery Burned by Groupon (MSNBC)…
Knight-Backed Local News Site ‘Brooklyn Bureau’ Launches (PaidContent)…
Google backtracks a bit on charging for its Maps API (Nieman Lab)…
Street Fight Daily: 11.18.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
Yelp Files for $100 Million IPO (GigaOm)…
Major Newspaper Publishers Band Together On Social Shopping Portal (PaidContent)…
Patch Traffic Rides High on Local Elections and Hurricanes — But can a Drive-by Audience Be Enough? (Nieman Lab)…
Street Fight Daily: 11.16.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
Foursquare’s Website Just Got a Lot More Useful (ReadWriteWeb)…
Despite Groupon’s Big IPO Pop, Most Flippers Lost Money (Business Insider)…
Street Fight Daily: 11.09.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
Yelp Hires Goldman and Citigroup to Lead I.P.O. (NYT/Dealbook)
Yelp, the online reviews site for local businesses, has hired Goldman Sachs and Citigroup to lead its initial public offering of stock, which is expected to value the company at $1.5 billion to $2 billion…
CrowdMob Builds a Tapjoy+Groupon for Distributing Local Deals (GigaOm)
The company offers merchants and retailers a way to distribute their local deals through third-party apps, incentivizing mobile users to buy a deal in exchange for virtual currency or goods…
Street Fight Daily: 11.08.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
Daily-Deal Sites Face Problems Ahead, Report Says (Wall Street Journal)
Forrester Research e-commerce analyst Sucharita Mulpuru says in report that the deal sites face challenges that threaten to slow down, if not end their businesses…
Starbucks Taps China’s Foursquare for Holiday Check-in Campaign (Ad Age)
While Foursquare slowly experiments with near-field communication technologies here in the U.S., one of its Chinese lookalikes is rolling out a massive NFC-powered campaign in Eastern China…
Street Fight Daily: 10.31.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
Gilt City Picks Up BuyWithMe at a Discount (AllThingsD)
The daily deals site operated by fashion and luxury online retailer Gilt Groupe, has acquired daily deals company BuyWithMe. Gilt will be purchasing BuyWithMe’s assets, including its member and vendor lists, as well as some of its technology…
Cachet, Not Cash Fuels NYT’s Local Team-Ups (NetNewsCheck)
The New York Times’ local partnerships with the Bay Citizen, the Texas Tribune and the Chicago News Cooperative have been a boon to the legitimacy nonprofit sites and their missions to raise the level of local journalism in their markets. But some acknowledge that weighing the Times’ needs against their own can be a challenge…
Yelp Helps Local Restaurants Beat the Big Chains
Positive Yelp scores translate into real revenue boosts for local restaurants but not for chains. That’s the basic finding of a recent study by Michael Luca, a researcher at Harvard Business School. He found that a one-star differential in ratings on the popular crowd-sourced review site can bump revenues by 5% to 9% at a local restaurant. This is not entirely surprising. What is more interesting is that chain restaurants did not benefit from any significant increase in profitability or revenue corresponding to Yelp ratings…
Street Fight Daily: 10.13.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
The next update to Foursquare’s iPhone app includes a new feature called Radar, which pulls suggestions from the app’s Explore feature. Depending on your location, it might suggest a nearby restaurant, or remind you that the coffee shop on your to-do list is nearby. It will also tell you when your friends are meeting nearby. (TechCrunch)…
LocalResponse, a local marketing system that pushes targeted ads to users based on their check-ins, has raised $5 million. The money will go toward expanding the sales team and building out an enterprise version of the service for brands and agencies. (GigaOm)…
Street Fight Daily: 09.22.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups…
Ad sales chief Scott Colontonio is leaving AOL’s hyperlocal network Patch after little over a year to join Google. Meanwhile, AOL CEO Tim Armstrong reiterated his assertion that some Patch outposts would be profitable by the end of the year. (PaidContent)…
LivingSocial may raise more than $200 million in funding that would give it a valuation of as much as $6 billion, rather than proceeding toward an initial public offering. (Bloomberg)…
Street Fight Daily: 09.14.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman claims that a 54% traffic growth this year has led the service to 63 million monthly unique visits. 21 million reviews grace the site and the app, and 1 million are being added every 30 days. He also calls Google’s acquisition of Zagat “a funny move. (The Next Web)…
Groupon’s Chinese joint venture Gaopeng is not doing so well. It has apparently closed 10 offices and fired at as many as 400 employees over the past three months. (ReadWriteWeb)…
Street Fight Daily: 09.12.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
A Groupon deal might boost sales but, it can also lower a merchant’s reputation as measured by Yelp ratings, say computer scientists who have analyzed the link between daily deals and online reviews. (Technology Review)…
Patch is looking for adolescent contributors from high schools — and even middle schools — as it seeks to recruit thousands of community bloggers. (Forbes)…
Street Fight Daily: 09.02.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
While Yelp’s daily deal segment got off to a strong start, things have been getting worse ever since. So, what happened? Over the last 6 months, Yelp has been generating less and less revenue per deal as competition in the space heated up. (Yipit Blog)…
The Washington Post has decided to let the leases lapse on all but two of its local bureaus. Beginning next year, the Post has decided to end the leases on four offices in Virginia and three offices in Maryland. (Politico)…
What Motivates Yelp’s Power Users?
In an effort to dig a little deeper into what motivates Elite Squad-ers and other active Yelp users — beyond the free beer and crudités — Street Fight spoke with three power users who approach the service with differing goals in mind, but all of whom view Yelp as an integral part of their decision-making process.
Street Fight Daily: 08.31.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
“The golden age of daily deals, led by the unprecedented growth of Groupon, seems to be coming to its end,” writes Ben Parr. “That’s not to say daily deals won’t be sticking around for a long time — clearly there is a business in it — but when two major players withdraw from the space and its biggest player experiences a 50% traffic decline, it’s a clear sign that the daily deals market is no longer in its heyday.” (Mashable)…
A little over a year after Gannett and Yahoo teamed up on local ads sales primarily for the publisher’s 81 community newspapers, the two are extending their partnership to include all of Gannett’s 19 local TV stations. (PaidContent)…
Street Fight Daily: 08.30.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
Local reviews network Yelp is preparing to cut staff and “scale back” its one-year-old Yelp Deals service. About 15 sales staff currently working on the Deals service are getting redeployed to other parts of the organization; another 15 will remain working on the service, and the number of offers sent to users is “unlikely to grow.” (PaidContent)…
By 2015, small and medium-sized businesses will spend only 30% of their marketing budgets on traditional media with the rest going to digital and online media, according to BIA/Kelsey. (NetNewsCheck)…
Oink: A Help to Yelp?
With Oink (“Rate the Adventure”), Digg founder Kevin Rose has chosen to address a glaring problem in the existing world of online (and offline ratings). Namely, what do I buy when I’m there? Or what do I do? Or what should I try? The idea is, with this nifty mobile app, Oink users can give a thumbs up or a thumbs down to anything at all.