Citysearch has been around the local scene for so long that it often gets overlooked. But the IAC division plans a significantly higher profile in early 2007, with a relaunch of its site, a big push on local and national…
Insider Pages founder Stu MacFarlane has been replaced as CEO by Mitch Galbraith, a veteran of Yahoo!'s small-business division who was recently brought in as VP of advertising. The change at the top appears to have been initiated by Insider's…
And they just keep plugging away and plugging away at microsites. A new Bay Area company, Smalltown, has launched a microsite service in San Mateo and Burlingame that serves as kind of a commerce-oriented city guide/Yellow Pages. The service has…
Craigslist will be adding $25 fees Oct. 22 for recruitment ads in four more markets: Boston; Seattle; Washington, D.C.; and San Diego. The markets join New York City, Los Angeles and San Francisco as cities where fees have been imposed…
Call it sour grapes. But a year after famous talking head Michael Kinsley was thrown out as the Los Angeles Times' editorial page editor, he finally lets loose on Tribune Co. and its problems "fixing" the Times. In various comments,…
TV station Web sites and other local media will be hosting local "best of" contests developed by CityVoter, a new company started by Forrester Research alum. The "best of" contests are using a tried-and-true format popularized by city magazines such…
Store locators, the only "local" part of many national retail sites, are an increasingly important part of both national and local retail sites, according to "Expectations of The Cross Channel Customer," a new study released by authoritative retail analyst Lauren…
Print and Internet advertising aren't perfect substitutes for each other. The way that ads are priced, it takes at least 10 Internet users to make up for a single print user. So it doesn't make too much sense to suggest…
The report on Newspaper Next, a Harvard Business School-influenced blueprint for transforming newspapers into local ad hubs, has been released by the American Press Institute — or at least a stripped-down, free version of it (i.e., very little data). Included…
Geo-tagging is becoming a significant part of the local ecosphere and is a very popular feature on Yahoo!'s Flickr service, according to Yahoo! Local GM Paul Levine, who spoke at SES Local on Sept. 28 in Denver. Levine said that…
There is vast opportunity for local niche players in a world that is otherwise dominated by the leading search engines. Moreover, the emergence of search, in all its variations, creates a wealth of local inventory for advertisers smart enough to…
Last week, I got 22 comments within a two-day timeframe on a several-month-old post regarding Merchant Circle. I took all the comments off the blog after noting irregularities among them. Basically, I saw a deliberate attempt by one or more…
For the past couple of days, I've been besieged by "comments" that look like they are from small businesses that are complaining about Merchant Circle's aggressive voicemail promos. Merchant Circle is a new company that is designed to generate small-business…
Spot Runner, the year-old company that uses the Internet to inexpensively produce and place local TV ads for small businesses, has revealed some new directions. While it is still pursuing ad campaigns with local businesses, which number "in the thousands,"…
Yellow Pages companies are increasingly eyeing classifieds as the final piece of a "local advertising hub." The "inevitable" convergence of classifieds and Yellow Pages was explored at Kelsey's Directory Driven Commerce conference in Los Angeles Sept. 19-20. I gave a…
The partisans have come out of the woodwork to defend the future of classifieds — and specifically, newspaper-dominated classifieds. Following are short takes from comments sent to The Local Onliner. (It is worthwhile to look up the full comments.) Jay…
There is a great promotion for Yahoo! and Yahoo! Local going on right now. Or at least the concept is great. But it doesn't work.When I signed on to Yahoo! tonight, it touted that I could print out a free…
Windows Live Expo, Microsoft's entry in the classifieds war, has upped the ante against Google Base, Yahoo! and the rest of them by signing with AdMission (formerly iPix) to use its Spotlight Ads technology.While advertisers can still post ads for…
At a time when telcos like Verizon are divesting their Yellow Pages unit to help pay for the deployment of IPTV networks, AT&T Directory President Denny Payne makes a passionate case that the parent company ought to keep its Yellow…
Yellow Pages executives don't exactly have their heads in the sand. They know that print references are going down. But in their opinion, the industry is still likely to survive and even thrive, thanks to its strong ROI and concomitant…
