We’ve just announced the lineup for our Marketplaces 2009 conference, which is March 16-18 at the historic (and excellent) Century Plaza in L.A. We hope you find it as compelling as we do. It is probably a “must attend” event by any…
WebVisible and Nielsen's jointly produced research on local search shows there is still a gap between user behavior and SMB advertising. The annual survey was just released, including responses from 4,000 U.S. Internet users and 261 SMBs. Here are some…
Spas and salon advertisers are a huge focus for local sites. They’re a Top 4 selection for Citysearch, and also rank highly on Yelp and other sites. Now they are being specifically targeted by InnerRewards, a new health and wellness vertical…
Bakersfield Californian President and CEO Richard Beene says smaller advertisers will be receiving more and more focus by the independently owned paper -- something that many newspapers say, but few really do much about. In a note to employees discussing recent…
This just in. Canada's Yellow Pages Group has announced a deal with My Virtual Paper, a start-up that has developed a process for extracting and indexing deep content from SMBs' offline business papers -- brochures, fliers and so on. CEO Manoj…
Marchex, during its 3Q earnings call today, reaffirmed its focus on providing ad solutions for the local and vertical search space, noting that it currently works with 80,000 local advertisers via 110 local partner relationships, including AT&T and Idearc. The…
Broadband providers, especially those formerly associated with telco Yellow Pages, are trying to get back in the game of providing marketing services for small businesses. They’re looking to provide Web 2.0 directory-like profiles and search engine marketing services for small…
Are the small-business “home and trade service” advertisers that populate PennySaver and American Classifieds a good bet to buy search packages? That’s the question being posed by American Classifieds, the second-largest classified publisher franchise with 6,000 editions. The company signed…
Closing remarks at the Warrillow Summit Toronto yesterday gave advertisers targeting the small and medium-sized business market some hope despite the alarming descent in optimism on the current Canadian economic situation. A recurring theme over the past two days of…
We’re just about ready to go with Interactive Local Media 2008, which is Nov. 19-21 in Santa Clara, in the heart of Silicon Valley. It should be a very important, game-defining event -- and the first one for The Kelsey…
I read two columns today that had similar themes regarding SMBs' general need to adopt better local marketing strategies. Carrie Hill's Search Engine Watch column argues the relatively weak ROI transparency of print advertising (compared with online), while Danny Sullivan's…
To the ranks of Marchex Connect, WebVisible, ReachLocal, Yodle, Metrix4Media, Orange Soda and others add Clickable, a pay-per-click and search "dashboard" company that has attracted $23 million in venture funding from Founders Fund, Union Square Ventures and FirstMark Capital. The…
Fox Interactive Media’s MySpace is seeking to jump-start local and small-business advertising by launching a homegrown Self-Serve Ad Service. Initial advertisers are likely to be rock bands -- the first major segment to have adopted MySpace itself -- but the…
OK, we’ve got the format(s) and “best and brightest” speaker roster set for Interactive Local Media: Extending Local Channels, which is Nov. 19-21 in Santa Clara, California, next to San Jose. At the top of the list is Angie Hicks,…
Since launching self-service EZ Ads in April 2007, Zillow.com has set a new standard for simple-to-buy, one-price ads, and 13,000 (mostly) local advertisers responded. Typical ad spends were about $50. Now as Zillow begins to have its inventory sold to…
The latest nugget of data has been released from the folks at Palore. This set shows the monthly ad spends from a sample of 6,000 advertisers in San Francisco and New York within the Yellow Pages headings of beauty &…
Marchex has announced the launch of Marchex Connect 2.0, an updated version of its private-labeled local ad platform that is used by local ad resellers such as AT&T and Yellowpages.com. The new version's highlights include integration of call tracking (from…
One of the hard and fast truths about print Yellow Pages advertising is that the ads at the front of the heading almost always generate more calls and leads compared with those further back. The current trend is for small-business advertisers…
Over the past two months, we have been talking with sales reps in a variety of local media outlets who are selling search engine marketing. While we feel like some sales organizations are making headway in selling a significant volume…
The headlines from this week’s edition: GE: The Heat on Immelt Google: Weathering the Storm? The Future of Fannie and Freddie Anheuser-Busch’s Troubled Brew This wedding tradition of something old and something new is appropriate for BusinessWeek’s leading online stories…