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The deal was announced today. YellowPages.com, SBC SMARTpages.com and BellSouth RealPages.com advertisers will be featured and recieve "priority placement" on InfoSpace-owed Switchboard, which has consistently been one of the most-visited IYP sites.
More on this in our Local Media Journal next week.
Barry Diller more than hints that Ask Jeeves will be rebranded (a good move as part of a global strategy). Ask.com (the company's URL anyway) will likely be the new name.
Would Barry Diller rather put an Ask search box on every IAC site or the butler? I think the choice is all but self-evident.
More from Search Engine Journal and John Battelle's blog.
In addition, Ask has also charged forward with very interesting search innovations. For example: focus and zoom. More from Chris Sherman at SEW.
I missed Blogdigger's announcement about the addition of local a few days ago. Local.blogdigger.com appears to be a mix of local search, blog/news search and community.
The results of my few quick searches weren't very impressive. But the concept is pretty interesting.
From the press release:
“It is well known that Weblogs have created a global conversation, on a global scale,” said Greg Gershman, President of Blogdigger. “But conversations are happening at a local level as well, and Blogdigger Local does the job of identifying those conversations and in order to bring people together on a community level. Whether it’s citizens’ journalism, grass-roots media, or just personal opinion, Blogdigger Local connects participants in new and useful ways.”
The company said that it had partnered with Whizspark Corp., "an online event marketing service," which will target ads to local users that are conducting local searches on Blogdigger. The company is also soliciting advertisers through its site. In addition, Blogdigger serves AdSense ads.
If search results can't identify blogs that are directly relevant, it shows users the "closest blogs" to the geography identified. In one sense this is absurd (why do I care where a blog is based if the content is not relevant to me?). But I'm still fascinated by the combination of blogs and location.
It's really another spin on online communities/social networks, with blogs as the source of the user-generated content. But these folks are probably ahead of their time.
The concept requires a considerable amount of user-generated/blog content that is locally and otherwise relevant to promote repeat usage. And even though Pew earlier reported that 8 million Americans had "created blogs," we're still some time away from enough content to really make the Blogdigger local search experience a rich one.
Still, we'll be watching to see what develops.
P.S.: Given that Bloglines has said it's going to develop a better blog search engine — and now that it's owned by Ask Jeeves, which is owned by IAC — it will be interesting whether they pick up on this and try and work some local/geotargeting element into their offering.
In the New York Times today, an article titled No More Same-Old lays out the challenges facing advertisers and advertising agencies in today’s “connected” and ever changing world.
According to Universal-McCann during the last 5 years, only three media categories have increased their overall ad budget share " direct mail, cable TV and the Internet. Share losses were felt by the “big-four” traditional categories " newspapers, broadcast TV, radio and magazines. And though left out of the analysis, Yellow Pages too lost share during the last 5 years. More evidence that media that can target audiences more precisely " closer to where those audiences make buying decisions " is on the rise. Yellow Pages can make this claim too " so why hasn’t it gained share in the last 5 years? It maybe that Yellow Pages lost its way when instead of focusing on the value proposition " Yellow Pages usually offers a great ROI - publishers and their legions of sales people began pushing color, double trucks, cover, spine, tip-on and other high-revenue items.
As if newspapers have not had enough bad news in recent months " declining readership, circulation audits, classified erosion. Now comes another challenge " this time from Hollywood. A decade ago movie advertising accounted for about 8 percent of national newspaper advertising.
This share rose 73 percent to over 14 percent in 2004 and amounted to more than a billion dollars. While this might be classified as national advertising, it is really local advertising " enabling moviegoers to find out what movie is playing at what theatre and at what time. As they say in the movie business, this trend “may not have legs”. Now more than ever, moviegoers can go online to get a more comprehensive solution to their movie-going needs. The basic movie information is easily found online or over the phone. The online experience is considerably enhanced by easy access to reviews " both edited and moviegoer generated, online ticketing, nearby eating options, parking choices and even traffic information. This is just one more example of the inevitable, albeit gradual, march toward the local online neighborhood.
Always one to read just about anything that has Yellow Pages in it, I stumbled upon this article Get More Green from Your Yellow Pages Ad in contractor magazine. Written by a one Adams Hudson, a self-proclaimed marketing consultant, the article offers the contractor community a different view of Yellow Pages advertising.
Overall his suggestions seem right on. “You’re paying a fortune for your Yellow Pages ad. It is supposed to produce leads, not showcase your vans, silly graphics or spout innumerable sentence fragments. So tell your prospects “why” they should call using the personal language of “you” to pull them into the copy.” Adams goes on to tell how a Chicago plumber went from a full-page color ad to a triple quarter column black and witnessed a 20 percent increase in calls. The plumber " at the advice of Mr. Hudson (and probably fulfilled by Mr. Hudson’s marketing services company) shifted the budget he saved to a direct mail campaign.
This anecdote is consistent with TKG’s findings in Wave VII of the Local Commerce Monitor where there was a statistically significant increase in the number advertisers using direct mail. Interestingly the other day I received a direct mail piece from London Chimney Services, Inc. " a company I have used for nearly 20 years. The mail piece included a brochure from Hargrove Hearth Products " more than likely a co-sponsor of the direct mail. The point of all this? Well, increasingly the small and medium-sized business owner is looking for ways to improve the effectiveness of the ad and marketing budget. And Yellow Pages publishers, IYPs, local search providers, direct marketing companies and the like had all better be prepared to demonstrate performance with facts, figures and analysis because otherwise they’ll all be wondering why “that dog don’t hunt.”
Everybody involved in hockey — not just players and management, but people who sell beer or jerseys — loses. No one who was not intimately involved in the negotiations can understand what went on between the two sides, but the end result is that this was the first cancellation of a major league sport in North America ever.
The losers from the telecommunications deals (let's include SBC and AT&T here) are not as immediately obvious, but the mergers will have a much greater impact on the economy. Thousands of people will lose their jobs through "cost savings," and prices will rise, particularly for small businesses, through less competition. If small businesses spend more money on communications (a required expenditure), they will have less money to spend on marketing their goods and services. Cutting marketing and sales expenses is what companies have always done when they need to increase their bottom line. It's a short-term gain, but a long-term loss.
Marketing, whether it's enhancing the image of your brand or telling people where they can buy your products and services, is one of the things that makes the U.S. economy so robust. Advertising has outpaced GDP most years and that is a good thing for everyone involved in media, marketing, retailing and most every other industry.
So the 2004/2005 NHL hockey season is over, and both sides are at fault. But the season of larger telecommunications companies is just getting started. We all lose.
This just might be a record for the shortest holding period for a private equity investing in the directories business. This morning, Yellow Pages Group announced it will buy the SuperPages Canada business, which Bain Capital had acquired from Verizon back in September for C$1.98 billion. Today, the price is C$2.55 billion.
We haven’t yet listened to the conference call explaining the deal, but it is no secret that YPG was an eager suitor the last time this property was for sale (way back in 2004), and clearly it never gave up on the idea of creating a national platform for it print and online directories business.
It’s worth noting that the price went up by a half billion Canadian in the time Bain owned the asset. It is also interesting that Bain took the decision late last year to close rather than sell its Eastern Canadian operations. That decision certainly makes it easier and cleaner for YPG to acquire the Bain assets, since there is now no market overlap.
And the incredibly brief holding period by Bain may suggest a general trend toward shorter holding periods. 3i and VSS have signaled a possible quick exit from Yellow Brick Road in Europe.
We will have more coverage of this deal in Local Media Journal later this week.
Nothing radical in one sense, but the development is very interesting and another harbinger of — dare I say it — TV-Internet convergence. (Actually there won't be true convergence, but some mixing of TV and Internet on both mediums).
Separately, eBay bought two classified sites that it will fold into Kijiji.com (outside the U.S.): Gumtree.com and Loquo.com.
Gumtree operates in the U.K., Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. Loquo is in Spain and other European countries.
Quietly eBay is building a classifieds powerhouse outside the U.S. Also, remember that eBay now owns Rent.com and 25% of Craigslist.
My Google is here. Though that's not the official name, that's what the new home page personalization features seem to amount to.
While the move is not a tremendous surprise — we speculated about My Google when Google News personalization was released — it does appear to be something of a directional change for the company (or at least a public unveiling of a strategy — "fusion"), which had long denied that it was becoming a portal.
Google said that it was responding to user demand in creating the alternative home page. Accordingly, for some segments of the Google user population, it should help reinforce usage — along the lines of Google's Toolbar and Desktop search. That may especially be the case for Gmail users, who can integrate the email program into the new home page as one of a number of modules (weather, news, stocks, driving directions and a few others).
Users can drag the content modules and place them anywhere in relation to one another under the search bar. That capability is very nice. However, overall, the new home page is not anywhere near as "robust" as My Yahoo!, nor does it offer as many options to users. But I expect that will change in the near term, with more RSS feeds and product features likely on the way.
Local elements include weather, driving directions and movie showtimes. I would expect Google to integrate more local elements over time (e.g., Maps more explicitly and/or a separate Google Local search module).
For more:
Here's the press release and tons more news on the announcement from . . . Google News. (Notice how highly ranked the blog coverage is.)
Here's the Search Engine Watch coverage and CNET's and the New York Times' coverage.
