An interesting story just appeared on Bloomberg that reports Australian publisher Sensis, a unit of telecom Telstra, will be spared from a massive job-cutting program because it represents a critical component of Telstra’s growth plans. Telstra CEO Sol Trujillo has announced plans to cut 12,000 jobs over the next five years. Sensis is committing to double its revenues by 2010, a tall order for any directory company. However, print Yellow Pages does not appear to be central to these growth objectives. Rather, the company will rely on Internet advertising and initiatives like Platefood, a London-based enterprise that will license Sensis’ online search and directory platform to other European and Asian publishers. You can read the story here.

Everyone has been speculating about whether Google Base is Google's entry into online classifieds. I have argued that it's about much more than classifieds. But I can tell you with confidence that MSN is soon to enter the online classifieds market. The company has been working some time on a classifieds site that it will offer through the Windows Live portal. It's in "internal beta" right now.

I got a quick demo a couple of weeks ago. The site sweeps pretty broadly and has traditional classifieds categories, as well as services. It also seeks to leverage community features so that it's not just a listings database but much more dynamic.

I didn't see the live site in operation; I saw several screenshots (sorry I don't have any to share). The interface I saw was very nice and should give MSN/Microsoft an immediate presence in the now much more competitive online classifieds space. I expect we'll hear (and, we hope, see) more at ILM:05.

Local search is getting a lot better, but one of the things that most engines and sites cannot now do with accuracy is deliver results consistent with the way people actually search. For example, I live in an area of Oakland, California, known as "Montclair." Montclair isn't an official place, and so it doesn't often show up in most engines (Yahoo! and Google sometimes get it right). If I use my ZIP, the engines have an easier time.

But people search for things according to neighborhoods and colloquial names. Think about New York. A local search in New York might use phrases such as "Upper East Side" or "SoHo" or "Midtown." It's equally true in London or Paris — the names used for places by ordinary people are not the DMAs or necessarily consistent with official municipalities or formal geographic boundaries.

So it's significant that real estate vertical HomeGain (owned now by Classified Ventures) has developed what it is referring to informally as "neighborhood maps." I spoke to Dan Martin at HomeGain recently, and he explained that the company had "mapped" 200 cities with more than 11,000 neighborhoods (I believe this is now U.S. only).

This is what Dan said in an e-mail to me:

We can now enable local searches for things like "Russian Hill apartments" or "sushi in Bernal Heights" [San Francisco neighborhoods]. To date nobody else we've encountered has developed good neighborhood maps on a national level. I think this could have immense value to folks in travel (think hotels), local search, real estate, yellow pages, etc. Analyzing data at the neighborhood level may also reveal insights that are not apparent when using zip code boundaries. For instance, Starbucks may want to put its shops in the center of a neighborhood or at the neighborhood junction points.

HomeGain is clearly going to use this, but Dan also said he is interested in licensing this data/technology to others.

The Canadian Finance Minster issued a ruling yesterday on the taxation of income trusts that has left Yellow Pages Group President and CEO Marc Tellier breathing a sigh of relief. The government decided to reduce the tax on dividend income, making the trusts more attractive to individual investors. There had been fears that the government would increase taxes on the trusts to raise revenue and to put cold water on the trusts. YPG’s reaction can be read here.

The trusts were once seen as a highly specialized asset class but are now increasingly popular, with many prominent Canadian companies looking for ways to convert to tax-advantaged income trusts. One of the trust model’s main popularizers has been YPG. The company has shown it can both grow and invest in the business within the trust structure, which essentially delivers all free cash back to trust unit-holders. Had the government made a different decision, YPG might have been left scrambling. And while business would have continued regardless, its valuation would likely have suffered.

Here is a comment from Tellier: "We believe the decision to cut the taxation on dividends will make Canada more competitive. The threat to productivity is not the income trust structure but the relatively high levels of taxation on corporations and individuals, and we are satisfied that the government understands this concern. Clearly they have responded to the input of Canadians from across Canada as part of this consultation process."

This approach has some risks, but it is clearly a way for the sales force to gain advertising in a world where the consumer is way ahead of the SMB in adapting the concept of local search. Obviously the name describes the product, but they reinforce that strongly by introducing a new brand design that incorporates the walking fingers in the ‘a’ of Yellow Pages.

This had to have been an incredibly complex challenge for CEO Charles Stubbs and his team. Each of the three previous products had advertisers, and they all had to be integrated into the new Web site. In addition, the three Web businesses had relationships with suppliers and their own traffic deals. BellSouth and SBC management obviously had their opinions, which couldn’t be ignored. You can bet that sales management wanted to sure that their ox wasn’t gored. Perhaps most challenging of all are the back-office issues, which is the plumbing that the consumer and advertiser only cares about if there’s a problem.

All in all it is amazing what the YellowPages.com team has accomplished in the past year. Anyone going to YellowPages.com is likely to have an opinion about how well they have done, but I would recommend you give this site time. It is not quite ready for prime time yet, but no one said that what is in essence a new product had to be perfect from day one. This business continues to change very quickly, and YellowPages.com appears to be positioned to build on a very strong foundation.

While Craig Newmark would undoubtedly bristle at that characterization, the network of sites that bears his name is the undisputed king of online classifieds (not counting eBay).

According to a report put out by Pew, using comScore data, traffic to classifieds-oriented Web sites has grown 80% in the past year (much greater than the 7% growth of the total U.S. Internet population). Craigslist in particular had almost 9 million uniques in September.

The top online classifieds sites (traffic volume) in September 2005 were the following:

• Craigslist.org
• Trader Publishing Co.
• Cars.com
• Apartments.com
• Abracat Property
• Homescape.com
• PuppyDogWeb.com
• LiveDeal.com
• Tribe Networks
• RegionalHelpWanted.com Sites
• Yahoo! Classifieds
• USCity.net
• BackPage.com
• MySpace Classifieds
• Hoobly.com

Trader Publishing had nearly as many uniques as Craigslist. But after Trader, Cars.com and Apartments.com had less than half the traffic of Craigslist, and the numbers drop off considerably from there.

The Pew report also found that about one in six online users in the U.S. had sold something online.

Here are a couple of quick thoughts. Tribe is doing better than I thought, and look at PuppyDogWeb (who had ever heard of that site?– obviously lots of people). And now the almost perfunctory statement: There aren't any newspapers represented here (although Tribe is partly newspaper owned, and Cars.com and Apartments.com are owned by Classified Ventures).

Print newspaper classified advertising was a $16.6 billion industry in 2004. What's going to happen to that revenue as more consumers (per the Pew/comScore data) shop for cars, jobs and real estate online?

ILM:05 has a panel on classifieds, "The Future of Classifieds in a World of Free," featuring Steve Harmon, VP, Business Development, LiveDeal.com; Leif Welch, VP, Business Development, AdMission Corp.; and Peter Zollman, Founder, Classified Intelligence.

It should be quite interesting.

Here's another movement in the transformation of TV (from reach to targeting) … per the WSJ, TiVo is working with Comcast and others to enable users to "search" for ads that are more relevant to them:

TiVo users will be able to set up a profile of products on their television screens by clicking on categories such as automotive or travel or typing in keywords such as "BMW" or "cruises." On a regular basis, TiVo will then download relevant commercials to TiVo recorders over the Internet or, for those users who don't have broadband, send the video via traditional broadcast signals. The commercials will appear on-screen in a folder next to the list of television shows TiVo users record.

Advertisers will associate their ads, according to the Journal, with keywords and categories (a la Google AdWords/AdSense).

Some version of this idea will ultimately be adopted by all DVR providers (unless TiVo rushes out and gets a "method" patent). And consumers — who don't skip ads as much as conventionally thought — will go for this.

comScore reported that, while Internet use grew 7 percent overall in 2004, online map site traffic increased 33 percent to 51.3 million. Mapquest held a 71 percent share of the market in September, according to comScore, while Yahoo! Maps followed with 32 percent, and Google Maps with 25 percent. The overlap in use across these sites accounts for the numbers not adding up to 100 percent.

Google Maps has the most interactivity with the map itself and has recently fused the product with Google Local for more local and directory information. But it trails Yahoo! Maps, which has more local features and tie-ins with other products, and Mapquest simply because it has been around much longer. Mapping, like search, is a highly habitual online activity with which early entrants can have a signifigant edge. And, like search, gaining market share is a key part of the online mapping game because revenue potential is so closely tied to traffic. This explains the acceleration in feature development and integration over the past year.

But how to leverage these user bases in forming creative ways to monetize maps is also a key question for mapping providers. In the meantime, they want to have a solid base of users to hit the ground running when revenue models come to fruition — both online and with wireless mapping and mobile directory applications, of which mapping will be a central component.

These and other topics in mapping will be explored during the second day of ILM:05 (Thursday) in a panel titled "Maps, Mashups and Monetization."

Ingenio and Marchex, which is building out a proprietary network of local and vertical destination sites, announced that Ingenio PPCall advertisers would appear on Marchex's network of sites. Marchex subsidiary TrafficLeader is a "simplified search" vendor to YellowPages.com (SBC, BellSouth) and the Houston Chronicle, managing search distribution to local advertisers (and fulfillment) through their own sites and search engines.

Read more in the release.

A new company called Centro launched today that purports to be a one-stop shop for national advertisers to buy ad space on local Web sites such as newspaper sites.

It appears to be a local ad placement service for national advertiser display ads. The company’s president, Shawn Riegsecker, told Clickz News: "Search had SEM agencies that made search easy. We’re trying to do for local what Overture did for search years ago."

The company has close to $10 million in advertising commitments for 2006, according to Clickz, from blue-chip national advertisers such as Allstate, American Airlines, Ford, Mercedes-Benz and State Farm.

Competition for local advertising continues to heat up, making this a difficult field to enter. Centro will have competition from search giants as well as IYPs. The company hopes to differentiate itself by focusing on Web sites for local media, including newspapers, television and radio stations — thus capturing a segment of the advertising market with a primary interest in these channels. The company’s success will hinge largely upon how this segment of advertisers values its service model in brokering local ad space.

The good news for Centro is that online newspaper readership is on the rise, but competition from paid search won’t make it easy for the company — or any other company that attempts to compete for local ad dollars.