Here's the Yahoo! Search response to the "controversy" created yesterday by the Bloomberg article in which Yahoo! CFO Susan Decker seemed to be saying Yahoo! was perfectly happy being No. 2 (to Google) in search:
[W]e thought it made sense to briefly recap how focused we are in search and our passion to be the …

It would appear so, according to this article in MediaPost (reg. req'd):
On Tuesday, some of the nation's biggest advertisers got a pitch from a surprise media buying "solutions provider:" online auction service eBay. Details of the presentation, and the reaction of the ad executives—members of the Association of National Advertisers influential Television Advertising Committee—could …

PaidContent reports today that CBS Digital president Larry Kramer announced the network will offer all of its NCAA March Madness coverage online for free. The coverage will be ad supported, and Kramer likened it to AOLs Live 8 coverage which put its broadband video delivery on the map.
Online would seem to be a great venue …

This is really old news, but Craigslist confirmed that it will be charging for apartment rentals in New York. This adds a second category, the other being jobs, to its source of revenues. I believe that Peter Zollman's Classified Intelligence has estimated annual Craigslist revenues at $10 million (that's my memory).
A long time …

The Internet Stock Blog has a summary of the NY Times earnings call (revenues up 30 percent in Q4)—there are lots of datapoints about traffic/users, etc. And the ranks/rolls of TimesSelect paying subscribers (I'm one) continues to grow. I was really skeptical at launch, but there seems to be some momentum (now 156K online only …

A new report from the good folks at the Pew Internet & American Life Project finds that the Internet (and e-mail) are increasingly relied up to manage "offlline" social relations/networks and that, in addition, more and more people are relying on the Internet to help them in making major life (cycle) decisions:
45% of internet …

Late to the party on this one . . . but here's a MediaPost story (reg. req'd) from Monday about the SF Chronicle (owned by Hearst) launching a cable TV show devoted to classifieds advertising, which will also be streamed on the SF Gate site.
Classifieds on "Chronicle Jobs TV" will be up to …

It's official. The RHD-Dex Media merger has been approved by shareholders. Here is the release. The deal, which combines two of the top five U.S. incumbent publishers, is expected to formally close at the end of this month.
Here is a summary of the deal from our Local Media Journal, published shortly after the deal …

This article appeared today in the Guardian Newspaper in the U.K., regarding the ongoing review of the rate cap imposed on Yell in the United Kingdom. The Competition Commission has issued a report indicating it may extend or expand the rate cap. We will follow up with our analysis of this development in the coming …

This doesn't have anything to do with local per se, but Ask.com is supposed to being helping make IAC a local powerhouse (together with Citysearch). I'm reminded by this that I need to catch up with them on a range of fronts. But the new image search is a nice presentation.
According to the …

BusinessWeek Reporter Ben Elgin provides a nice overview of Yahoo!'s "differentiation strategy" (vs. Google) using community and "social search." (I believe JudysBook has tried to TM the term "social search.")
We wrote about Yahoo!'s broader social strategy and how it related to local back in August last year and blogged a bit more about it …

This is a very interesting piece from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer quoting Yahoo!'s CFO Susan Decker on the implied unliklihood that Yahoo! will gain any significant search share from Google in the immediate future.
Recall, however, that overall Yahoo! is number 1 in terms of uniques (a position it has traded with AOL back and forth). …

Seeking to match some of the very impressive high-resolution "birdseye" photography now available through Windows Live Local, Google has improved the resolution on some of its aerial coverage. Here's the latest from the Official Google Blog:
We're always trying to improve the imagery in Google Earth and Google Local, but our latest update is bigger …

PaidContent reports that a new social networking site for Teens called Tagged has received funding. Little is revealed about the business model, but it will be difficult for anyone entering the space to gain market share from MySpace.
The average age of MySpace users skews a bit older than a teenage user base (roughly 18), …

According to this AFP story:
A survey from the Michigan-based Ponemon Institute, released Tuesday, indicated that approximately 56 percent of respondents believed Google shouldn't hand over the information demanded by the Department of Justice. Nearly 90 percent of those polled were under the impression that their Internet searches were kept private.
But this sentence …

Om Malik has an interesting take on what constitutes the term "News 2.0" (the latest phrase within the Internet buzzword parlance that started with "Web 2.0").
There are many high-traffic news sites out there, he contends, that don’t create any news at all — they only aggregate. This has been a successful model for many …

An interesting piece in today's New York Times about HD radio. Better described as "digital radio", the technology allows broadcasters to fit three additional channels in the space now occupied by just one.
A digital signal also allows for much better behavioral targeting for advertisers. Combine this with Google's recent move into radio advertising, and …

Here's a broad ClickZ article about media fragmentation, consumer control and video coming to local. These are all themes of the upcoming Drilling Down event. Also eMarketer compiles data from Tacoda-sponsored research showing that behavioral targeting beats contextual. The data aggregator further cites MarketingSherpa regarding the relative effectiveness of different categories of online ads. …

Now this isn't PPCall, it's call connection (eStara). . . but this DMNews piece offers a case study of sorts on how Chrysler is having success connecting potential purchasers to local dealers:
…80 percent of calls generated through the click-to-call technology were transferred to local dealers. Of those calls, 15 percent closed the sale…
There …

Here's a rebranding case study—call measurement firm DCCI changing its name to telmetrics—that appeared in Ken Clark's YPTalk blog/newsletter. Call tracking will become more important and more central to integrated online-offline campaigns in the very near future.
Call tracking will likely be the way that Google, for example, will measure the efficacy of its new …