Four million babies are born in the U.S. every year. Hence the interest of two e-commerce portals in local baby sites. Just last week, UrbanBaby.com, an e-mail-oriented baby-care tip sheet, was sold to CNET, and LilaGuides, a print-oriented local baby guide that features user reviews, was sold to The Knot, the marriage-oriented e-commerce portal.

UrbanBaby is currently in seven markets, with a special emphasis on New York City. But it has plans on the drawing boards to enter 19 more. LilaGuides sells its pocket-sized print guides for 23 markets, and has collected 32,000 Zagat-style reviews in those markets. The guides list for $16.95 but are provided for free in many markets if parents submit 10-plus reviews. While LilaGuides only uses online to collect reviews, it expects to ramp up its online platform.

Both sites feature local content but haven't really established local sales channels. With deeper pockets, and possible integration into existing content — The Knot has city/regional guides in key U.S. markets — we'd expect to see both partner with local media and commerce companies to fully leverage the local component.

The Knot's interest in a baby site makes sense to me. It is a logical extension. What CNET is ultimately going to do with a baby site past tech reviews of baby monitors, however, is kind of confounding.

Sallie Mae announced that it has signed an agreement to purchase Upromise. Sallie Mae services more than 10 million customers totaling US$130 billion in loans. Upromise launched in 2001 and has grown into one of the largest direct marketing companies for the popular 529 college savings plan. Currently, it administers more than 1 million plans with total asset value of more than US$10 billion in seven states. According to the release, "Sallie Mae and Upromise will offer parents and students a comprehensive financial package to access college — including a broad range of investment options, financial aid information, college savings and student loan solutions."

Upromise also has a large merchant base including 20,000 grocery and drug stores, 10,000 hotels, 8,000 restaurants and several hundred national companies. Consumers can receive rebates in the form of college savings ranging from 1 percent to 10 percent on select items and services by registering credit cards with Upromise (participating companies).

Monster's deal to partner with the new owners of Philadelphia Media Holdings "would work with other newspapers," but probably makes more sense with papers in smaller markets, Monster CEO Andrew McKelvey told Reuters. McKelvey also said the Philadelphia deal was opportunistic and that no other newspapers are waiting in the wings.

"Would we consider a newspaper in California, or a newspaper in the Midwest? Sure," McKelvey told Reuters. But it would more likely be a paper in a small- to mid-sized market, where papers have maintained a commanding lead over Monster and other job portals, but could benefit from their superior technology and national advertising.

"The local marketplace is tough, particularly when you get into C and D markets," said McKelvey. "So what we’re looking at is, would it make sense to partner with some newspapers in those markets, because we’re really not there now."

Interchange Corp. and Verizon SuperPages will partner to deliver SuperPages.com customers via Interchange’s Local.com search engine. Here is the press release.

Just saw a note from media analyst Ben Mogil of Westwind Partners that takes issue with the conclusions of a recent report from Veritas suggesting that Yellow Pages Group’s core print directory business is imploding, citing a sharp reduction in page counts in key markets.

Here is my post from last week regarding the hit YPG has taken as a result of the Veritas report.

In his note, Mogil writes that the Veritas analysis ignores YPG’s pricing power and the tradeoff between high ARPA and having a growing number of accounts. He points out that YPG has deliberately sought to cull smaller accounts in favor of larger, more profitable accounts.

We can argue whether it is wise long term to cull small accounts that could become larger down the road, especially in a market that is getting more competitive. But YPG is not alone in this approach. There is also a debate over how aggressively a publisher should use its pricing power, since there is always risk of backlash, again especially in the presence of competition. Nevertheless, it seems the report from Veritas seeks to penalize YPG for actions that are consistent with its strategy.

It is worth noting some of Westwind’s disclosures related to YPG. The company has provided investment banking services for YPG and co-managed public offerings of YPG securities, all within the past 12 months. That said, Mogil makes some good points.

College newspapers are often overlooked as part of the local ecosystem. Local newspapers in college towns such as Lawrence, Kansas, and Austin, Texas, vie with college papers (a little) for advertising. And classified vendors such as LiveDeal and Ad2Ad have begun working with various college paper networks. College communities are an excellent target for used goods, right? But otherwise, there isn't much action — especially considering that there are 1.9 million users of college papers registered online.

A recent survey of college newspaper readers by Y2M Youth Media and Marketing Network, however, suggests that the college papers ought to rev it up — especially at the local level.

Y2M's survey, with 7,500 respondents, including 2,925 undergrads, suggests that college papers' focus on national and world events as "practice journalism" doesn't sit well with their readers. Ninety percent of the readers, in fact, rely on the college papers for local and campus news.

The respondents are also clamoring for more local advertising. Sixty-four percent want more local restaurant ads, 57 percent want more recruitment ads, 51 percent want more local entertainment ads, and 50 percent want more local store ads.

One of the oddities of the Internet's impact on college papers is that on campus/near campus readership has actually been dwarfed by national readers such as alumni. The percentage of "local" readers compared with "national" readers, in fact, has fallen from 43 percent to 35 percent between 2005 and 2006.

But "local" readers still make up the most regular readership, both in print and online. Seventy-seven percent say they look at either the print or online edition of the college paper at least once a month, with almost half indicating they look at the paper at least twice a week.

The online edition is increasingly popular, especially among undergrads. Twenty-four percent of undergrads look at the online edition at least twice per week, and 33 percent look at it at least once a month.

One area that has fallen, however, has been the use of classified ads in the papers’ print and online editions. Y2M suggests these markets are beginning to fall sway to Craigslist and other free listings. Perhaps this is something that the deals with LiveDeal and Ad2Ad will begin to alleviate.

Here is an item from Bloomberg that says buyout firm KKR will saddle up PagesJaunes with a record level of debt for a European LBO, about US$8 billion. This will certainly motivate PagesJaunes managers to optimize cash flow.

This morning I had the chance to talk to Julie Mason, general manager of Kellysearch. The site is a B2B vertical search engine and directory that mostly focuses on industrial products, services and equipment. Basic listings are free with the option for additional levels of paid enhancements and upsells, such as hosting a searchable product catalog (print or electronic catalogs are converted to HTML).

Interestingly, Mason asserted that most of its advertisers prefer flat annual pricing, rather than cost-per-click. Like most of the site's features and functionality, it has determined this through extensive usability studies and surveys with existing users and advertisers. These surveys have also, for example, determined that 70 percent of its users have B2B intent rather than B2C intent, and it has tailored the usability and specificity of ads and sponsored links accordingly.

But back to performance-based vs. flat pricing. It is interesting that Kellysearch's customer base largely prefers the latter, given the general move toward the former among SMEs (we projected in our most recent forecast that performance-based advertising will account for 26 percent of traditional directional ad revenues by 2010). It could have something to do with the proclivities of the specific verticals the company serves or that of the B2B industrial equipment market in general.

Nonetheless, Mason sees a slight trend toward increased demand for performance-based marketing among the site's advertisers. It will accordingly launch a pilot program in the near future that will involve a cost-per-click model. Eventually there will likely be a combination of pricing models or an option for the advertiser.

Interestingly, the affinity for performance-based pricing is greater in the U.S. Mason is in a unique perspective to make this observation given that Kellysearch was started in the U.K. and operates in several countries and languages (which raises a whole host of challenges with its taxonomy and site design). Generally speaking the U.S. is about six months ahead of the U.K. in terms of advertiser sophistication and demand for interactive advertising, and the rest of Europe trails about six months behind the U.K., according to Mason.

The site will undergo a front-end redesign in the next 60 days that will include better indexing of business listings. In addition to product category, vertical tags and behavioral tracking will be used to help it build a more robust ontology. We'll keep an eye on the company and check back in post redesign.

The Kelsey Group is preparing a report scheduled for release in September that evaluates the current field of online directory and local search sites.

Part of the process of researching this report involves soliciting the views of the industry on how various products stack up and also what makes for a good online directory/local search product.

If you could, please take a few minutes to complete our 2006 IYP/Local Search Product Survey by clicking here.

The survey will only take a few minutes to complete, and your input is very important to us. If you’ve already filled it out, please accept our thanks and disregard this request.

This is your chance to weigh in on how these products are faring and how this space is developing.

CNET ran a report stating Google ads are running on a Detroit-based radio station. This is part of the strategy revolving around the dMarc acquisition last year. Other portals and ad networks have not been shy in suggesting that they will also pursue offline ad opportunities. This naturally suggests, given the acquisitive nature of portals, that Spot Runner, Bid4Spots and others will become acquisition targets sooner or later.

Bid4Spots has about 2,200 stations in its network, and it is adding about 30 new ones each week. Spot Runner has been very successful landing partnerships with Cendant (Century 21 and Coldwell Banker) and others.

Generally, online to offline is an interesting trend that we've been following. Insider Pages has its print directory with tracking telephone numbers. Representatives tell TKG they are pleased with the metrics and will drop a second print guide in the Palo Alta area in the next 30 days. LiveDeal and AdStar also have a partnership to push classified content from the Web to print.

Here are a few previous posts on this topic:

Insider Pages

Bid4Spots

AdCenter

LiveDeal and AdStar