Does it make any sense to build a national chain of city sites by hiring local editors, one by one? The answer is a resolute “no,” according to Examiner.com CEO Rick Blair, who said he’d been there and done that when he was a top exec at AOL Digital City.

Blair came on board to run the Denver-based company in April 2008. Working with owner Philip Anschutz, the mogul who had prior successes with AEG Live and Qwest Communications, Blair and a team that largely consists of former AOL execs have scrapped a model that had created local offices in five markets.

The company’s currently structured around 25 vertical channels, with channel managers based in Denver. They are served by thousands of “Examiners” writing for 200+ local editions. Each Examiner is fully vetted and signed up to write about various micro subjects (i.e., “Denver Skiing,” “San Diego Alternative Health,” etc.).

The company has 23,000 Examiners writing for it now, and expects 26,000 by year-end.  They account for 90 percent of the company’s content, with links to local sites accounting for the rest. More than 13.9 million unique visitors currently come to the site, making it the No. 5 U.S. news site, per comScore.

Each Examiner’s pay is based on a number of variables (page views, unique visitors, session length, return visits and frequency of posts). It is a model that is not dissimilar to other content developers, such as Associated Content, Demand Media and About.com. The difference is that Examiner.com is still mostly rooted in local reporting.

Looking forward, Blair says the company will focus on building up stickiness with the introduction of community social features. The site is currently reliant on SEO. It is also poised to begin monetizing its content via sponsorship models. One ski resort, for instance, has sponsored seven of the area’s 14 ski-based Examiners. The company is set to aggressively develop accounts around the U.S., Canada and several international markets via telemarketing efforts.

A full report is available for clients of the BIA/Kelsey Marketplaces program.

Newspapers haven’t done too well with local search, despite efforts to leverage their potential mix of human editors and algorithms. But Boston.com made more of an effort than many others, launching a local search/directory effort in 2006. As chronicled by Nieman Lab, that effort started out on a promising note but quickly plateaued.

Given the lackluster results, Boston.com might have dumped its search efforts altogether. But the project’s sunk costs — more than six figures — were too great to ignore. This was especially the case given the newspaper’s serious financial predicament.

Instead, the site lowered expectations. As we noted in our coverage at that time, Boston.com let Google handle many of the search site elements, and started thinking of its end of the equation as a “platform” rather than a “product.” Basically, it decided to get out of the business of selling keywords.

VP of Products and Technology Bob Kempf told Nieman that search’s new use would be to “find, assemble, and publish targeted content” around the core information. That would deepen Boston.com’s relationship with users, even if they also used other search engines for research and discovery.

The effort has also better positioned the site for hyperlocal “Your Town” sites in the Boston-area. Targeted articles get pushed out to neighborhood sections. Ultimately, Kempf told Nieman that he believes the search platform will offset the initial investment.

Will any newspaper ultimately breakthrough with local search sales? This is the question that will be addressed on the podium when The LA Times’ Andy Vogel shares the stage with WebVisible’s Kirsten Mangers and Yodle’s Court Cunningham at ILM:09 next week.

Here is a recap of posts from last week, in case you missed any. Click below to read each post in full.

Digital Newsstand: Food for Thought for YP Industry?

The New York Times reported yesterday that four leading magazine publishers — Time, Conde Nast, Hearst and Meredith — are jointly developing an “online newsstand.” The initiative has ambitions of becoming the “iTunes of magazines,” according to the article. (read more…)

Just in Time for Black Friday, Lucky Magazine Gets More ‘Actionable’

Fashion magazine Lucky has rolled out a new site that lets readers locate, get specs, and/or buy the products featured within its pages. Partnering with loyalty shopping network Mall Networks, the site will include 100,000 fashion items from 450 brands. They’ll be featured in daily picks from editors as well as searchable by category, designer, price range or specific stores. (read more…)

Philly CBS Broadcasters Team to Power 120 ‘Digital Newsstands’

Seven Philadelphia CBS-TV and radio stations have combined their news resources to create a new Digital Out of Home (DOOH) News Network utilizing 39  CBS Always On “Digital Newsstands.” The Newsstands include HDTVs and a 24 hour news ticker. (read more…)

OpenTable Goes Mobile; 1 Million Served

Online restaurant booking success story OpenTable has started to make moves into mobile — both building apps and distributing its reservation system to other app partners. This is a logical move, given that arts and entertainment is a big category of mobile content consumption, according to our recently released Mobile Market View study. Already, the company has served 1 million diners through its mobile apps (mostly iPhone). (read more…)

Local.com Reorgs Into 3 Business Units

Local.com has reorganized around three business units: “Owned & Operated,” “Sales & Advertiser Services,” and “Network.” The latter unit will consist of more than 700 regional media sites, formerly associated with PremierGuide and its successor, and the new Local Distribution Network. (read more…)

Geolocation Chatter Continues

The discussion volume for geolocation continues to be turned up. The latest example is the geolocation panel that took place at TechCrunch’s Real Time Crunchup on Friday. If you missed it, you can see the entire session here. (read more…)

WebVisible: SMBs Spent Average of $1,658 on Search in Q3; Google’s Share Drops a Little

Small businesses that buy search spent $1,658 on average in Q3 2009, a figure that was up 91 percent from 3Q 2008, according to a new report issued by WebVisible, a company that manages online marketing campaigns for SMBs. (read more…)

The New York Times reported yesterday that four leading magazine publishers — Time, Conde Nast, Hearst and Meredith — are jointly developing an “online newsstand.” The initiative has ambitions of becoming the “iTunes of magazines,” according to the article. That bit of hyperbole aside, this initiative has a central idea that makes sense for traditional media players, including Yellow Pages publishers. Compete for customer spend, but collaborate on technology initiatives where it makes sense.

From the article:

“The new magazine company would, in theory, make it easy to buy print and electronic copies of publications like The New Yorker, Sports Illustrated, Esquire and Better Homes and Gardens from a single Web site. While mostly leaving the hardware to others, the alliance of competing publishers would develop software standards for magazine viewing on iPhones, BlackBerrys, e-book readers and other platforms, people with knowledge of the plans said.”

Fashion magazine Lucky has rolled out a new site that lets readers locate, get specs, and/or buy the products featured within its pages.

Partnering with loyalty shopping network Mall Networks, the site will include 100,000 fashion items from 450 brands. They’ll be featured in daily picks from editors as well as searchable by category, designer, price range or specific stores.

Lucky will include info on where to get these products online as well as nearby physical stores. The latter is fitting for the holiday shopping season and the immediacy sometimes involved. But the former has some appeal in avoiding crowds and seeking out online bargains. The site will draw affiliate revenues for purchases as well as ad revenues.

This follows Lucky’s “At Your Service” iPhone app rolled out earlier this year by NearbyNow. As we said at that time, this is a great way to add an actionable component to the magazine content. It’s a service to readers while having implications for advertisers. This is especially true with editorial content that orbits major retail categories, such as fashion and apparel.

The new retail Web site is created in the same vein, and we expect it will be a model for many struggling traditional media companies — starting with magazines but possibly moving into other areas. Mobile will be an important component.

Seven Philadelphia CBS-TV and radio stations have combined their news resources to create a new Digital Out of Home (DOOH) News Network utilizing 39  CBS Always On “Digital Newsstands.” The Newsstands include HDTVs and a 24 hour news ticker.

The Digital Newsstands have been created in partnership with Center City Direct, a local marketing and technology company. It is a division of Alternative Media Holdings, which also provides DOOH services to retailers, office buildings and other street-level installations.

Stations included in the partnership include KYW-TV (CBS), WPSG-TV (CW), KYW-AM, WOGL-FM, WYSP-FM, WIP-AM and WPHT-AM. In addition to local news and weather, the newsstands will also feature tourist information. Ultimately, more than 120 newsstands are envisioned.

Thanks to TV NewsCheck for the scoop

Online restaurant booking success story OpenTable has started to make moves into mobile — both building apps and distributing its reservation system to other app partners.

This is a logical move, given that arts and entertainment is a big category of mobile content consumption, according to our recently released Mobile Market View study. Already, the company has served 1 million diners through its mobile apps (mostly iPhone). It estimates this accounts for $50 million spent at local restaurants, applying a $50 per-check average.

For this reason and others, Scott Jampol, senior director of consumer marketing, characterizes mobile as a big area of innovation and resource allocation. This comes with an attitude that mobile is not only a logical extension, but also one that squeezes more value out of its trusted online brand. This is an edge that many start-ups entering the mobile space don’t enjoy.

Mobile also allows OpenTable to reach incremental users … or reach existing users at incremental times and places (i.e., nights and weekends). To that effect, the company is seeing different rates of conversion and post-click behavior on the mobile device. Time between searches and reservations are decidedly shorter than online, for example.

A different “form factor” for mobile also allows OpenTable to broaden the way the product is used, says Jampol. The mobile device’s portability opens up possibilities to use OpenTable as more of a discovery engine than the purely search utility that defines its online product. This is consistent with an overall trend we’re seeing in mobile local products.

“If I’m walking out of the San Francisco Modern Museum of Art and I decide that I’m hungry, being able to open my mobile app and see all the places to eat that are immediately around me is compelling,” says Jampol.

Long term, the company is thinking in terms of budding mobile local technologies such as augmented reality and voice search. But we’re not there yet as an industry, says Jampol. He’s focusing on shorter term products and features that pass the “grandmother test,” and on making sure mobile users can access OpenTable on all devices, platforms and local apps.

Local.com has reorganized around three business units: “Owned & Operated,” “Sales & Advertiser Services,” and “Network.” The latter unit will consist of more than 700 regional media sites, formerly associated with PremierGuide and its successor, and the new Local Distribution Network. Richard Szatkowski, former Autobytel senior vice president of advertising and business development, will be GM of both the Network and Sales & Advertiser Services units.

“Local.com has three distinct customer types, consisting of over 20 million monthly users, over 80 network partners, and more than 20,000 small business subscribers,” said Chairman and CEO Heath Clarke in a statement. “Under our new structure, each business unit will focus on serving its customers’ unique needs, while leveraging the assets of all our businesses in order to compete most effectively in the local search marketplace.”

Additionally, Local.com expects to augment these business units through the acquisition of complementary brands, content publishers, small business subscribers and technologies. Peter Hutto, senior vice president of business development and sales, will play a large role in that in a new role as senior vice president, corporate development.

Local.com’s Jeff Ferguson is a featured speaker at our Local Search Marketing preconference at ILM:09 Dec. 9-11 in L.A.

The discussion volume for geolocation continues to be turned up. The latest example is the geolocation panel that took place at TechCrunch’s Real Time Crunchup on Friday. If you missed it, you can see the entire session here.

If you don’t have time, start at minute 30 for some of the meaty discussion about adding geotargeted ads into social tools (mobile and desktop), such as Twitter and Google Latitude.

The gist of the discussion is how we’re in early days for the technology that enables location awareness in search products on the desktop and mobile device. Eventually, it will become a commodity for various apps and Twitter mashups.

This gets us past traditional online geotargeting that is based on IP address or geographic search queries. More automatic location tags that are appended to things like Twitter streams open up opportunities for users to search for nearby trending topics, and advertisers to target nearby customers.

I spent some time talking to Twitter Senior Product Manager Anamitra Banerji this morning. There are lots of things Twitter is beginning to develop that make it a more effective local discovery engine. The basic idea is that location is inherent in the question of “what’s happening?”

As such, it will provide an additional dimension of relevance to tweets. This isn’t anything new, as location information could previously be indexed in Twitter’s search results and trending topics. The difference is that it’s primarily been done by filtering geographic keywords within tweets — not automatically geotagging the origin of a tweet.

There are other possibilities we’ve explored in the past, and we’ll continue the discussion at the Interactive Local Media conference next month. Banerji will join us in a panel discussion on the colliding worlds of local and social. We’ll also have Facebook’s Tim Kendall, Citysearch’s Kara Nortman and AT&Ti’s Greg Isaacs. Hope to see you there.

Small businesses that buy search spent $1,658 on average in Q3 2009, a figure that was up 91 percent from 3Q 2008, according to a new report issued by WebVisible, a company that manages online marketing campaigns for SMBs.

Thirty-three percent of the SMB search market is made up of advertisers spending between $1,000 and $1,999. Fifteen percent is made up of advertising spending between $2,000 and $2,999. Twelve percent is made up of advertising spending above $3,000 on the high end, and 19 percent spend between $100 and $999 on the lower end.

The report, “State of Small Businesses Online Advertising, Search Edition, Q3,” noted that search spending is widely spread out among SMB categories, with the top 20 categories making up just 20 percent of total search spending. Leading spenders were Attorneys, Dentists, Air Conditioning Services, Physicians & Surgeons, Insurance, Roofing, and Plumbing Contractors. Of these only the top four categories had spending share over 2 percent.

While Google dominates spending with more than 60 percent of the market, that domination has lessened by five percentage points as lower priced competitors picked up the slack, according to the report. It also says that Google’s cost per click (CPC) jumped 14 percent from last year, and its CPC is now 30 percent above Yahoo and Microsoft’s Bing. The report notes that Yahoo has more than 26 percent share, and that Bing has 10.5 percent.