Despite some traction by sites like Yelp – ok, specifically Yelp — the hybrid IYP/ratings-and-review segment remain something of a question mark in the industry. It remains to be seen whether such sites can attract a large number of frequent reviewers and users – and not just recent college grads and/or mother-aged women. It also remains to be seen whether they can cross the chasm out of restaurants and bars into the gold mine of services traditionally mined by Yellow Pages.

Besides Yelp, other sites abound, including Cox’s Kudzu, Boorah, Loladex and Citysearch’s InsiderPages. But it is hard to get a handle on how well they are doing. MojoPages, a newer Yelp-like site, reports it has been making progress.

A year out of the gate, the San Diego-based site claims a solid base ofd 500,000 user reviews and 100,000 local advertisers across the U.S., mostly on the backs of partners including SuperPages.com, Marchex, ServiceMagic and ServiceMaster. It also has coupon distribution with ValPak.

President Jon Carder, a 29 year old vertical search pro who sold his first, baby-oriented venture to IdeaLabs, says the site has been seeing steady growth. He acknowledges the comparisons to Yelp and others, but says Mojo has been developing its own unique mix of features, including video reviews, email notification for reviewed businesses, and an “ask friends” feature. It also has set its algorithms to bring up more relevant results.

A search on MojoPages for Carpet Cleaners in Sen Diego will get you mostly relevant results, he says. If you do a search for carpet cleaners in San Diego on Yelp, he says, “six of the ten results aren’t even carpet cleaners.”

AOL may have trouble on several fronts, but it still gets millions of users and it intends to fully leverage them at the local level, per Chris Spanos, Director of Search Verticals, who was speaking at Kelsey Seattle. “Given its scale, local just hasn’t been getting fair share.”

Spanos says the local products will be receiving people, money and time. There will also be vertical investment in autos, travel and health. Previous regimes didn’t see rich opportunities in local and under-invested in the local products, he notes. They also didn’t leverage the relationship between the local sites and Mapquest, which remains the #1 mapping site. But that will change, especially as the city guides and Yellow Pages get relaunched.

AOL is also going to transform its sales effort. While dedicated local sales won’t be brought back, circa late 1990s, new self-serve and partnership efforts will be introduced.

In light of BostonNow’s closure this week (apparently for investment-related reasons), I’ve been mulling over the future of free metro papers in the U.S. The Chicago Tribune, The Washington Post and The San Diego Union-Tribune are among newspaper companies that have developed free (or discounted metros). Some have done so in response to a deep-pocketed effort by billionaire Philip Anschutz, and his Examiner papers, to storm their markets.

There are now Monday-Saturday print editions of Examiners in San Francisco, Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Seattle, Denver and other markets. They seem to be geared up to have regional offices. Its Internet editions are published in 57 markets, and now reach 2 million unique visitors, according to Examiner collateral.

When initially launched a few years ago, on the backbone of the dying San Francisco Examiner, the papers did not have an Internet strategy, according to company insiders. But now, synergies with a snappy Internet edition are clearly are main part of the strategy. This is combined with a red-line philosophy that focuses its print distribution on upper demographic households. Seventy percent of its readership is college educated; 85 percent have a household income over $75k.

Content-wise, the newspapers largely make do with wire copy for news, sorted under various “examiner” themed sections (i.e., “Automotive Examiner,” “Right Side Political Examiner,” “Go To Education Examiner,” “Celebrity Examiner”). For local flavor, they are building a strong base of columnists/bloggers in several markets. Baltimore, for instance, appears to be among the most developed.

On the Web sites, the local information is filled in with syndicated content. Traffic information, for instance, comes from Traffic.com and Outside.in (providing conversations about traffic — nice). Events come from Zvents. Yellow Pages are provided by Yellowpages.com. Movies are provided by Fandango. Shopping is from ShopLocal.com. And weather comes from Weatherbonk.com.

There are also links with other Anschutz projects, such as Christian-themed Walden Media (“Adventures of Narnia” movie) and The Foundation for a Better Life, as well as his AEG Worldwide entertainment conglomerate. The links alone would never pass the objectivity tests of most newspapers.

But most of the package is fairly attractive and compelling — especially for a generation getting their headlines on Yahoo! Mobile. It is a nice 1-2 print/online punch with a breaking news factor that isn’t always emphasized enough in local news/blogger aggregator sites (Topix, Outside.in, OurTown, AmericanTowns).

Examiner is currently advertising for account executives for auto, real estate and recruitment. Auto dealers are getting the biggest push and are provided with significant discounts over local dailies. That’s not hard to do. But are the dealers dying to support another newspaper effort? It is still hard to establish the readership value of these metros.

My own free metro in San Diego, Today’s Local News, comes from The San Diego Union- Tribune. It is delivered to every household that does not subscribe to the flagship paper from Wednesday to Sunday — whether they like or not. My neighbors usually have several copies littering their driveway by the end of the week. But I like it. The problem is I only spend about 45 seconds on it. Is that a good place for Hoehn’s Honda to advertise? I read The LA Times for over 25 minutes.

There are a number of new or re-energized hyperlocal efforts out there, trying to crack the code. New efforts are expected shortly from Outside.in and SmallTown. Ongoing efforts are being made with AmericanTowns, which counts Idearc as a lead investor, and Dallas’ Pegasus News, which is owned by Fisher Communications. CitySquares in Boston continues to build its model. Topix has also remade itself into an aggregation of local news and hyperlocal commenting.

And that’s just a rundown of the hyperlocal efforts that have regional and national aspirations. Some of the best hyperlocal efforts, of course (BaristaNet, WestportNow) are actually tied to specific communities. We also count some well-funded newspaper efforts in that category (LA Times, Boston.com, Washington Post, et al).

This week, The Online Journalism Review covers OurTown, a new hyperlocal chain based in Cincinnati. The site proclaims that it represents “America’s Local Websites. Neighborhood by Neighborhood. Local and Regional Content, Chat, Weather, Maps, Personal & Family Calendar and Community.”

OurTown’s primary business concept is that local editors will sell the local advertising, keeping most of the revenue; $100 monthly contracts for advertising are envisioned. The site will also have paid classifieds (but free classifieds for individuals).

In addition to local ad dollars, the editors will also get 40 percent of national ad dollars. It is suggested that local editors covering two ZIP codes can make between $45,000 and $60,000 per year.

Eventually, OurTown expects to charge a license fee to the local editors, but as a come-on, it is offering a one-year license for free to the first 1,000 takers. Seventy thousand sites are expected in Year One. The site is being advertised on Google, Yahoo!, Craigslist and other Web sites. While an illustrious advisory board of “top journalists” is claimed, there is no link to such a board on the site, or names of management, for that matter.

Last week, we wrote about The Seattle Times Co. and its new “Network search,” which is powered with FAST. This week, we are covering The Boston Globe’s Boston.com and its new “Federated” search solution, powered by Google.

Federated and Network search are different names for pretty much the same thing. But even as the respective newspapers try to tackle the issues of incorporating small-business advertisers and the elements of local search, they are taking somewhat different approaches.

Boston.com’s mission is to move away from “newspaper.com” toward becoming the aggregator of local community content, notes VP of Product Bob Kempf. The site has taken several concrete steps to get there, including local news outreach, crawls for local events, multimedia search, and perhaps most importantly, business listing search (i.e., Yellow Pages).

The initial step was making the news from The Boston Globe and content from Boston.com searchable. But since then, it has also reached out to 4,500 local Boston-area sites to supplement the content.

The event listings, using ZVents, was something that added a unique element to the site and “quadrupled the amount of listings,” says Kempf. It is more than just effective crawling. Users are seeing that the site has a really good event guide and submitting listings of their own.

Multimedia is another key ingredient for the site and its 360-degree, federated search strategy. As the site has added more and more audio and video, its content has become less findable. But that has been helped by adding search, via Everyzing, a vendor that transcribes audio content to track the content.

The multimedia application “doesn’t bring in huge traffic,” but it is very relevant for a news site, says Kempf. And it goes way beyond the search box. “What we’re doing is adding little ‘searchlets’ into the site, he notes. “We drop [clips of] Manny Ramirez right into articles.”

The business listing effort, on the other hand, suggests the strongest revenue opportunities. Many newspapers are relying on local search vendors such as Planet Discover, Local.com and Harvest Info.

But Kempf’s team reached a conclusion that those solutions would probably always be “second rate” compared with one provided by a major search engine (i.e., Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft). He notes the search engines are pumping hundreds of millions of dollars into search algorithms, making relevant matches to queries, ratings and reviews.

Ultimately, Boston.com chose to partner with Google for a variety of considerations, including the power of the Google Maps brand, which appears alongside Boston.com when you go into Business Listings; its relatively low upfront cost (it pays Google just a small amount for the searches that are actually made); access to its extensive tool set; its high level of maintenance; and the ease of using Google’s licensed listings instead of having to make its own deals with a listing company. Google’s broader deal with The New York Times Co. might have had some influence as well.

Boston.com also appreciated the ability to use Google to build out a tiered list of searches that any newspaper would want to have; a “white list” for pure listing lookups; a “gray list” for in between searches, such as place names; and a “black list” for inappropriate searches, such as tying merchandise ads to a news story on a murder in Worchester.

On a business basis, the deal with Google gives Boston.com a chance to make money on reselling the CPM at higher rates and also from local AdSense ads that appear alongside the searches, says Kempf. It also provides new inventory to sell around the search box — not dissimilar to what newspapers have always done, selling mortgage ads around real estate listings and other content.

What Kempf and his team haven’t begun to work on is any search integration with classifieds, an area he admits is the “least sexy.” It also hasn’t begun to aggressively sell to smaller local advertisers — something The Seattle Times appears to be far in front of. “It was very core for GateHouse,” where Kempf worked on Wicked Local in the suburbs that surround Boston, one of the first federated search projects. “But it isn’t core for us.”

In a followup email to me after this post was written, Kempf clarifies:”Classifieds are on the roadmap but not on the immediate roadmap; small business listings very much are core and are on the immediate roadmap.”

Next steps that Kempf envisions include using the search technology to help develop more vertical directories, such has health and business. The site is also getting a massive dose of TV and radio promotion, where Boston.com is not treated as a newspaper, but as an information source.

“The trick is to untrain users for news,” he says. In a followup email to me, also cited above, Kempf adds:  “The news use case remains core and very important to us.  Expanding beyond that use is the challenge.  I wouldn’t want your readers to think that we’ve abandoned news or its importance to us.”

Yelp! has announced that it got $15 million in a fourth round of funding led by DAG and existing investors.

The company also sent some growth metrics:

October ‘07 — 5M Unique Visitors
December ‘07 — 6M UVs
January ‘08 — 7M UVs
February ‘08 — Numbers aren’t in yet but there were 8.3M UVs in the past 30 days.

Total number of reviews posted to the site = 2.3M.
It took 2 years and 3 months to reach 1M reviews (May 2007).
In the past 8 months an additional 1.3 million reviews were posted.

In its short history, Yelp has become something of a model for how to build a local review site and has become a clear favorite of the twenty- and thirty-something urban “foodie.” Its success has also spawned a number of similar models in Europe, such as Qype, Welovelocal and TouchLocal.

The challenge for Yelp will be to replicate itself in new cities, broaden (and deepen) its base of users, and spread its ad support beyond restaurants and bars into the services arena — something it says it has been having success with.

It’s clearly strongest in hometown San Francisco, and it has good traction in New York. It also sells ads in Los Angeles, Chicago, Seattle and San Diego.

So –what will it do with its new money? We’d guess it is likely to be used to expand to new markets, add new verticals, make minor acquisitions and do more marketing. The company has certianly used some interesting marketing tactics to seed reviews in San Francisco such as providing “People on Yelp Love Us” stickers for businesses to put in their windows, or lobbying the SF City Hall to establish a “Yelp Day” in the city (there has also been a small but interesting Yelp backlash as there is with any social phenomenon). Expect more of this kind of marketing in new markets.

To help this growth in New York, the company is also in the process of opening an office there. I plan to talk to Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppleman later this week to dig deeper.

When a local team headed by ad agency and PR veteran Brian Tierney bought The Philadelphia Inquirer and related holdings 18 months ago, it was seen as a possible model for how “new thinking” could transform the newspaper industry.

Since then, Tierney and his team have had a tumultuous time, with major union problems, declining circulation and advertising shortfalls. But appearing at the Newspaper Association of America’s Marketing Conference in Orlando this week, Tierney laid out how he is righting the ship, bolstered in part by solid results from Philly.com, the online site headed by MediaNews Group veteran Eric Grilly.

Freed from corporate-wide deals made by Knight Ridder, Philly.com, which is “anything and everything Philly,” has been able to go its own way, signing with Monster.com for recruitment and building out community services. The site has doubled its page views and boosted unique visitors by 7 percent, says Tierney.

The goal is to attract new audiences online, and be realistic about print readership, which isn’t about young people. “We’re targeting women 35+,” says Tierney. “We’re being very, very tactical” with beach promotions, etc.

One of the biggest challenges faced by the company is that ads are bought by “32-year-old” account reps. “We know we’re a little bit uncool,” says Tierney. To counter such perceptions, Tierney is investing heavily in a media lab concept. “Agencies want to do TV,” he says. With broadband, Philly.com will counter that by creating TV shows, along with magazine-style stories and radio content.

For instance, the site has Philly Uncorked, a “wacky wine show” produced by the Philadelphia Wine School and sponsored by The Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board. Looking forward, Tierney sees real opportunities in e-commerce via Zeppy, an Amazon-like site that hopes to provide more of a local look and feel.

But first he needs his team to appreciate the economic challenges that lie ahead. “There will be economic literacy courses for everyone,” he says.

A couple of weeks ago, Citysearch formed a distribution deal with AOL that pushed its content and ads throughout the AOL Local Network. As we wrote here, this had a close resemblance to the December deal the company formed with Local.com.

The formula is: Citysearch gets extra distribution for its content and ads (a better value proposition for its advertisers), while the distribution partner gets extra content to boost its user experience (and a rev share). Because of Citysearch’s related efforts over the past year, this content includes video and reviews — both rapidly increasing in value in the local space.

So it comes as no surprise when the company announced a similar deal today with Marchex to distribute its content throughout Marchex’s network of 150,000 local sites. This isn’t to say Citysearch is exercising tired business deals; these are rather beneficial arrangements for the city guide and its advertisers.

And speaking of recent parallels, this also resembles the deal Marchex formed with Idearc Media last month to plug Idearc’s ads into Marchex’s network. Both will work toward beefing up the huge network of local search sites and geodomains the company launched last June.

Of course each distribution deal isn’t a carbon copy of the next, but they have similar formulas. In today’s deal, for example, it will be interesting to see how Citysearch’s content integrates with Marchex’s OpenList — a powerful review and content aggregator in its own right. We shall see.

Local.com, which has previously relied on third-party sales, is going direct in a big way. The company has outsourced contracts for 50 salespeople, up from 10. “We plan to ramp sales staff to several hundred this year,” says CEO Heath Clarke in an earnings-related announcement, which noted the sales effort is the company’s “most important project.”

Clarke said the sales effort, along with other initiatives, should move the company into the black “no later than 4Q 2008.” Revenues for the fourth quarter were $5.9 million, and $21.5 million for the year — a 51 percent increase over $14.2 million for 2006. But the company suffered a net loss of $18.2 million.

Among the company’s major initiatives is a strategic partnership with IAC’s Citysearch, which calls for it to display Citysearch business profile data, including its reviews, ratings, business coupons and photos.

I liked the 2003-2007 concept of a “local info hub.” The idea was to think beyond the original business boundaries of newspapers (and Yellow Pages). Now that concept has been fancifully enlarged to a “local info and connection utility.”

The redefinition is included in Newspaper Next 2.0, a “progress report” by the American Press Institute on the evolution of newspaper companies beyond the print edition. The report, which is free, comes out just as it has been reported that the Los Angeles Times has seen its revenues drop from $240 million to $150 million in the past two years.

The report’s general theme is that communities in the digital era have complex needs and have outgrown the simple news mission of their local newspapers. It is a 110-page sequel to a September 2005 report (which was in itself a generalized extension of newspaper “disruptive technology” research that I had a hand in, along with Harvard Business School’s Clark Gilbert and Borrell Associates).

The new report, which includes a lot of Borrell data, may not be especially fresh or insightful to our readers, but it is a helpful guide to new models for newspapers to follow, such as Angie’s List, Kudzu.com and Wikipedia. It includes 24 interesting case studies, which make it worth downloading all by themselves. A lot of it is about doing a better job connecting with local businesses; kind of a “how to” guide to becoming better Internet Yellow Pages.

I think that’s right on. That is the most obvious direction for newspapers to grow in. The metro-wide model that developed to serve the retail industry, in competition with television, isn’t cutting it anymore.

The big takeaway of the report is to move away from the newspaper industry’s current focus on “niche sites” (which I don’t quite get) and focus instead on “mega jobs” that incorporate many local media models (newspaper, Yellow Pages, SEO and coupons, etc.) Examples include mom sites, young adult sites, B2B sites and pet sites (hey, aren’t these niche sites?)

It is a “whole market” concept. The idea, in an era when newspapers are typically seeing circulation levels of between 20 percent and 40 percent, is to relentlessly pursue non-customers.

“These are jobs that virtually every consumer, regardless of demographic, wants to get done, and jobs that virtually every business, regardless of size, sector or customer group, struggles to accomplish … [The new newspaper company] sets out to learn what jobs are most frequent and frustrating among consumers, and it gradually builds a suite of products and services to fulfill those many jobs, using such elements as databases, social networking and discussion software, user content-sharing tools, calendars, shopping support functions, knowledge repositories and more. Step by step, the company moves toward its goal of helping consumers with whatever they need to live in their community, becoming their local information and connection utility.”

The report has a better fix on consumer-oriented solutions than business solutions. But that’s not surprising for a newspaper industry (i.e., editorial-driven) product. If the Yellow Pages Association commissioned similar research, it would probably be the other way around.

API says 6,000 newspaper managers have been exposed to the original Newspaper Next findings. That’s progress, isn’t it? Maybe some people will be talking about it next week at the Newspaper Association of America Marketing conference in Orlando.