The New York Times is set to recruit small-business advertisers via a deal with AdReady, the Seattle-based ad agency that provides a choice of 600 free templates for banners, customization tools and usage reports.
The Times will recruit its own advertisers via in-house promotions. Advertisers will have a choice of 14 sections of the site that …

Zillow continues its march up the real estate value chain with a new feature that allows house buyers to apply for mortgages. The mortgage service, like everything else on Zillow, is ad-supported and free to both buyers and lenders. It is a direct strike against companies like IAC’s LendingTree.com that sell leads.
The company’s goal is …

YouTube launched a series of new analytics features today, known as Insight. The product gives video producers more detailed information about where and when their videos were viewed. For now this drills down as far as state and country (using IP address) and day of the week. Future versions could get more granular with ZIP code …

More and more, people are looking at what Google can’t (or won’t) do. One thing Google isn’t doing is selling a lot of ads on a hyperlocal basis. If you look for a plumber in Tribeca, you are likely to get ads for all of Manhattan. That might simply be an issue of making …

Neal Polachek and I had the opportunity this morning to sit down with Mike Galgon, cheif advertising strategist for Microsoft. Galgon was brought on board as part of Microsoft’s $6 billion acquisition of aQuantive, which he cofounded in 1997.
The $6 billion price tag was was roughly 2x premium at the time of purchase, 10X revenue, …

One big takeaway from the NAA Marketing show last week in Orlando was that newspapers are ready to build up a zillion niche products that allow them to leverage their editorial talents. But not much progress, or even attention, is being paid to local search. It makes you wonder if newspapers are really serious …

Quick, what industry gets the highest customer service quality ratings from U.S. adult consumers, according to an August 2007 Harris Interactive poll? No. 1 is supermarkets with 92 percent giving them a good rating, No. 2 is online search engines (84 percent), and tied for No. 3 (78 percent) are computer hardware companies, hospitals and banks. My …

In a significant development, AT&T’s Yellowpages.com is replacing Yahoo! Local Search for AT&T’s broadband and Internet customers. It is a move that will greatly enhance Yellowpages.com’s position in the space. The company recently told analysts it expects to attract 2 billion searches in 2008 and 3 billion by 2010.
The move is part of a broad …

FAST Search and Transfer, whose “enterprise search” makes every element of an organization searchable, is being sold to Microsoft for $1.2 billion after the Oslo-based company severely missed sales goals and was forced last year to lay off a large number of employees. The company has recently sought to extend its role beyond enterprise …

One of the quietest but apparently most successful producers in the local search space has been GeoSign, owned by webpreneur Tim Nye. The Canadian company has incubated TrueLocal, which aggregates local online databases, and is also invested in mobile directory player Go2, among other geospatially savvy companies.
But most of its fortune, apparently, has been …

  BooRah, the Bay Area restaurant review site, has raised some seed funding from Storm Ventures and other investors (amount undisclosed) and plans to use the money to grow beyond its roots as a tech vendor for alternative newsweeklies. The “new” BooRah will continue to work with alternative newsweeklies, but it intends to create a …

Back in April we wrote about BuzzLogic, a San Francisco-based company whose web based app finds out where particular topics are being discussed throughout the blogosphere and online news media.
This takes form in a dashboard that includes an overhead-map-like interface, showing all the inbound and outbound links to various sources of authority on a given …

It is hard for me to comprehend, but we are finally finished with ILM:07. We were grateful to have had 650 interesting and enthusiastic attendees from all over the world, 72 stimulating speakers, a full load of sponsors and an excellent partnership with SES.
Our next conference, April 30-May 2 at the Westin in Seattle, will …

During a keynote at our ILM:07 conference in L.A., Chamath Palihapitiya, Facebook’s VP of product marketing and operations, said the company is keenly interested in driving local advertising via local media partners, its own outreach efforts and other means.
Just six months after opening up beyond the college and high school student market, Facebook now has …

Interactive Local Media: 07 is ready to roll Nov. 28-30 in L.A. That’s next Wednesday through Friday!
The show, which is being produced in partnership with SES Local, has attendees from all over the world. One exec told me he is coming on Wednesday, taking the red eye to New York that night due to …

AT&T has bought Ingenio and will use its call tracking platform across Yellowpages.com, 800-YellowPages, Mobile and Print Yellow Pages. We think the deal is quite important. This is a story that will unfold in the months ahead as more information about integration becomes public.
For a while now, we have been saying that the inclusion of …

The numbers are looking very, very good for the Interactive Local Media:07 conference in L.A. Nov. 28-30. Internally, we think this one is a record breaker. Register and book the hotel while you can. The latter tends to sell out.
In recent weeks, we’ve been putting the final touches on the program. For instance, we’ve added …

Curbed.com, the fun, well-written and insightful Web site about local real estate culture and deals, has gotten $1.5 million in new financing from Gawker Media, individuals associated with Gawker and others, such as Brad Inman. The site is the brainchild of publisher Lockhart Steele, who used to run editorial for Gawker, a blogger network.
According to …

Under-served small communities are getting more attention. Companies like TownNews, Grayboxx and Topix have set out to focus on small town and exurban residents, and aggregating those local users for advertisers.
As we wrote in April, Topix – a 25-person company that is 80 percent owned by Gannett, Tribune and McClatchy – has been aggregating local news from …

Big names, interesting people, compelling research. Forgive the commercial message here, but we’re set to deliver the goods at The Kelsey Group’s Interactive Local Media 2007 (ILM:07), Nov. 28-30 in L.A.
I think there’s something for everyone. And this year, as most of you know, we’ve partnered with Search Engine Strategies for a series of practical …