Telstra, the parent company of Sensis, the Australian-based YP company, has acquired 55 per cent of Autohome/PCPop, which runs Autohome.com.cn, a Chinese auto portal, and Norstar Mediatwo, a Chinese CNET- like tech site.

The two properties complement Telstra’s 51 percent share in SouFun, China’s top real estate site. “Telstra now owns majority interests in three of the leading Chinese companies operating in the three key online advertising industry segments: real estate, auto and digital devices,” said CEO Sol Trujillo, in the announcement. “These acquisitions provide further high-growth opportunities for Sensis,” which is described as “our buy, find and sell business.”

Telstra, in its announcement, notes that online advertising revenues in the Chinese auto segment are predicted to almost triple by 2012, rising from US$230 million this year to more than US$690 million in 2012. New car sales in China are already almost half that of the United States, with 7.2 million cars sold this year. China is expected to overtake the United States as the world’s largest auto market in the next decade.

It also notes that the online “digital device” advertising market is expected to triple by 2012 – up from about US$235 million this year to US$700 million. Last year, 48 per cent of the Chinese population had access to a digital device. By 2015, that percentage is predicted to increase to 84.5 per cent, or 1.18 billion people.

Over the past several months, The Kelsey Group has been talking with a number of sales managers and directors of companies in the directory, newspaper and online space to understand the challenges of recruiting, hiring and training online reps. The sense from our interviews is that the market for skilled reps who understand and have sold online products with success is extremely competitive. We have heard stories of companies paying “signing bonuses” as well as increasing base salaries with attractive commission structures to attract skilled reps away from their current employers. 

Many local media companies have resigned themselves to finding sales reps who understand and appreciate the value of online products and services and training them to become skilled online reps. Many sales reps see the value of acquiring online sales experience as a means of building a sales career in the hottest new media category that they could eventually leverage into higher paying positions. 

A recent New Zealand Herald interview with Greg Murphy of Yellow Pages Group New Zealand demonstrates this challenge and reflects many of the same issues we have heard from other publishers and local media companies.

According to Murphy:

“The goal when recruiting reps is not to rely on their understanding of the online world, but to balance that with professional selling skills and a clear understanding of the challenges a small business faces. A large proportion of New Zealand businesses are small, and often the owner is also the person who markets the business. The owner won’t want to deal with a whizzed-up propeller head – that person needs to be given explanations in how online fits into his or her business. So, in short [we need] good technical skills and the ability to communicate in a business-like way.” 

One of the critical skills identified by all the local media companies we talked with was the ability to be consultative about how online works with other media and to be able to clearly and simply educate small business on how online marketing works and what value it delivers for their particular business. Murphy’s comments echoed this: “The person selling the advertising needs to explain to a businessperson how online advertising will work for his/her business. Business acumen is the key. There are agency customers to communicate with too — these people expect salespeople to be professional.” 

The challenge with most local media companies is finding that group of sales candidates who show potential by exhibiting a comfortable knowledge of online products and have some demonstrated sales skill. The goal then is to train these candidates to consultatively sell online solutions either as a stand-alone product or in conjunction with their traditional media product as a bundled solution. The challenge of finding and developing reps skilled in selling online and multi-product solutions will continue to shape local media as they transform themselves from single product entities to multichannel local media companies.   

Here are this week’s highlights from the TKG blog, in case you missed any posts. Click below to read each post in full.

Stepup Alum Launches DriverSide, a Car Maintenance Site
There is a sudden glut of sites that allow people to register their cars and get specific service information and recommendations about them. First, there was Autobytel’s MyRide. RepairPal launched last week. This week, it is DriverSide, which is being developed by Jad Dunning, an executive with StepUp through its acquisition by Intuit, and Trevor Traina. The site, which has 20 staffers and is funded by Catamount Ventures, is designed to meet consumer needs between purchases and simplify automotive ownership. (read more…)

Idearc Discontinues 28 Independent Titles
Idearc Media has made the decision to discontinue 28 competitive directory titles in Florida, Tennessee and Texas, and has eliminated 200 positions as a result. The company will also close nine sales offices, each associated with the independent directory titles being discontinued. The company remains in the business of publishing independent directory titles and continues to publish them in 34 markets around the country. (read more…)

New Palore Data: Top States for Local Reviews
The latest nugget of data from Palore examines the average number of restaurants by state that have reviews written about them. Looks like Massachusetts takes the cake (sorry, bad pun). This is somewhat binary as it looks at restaurants that have at least one review. If a restaurant has one review or 100, it is counted as having reviews (the only alternative being no reviews). So there are lots of possible drill downs such as what states or sites lead in average volume of reviews per restaurant. (read more…)

Local Online Video Market to Reach $1.5B by 2012
Many market forecasts have attempted to size the U.S. online video market, which consists of ads that are tied to a growing subset of online music, sports and entertainment clips. These forecasts project the market will grow to between US$4 billion and US$7 billion by 2012. A TKG forecast released yesterday specifically breaks out the local portion of this. (read more…)

What Is the Opportunity With Geodomains?
In two weeks, Associated Cities will host its annual GeoDomain Expo at the W Hotel in Chicago. It will be produced by The Kelsey Group, and we hope to have a good presence at the show and learn more about the geodomain opportunity and the growth potential still to come in the space. (read more…)

The Huffington Post Goes Local
The Huffington Post has a certain glamour about it and is able to attract an “A” list of contributors. There is always something interesting on it, and its readership is apparently between 3 million and 8 million unique. Now it is going to go local, with a launch in Chicago this summer, and at least a dozen local sites in all, per founder Arianna Huffington in an audio interview by The Guardian. (read more…)

Canon Crosses the Pond, Joins Yell Group
TKG has learned that local online industry veteran Mark Canon has accepted the position of president-new media at Yell, the U.K.’s leading directory publisher. He will start in July and take over for the retiring Eddie Cheng. Canon brings a varied background to Yell, having been an Internet Yellow Pages pioneer at Switchboard, with subsequent stints at AOL and Autobytel. (read more…)

Yahoo!’s AMP Network Set to Launch for Newspapers
Yahoo! is set to place contextually relevant display ads with its newspaper consortium, which now represents 40 percent of all newspaper circulation. The new AMP program for newspapers begins by the end of 3Q at the San Jose Mercury News and SFGate. (read more…)

Location Awareness: It’s Not Just for Mobile
There is lots of talk this week about the next generation browser, now that Firefox 3 has launched. On Friday I got the chance to meet with Ryan Sarver, Skyhook Wireless director of consumer products, who has some notable efforts in progress to bring the company’s Wi-Fi positioning technology to the browser. (read more…)

Here are this week’s highlights from the TKG blog, in case you missed any posts. Click below to read each post in full.

MerchantCircle: 5,000 Paying Customers
MerchantCircle, which is partially owned by IAC, is apparently beginning to make some headway in selling search oriented services to small businesses. It reports that it has achieved a base of 5,000 paying customers, who buy services costing $30, $60, $100 and $250 a month. “Most of them are coming in at the lower end” – the “starter circle” package — “ but we do have customers at all price points,” said a spokesman. (read more…)

Urbanspoon Creates Local Discovery Engine for the iPhone
Urbanspoon is one of the first companies to announce a local search iPhone app (others are here). The application acts almost like a local restaurant eight-ball that lets users define cuisine price or other factors, before shaking the device to see what nearby eatery pops up. (read more…)

Trulia Selling Realtors Unlimited Self-Serve Ads
The frontiers of Web-based, self-serve advertising moved (a little) today, as Trulia introduced Trulia Pro, a new “starter” package for Realtors that provides unlimited “featured listings” and “Spotlight Ads” that Realtors use for branding. Trulia claims its featured listings capability boosts views by four to seven times. (read more…)

The SMB Video Opportunity: A Conversation With Adfare
Adfare has joined the growing list of companies looking to work with Internet Yellow Pages in order to tap the sizable opportunity of video-enabling their advertisers (3.2 million small and medium-sized businesses). But as Director of Business Development Frank Rocco reminded me this morning, the company isn’t new to SMB advertising. It primarily works with newspapers and is seeing good reception among auto dealers and classified advertisers that want to take advantage of the falling barriers to online video. (read more…)

Dulski’s New Thing: Events and Plans Front and Center’d
Is there room for a new, locally oriented social network if it is more practical than Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, LinkedIn, et al? That’s what Norwest Partners and Keynote Ventures are betting $6.5 million on with the launch this week of Center’d, formerly known as FatDoor. Currently in soft launch, or “first draft,” the service is sort of women focused and bent on helping friends get together locally. “People, Places and Plans” is the tag. Historically speaking, its first iteration, FatDoor, is now considered a false start. It had most of the money, and some hot tech, but no plan. (read more…)

Local.com Adds Reviews
Local.com today announced it has added the ability for users to write reviews directly on the site. This will include ratings (five-star system) and reviews that registered users can submit and track over time. The question of reviews in the local space has evolved from “should?” to “how?” Ratings and reviews are table stakes and an expectation for users. Many of the concerns about advertiser appeasement and spotty reviews volume have mostly quieted. The question is mostly how you get the reviews. (read more…)

AgendiZe Releases Video API
AgendiZe today announced it will launch an API for Yellow Pages publishers to enhance the videos they are shooting for small businesses, and hosting on their sites. The “video to action” API lets publishers create overlays for videos that bring up interactive calls to action when moused over. This is similar to functionality provided by Mixpo, and also comes weeks after AgendiZe did something similar for the video assets of VideoAgency. That was more of a custom job, whereas this extends the capability (via API) to Yellow Pages publishers to apply to their growing volumes of video clips. (read more…)

Now Playing on Your Phone: Video on Demand Classifieds
Classifieds have made their way to video (See RealPeopleRealStuff). But how about video on mobile phones? That’s a new effort being tried out in Portugal, where high-speed 3G phones are prevalent, but less than 40 percent of the population has Internet access. The video ads are being provided by Ocasio, a shopper publication with a print circulation of 25,000. (read more…)

Jivox Raises $10 Million
Self-serve video ad provider Jivox announced a $10 million round today. We wrote about the company, which lets advertisers create short ads using stock video, a few months ago. It also distributes these ads through a publisher network, which has grown with today’s addition of WorldNow ExpoTV and AOL India. It claims $40 million viewers in this network. (read more…)

Here are last week’s highlights from the TKG blog, in case you missed any posts. Click below to read each post in full.

On How Many Sites Do SMBs Advertise?
The folks at Palore sent me a new data set they’re releasing tomorrow. You might remember, the company recently changed its business model to focus on all the granular data it was scraping from local search sites. Since then it’s been on a steady pace of releasing various data mashups to whet the market’s appetite. The goal from there is to attract custom data jobs, where it applies its proprietary technology to scrape sites for any number of attributes for various market research purposes. (read more…)

Auto Repair Site RepairPal Launches
New auto repair information resource RepairPal went live today. The site steps into an undeserved market segment by providing information about the user’s specific car and its maintenance needs. One central use case, for example, is to check what a particular repair should cost to ensure that an estimate you received is fair. The site does this with predictive modeling, using literally tens of billions of data points it has assembled about nearly every conceivable repair on 94 percent of passenger vehicles. (read more…)

The 3G iPhone and Local
Lots of talk about the 3G iPhone this week. We’ll see lots of local applications developed that make use of faster speeds and GPS capability, as speculated. The $199 price tag will also make it more mainstream friendly than before. One example of a local application we’re hearing about is the Yellowpages.com local search app. This will be the second iPhone app from the IYP, and will add local social networking features. (read more…)

Main Street Under Attack … Again
Ran across this interesting piece via Topix that was produced by the local ABC7 affiliate here in the Bay Area. The story uncovers a nervousness among local SMBs that the Internet is increasingly having an impact on their business outlook.I have watched this firsthand since I live in San Anselmo, and it is clear that business owners are skittish. One of the SMBs profiled in the piece offers high-end flowers and would seem to be more insulated from being disintermediated by Internet models — but its owners too are nervous. (read more…)

Barton’s Newest Vertical: Recruitment Site Glassdoor.com
Rich Barton — Mr. Vertical — has added a new recruitment-oriented vertical to a lineup that now includes Expedia (sold), Zillow and Avvo. The new effort is Glassdoor.com, which provides recruitment-related information. It solicits and publishes detailed salary and bonus information by position and company, as well as in-depth reviews about company culture and views of top executives. (read more…)

NY Times Goes After SMB Market via AdReady
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 are self-selected by advertisers (i.e., sports, international news, etc.). (read more…)

IPhone 2.0 Video and Photo Apps From AP and TypePad
Among the developers of iPhone applications is The Associated Press. Featured during the relaunch of iPhone 2.0 today, AP’s Benjamin Moss, director of mobile products, said AP developed an iPhone app for its Mobile News Network in “just a few weeks.” Consumers can use the iPhone to send in news and photos. (read more…)

YPG-NZ Says Yellow to Mobile
Yellow Pages Group New Zealand has announced the debut of “Yellow mobile” on the Telecom and Vodafone Live! networks. While YPG-NZ could have gone with a more sophisticated approach, it has opted for a simple application that provides users with flexibility in how they want to interact with Yellow mobile. (read more…)

Marchex Unifies Local, National Ad Networks
Marchex has launched a new ad platform called Adhere. Essentially this brings together the company’s OpenList local content network with the premium publishers in its IndustryBrains network under one PPC platform. The biggest driver for the new platform was to simplify Marchex’s ad buys under one roof. This basically means that advertisers can buy both local and national advertising in the same place. (read more…)

Yellow Pages Group New Zealand has announced the debut of “Yellow mobile” on the Telecom and Vodafone Live! networks. 

According to New Zealand’s Business to Business magazine:

“Yellow Pages Group Digital Media Director Blair Glubb said Yellow mobile will complement the company’s existing range of advertising solutions which already cover the print, online and voice (via the 018 and 0172 directory assistance services) channels. ‘Yellow mobile will help businesses connect with the huge numbers of New Zealanders who want to find businesses and their products and services while they’re on the go. This is a big step towards our vision of reaching every New Zealander every day.’ ” 

While YPG-NZ could have gone with a more sophisticated approach, it has opted for a simple application that provides users with flexibility in how they want to interact with Yellow mobile.

“By texting a keyword, category or business name and a location to 018, subscribers will automatically receive a text message with contact details of the business most relevant to their search criteria. For example ‘Café Valentino. Christchurch’ or ‘Plumbers, Ellerslie.’

“As well as containing contact details for the business, the return text message will also include a link to a full set of search results on the Yellow mobile WAP portal (a WAP capable handset is required to use the link).” 

With a high penetration of mobile users, New Zealand is an ideal location for mobile local services. Mobile was an area lacking in YPG-NZ’s portfolio and was a stumbling block to its goal of reaching “every New Zealander every day.” The key to the success of this venture will certainly be in selling existing advertisers onto the mobile platform with incremental investment.  

Scott Wambolt has left his job as Yellow Pages Group’s senior vice president of sales, citing a desire to “pursue other career opportunities.” According to the press release announcing Wambolt’s departure, YPG will move to a flatter sales organization with the three current regional sales vice presidents — Paul Batchelor, David Toms and Paul Lalonde — reporting directly to Marc Tellier, president and chief executive officer.

Wambolt joined YPG in 2003. Unlike many sales leaders in the industry, he did not come up through the ranks carrying a bag. Before joining YPG, Wambolt spent eight years at Dell Computer Corp., including a position as general manager of the Home and Small Business division.

Here are last week’s highlights from the TKG blog, in case you missed any posts. Click below to read each post in full.

Curley on HyperLocal, The Washington Post and the New Vegas Venture
Some industry bloggers like to throw “Google” in the title to get some attention. For me, it is “Hyperlocal.” And somewhere in the middle of any discussion of hyperlocal is Rob Curley. The hyperlocal maestro has taken his Web 2.0 experimentations (videos, maps, databases, photo galleries, blogs, citizen journalism, pictures of local girls) in rapid fire succession from Augusta, Georgia, to Lawrence, Kansas, to Naples, Florida, before finally hitting the “big time” 20 months ago, with The Washington Post. (read more…)

More Musings on Microsoft and Yell
There has not been all that much fresh coverage of the rumor, reported earlier this week, that Microsoft may acquire Yell Group, the U.K.-based international publisher with operations in the United Kingdom, the United States, Spain and Latin America. We have not been able to pick up much to support the rumor, though circumstances might suggest that Yell is poised to make some kind of significant move to generate cash without further driving down its share price. The company took a hit after it announced its earnings last week (along with a dividend cut), and gained a little back on the Microsoft rumor. At this writing, the stock is trading down by about 2 percent. (read more…)

More Android Screenshots Emerge
News.com provides screenshots of Google’s Android operating system, straight from this week’s Google I/O conference in San Francisco. It is a touch screen interface with a home screen that looks a lot like the iPhone. Like the iPhone, lots of local applications will come out of this given the open developer environment and the natural ties between mobile and local. Meanwhile ease of use could push these platforms and applications into the mainstream, causing more incentive to innovate than we see today. (read more…)

Local Matters Gets Social, Continues Product Streak
Local search platform provider Local Matters has just acquired a Facebook application-in-progress from online real estate player Point2. The app will be called Neighborhoods for Facebook and will allow Facebook users to network with others in their area and find out about local events. It can be thought of as a sort of hyperlocal play within Facebook. (read more…)

1 Billion Online Video Viewers by 2013?
ABI just released a report that projects a billion Web video viewers by 2013. This is presumably a unique monthly viewer count, which makes it about a 4x to 5x increase over current levels. That’s a lot of viewers, but it could make sense if you look at evolving video technologies. Broadband penetration and killer apps like YouTube have made video a standard for hundreds of millions of users, especially younger generations and at-work users. This has even caused Google and other search engines to rethink their algorithms and SERP rankings (universal search). (read more…)

DOJ Settlement Has Little Impact on Real Estate Listings
Several years ago, it looked like real estate brokerages might be marginalized by “Virtual Office Websites” (VOWs) that grabbed multiple listings service listings from the Web, using a licensed agent. They then acted as cut-rate sales agents to home buyers. At the time, it was envisioned that major online entities such as Yahoo! might use VOWs as a loophole for getting into the tent. Worse, there was a fear that banks would use VOWs to facilitate a sneak attack on the industry (if restrictions on their participation eased). (read more…)

Will the Housing Crunch Crunch Cars Too?
Within the past eight or nine months, we’ve been thinking (and pushing some numbers) on the potential impact of the downturn in the housing market on local media — print Yellow Pages in particular. This is a huge topic, of course. One of its many component parts is this: How has the liquidity been spent that was created from home equity loans? We’ve identified dozens of print YP categories we think have been boosted by this liquidity. One of these categories is autos. (read more…)

Does In-House Social Networking Reduce Turnover?
Grazing the current crop of business news mags, I happened across the June 2 edition of BusinessWeek. The cover article, “Beyond Blogs,” is on how social networking is changing key aspects of the corporate marketing tool kit. One of the examples cited in the article is that of Best Buy, the ubiquitous consumer electronics chain. A couple of years ago, two Best Buy managers set up an in-house social network, “Blue Shirt Nation.” That network now has 20,000 participants, 85 percent of whom are sales associates. (read more…)

Technology and My Trip to London and Paris
Travelling abroad and keeping your job is pretty easy these days with seamless smartphone access. But I noticed a few things during a trip to London and Paris last week that gave me some food for thought. (read more…)

Does Microsoft Want Yell?
Reuters is reporting a rumor that Microsoft CEO Steve Balmer has set his sights on Yell Group as his next acquisition target, which has led to a bump in Yell’s share price. We don’t know if this is true. It is, after all, being reported as a “rumor.” However, this isn’t the most implausible rumor we’ve heard. Balmer may well be itching to do a deal in the wake of Microsoft’s failure to buy Yahoo!. Plus there has always been at least a superficial logic to a tech company acquiring a directory company, namely to acquire its sizable local sales channel. (read more…)

There has not been all that much fresh coverage of the rumor, reported earlier this week, that Microsoft may acquire Yell Group, the U.K.-based international publisher with operations in the United Kingdom, the United States, Spain and Latin America. We have not been able to pick up much to support the rumor, though circumstances might suggest that Yell is poised to make some kind of significant move to generate cash without further driving down its share price. The company took a hit after it announced its earnings last week (along with a dividend cut), and gained a little back on the Microsoft rumor. At this writing, the stock is trading down by about 2 percent.

Here is a bit more discussion on ClickZ regarding the rumor that Microsoft may acquire Yell. The focus here is on Yellowbook.com, which has been a second tier player in the U.S. IYP space, but has recently revamped and is growing usage rapidly, albeit from a small base. One key difference is the veteran leadership of Pat Marshall, who helped found Superpages.com back in the IYP pioneer days, and joined Yell last year to lead efforts to make Yellowbook.com a more competitive digital platform.

This article reports on a recent BNP Paribas report that suggests Yell might sell off its U.S. and Latin American operations (with Carlos Slim’s Telmex being the likely buyer of the latter) to avoid violating debt covenants. No mention is made of the prospects of a Microsoft acquisition.

This article reveals, ironically enough, that Yell and Microsoft were both voted into the top 10 U.K. companies to work for.

Travelling abroad and keeping your job is pretty easy these days with seamless smartphone access. But I noticed a few things during a trip to London and Paris last week that gave me some food for thought.

London

• The prepaid “Oyster” cards for public transport make it fun to hop on a bus or the underground; they let you look up your travel records; and (maybe) could serve as a platform for a wide range of smart card commerce.
• Nokia’s bold ad campaign for the N series – plastered on buses throughout the city –really hammers home the GPS and points of interest features. It is a compelling differentiator for a non-iPhone contender.
• All the major newspapers are 70 pence or more. That’s $1.37, compared with the 50 cents charged on average by U.S. newspapers. And most are tabloids. The International Herald Tribune is about $3.25.
• The Times of London has devolved into an English version of The NY Post. But it does some interesting things. Last weekend, for instance, it published the text of an entire new James Bond book. Sometimes, it also provides a CD of the greatest hits of various rock stars.
• There is not a lot of free Wi-Fi around London; just a few coffeeshops. Meanwhile, hotel Wi-Fi and broadband is generally 15 pounds a night, or $29.40. That’s a lot.
• Online ordering of major events and travel is a breeze. Theater tickets, The Chelsea Flower Show and EuroStar were all easily ordered from the Web (although I relied on half price TKTs for theater).
• Despite very high cellphone penetration, public phone booths are still readily available in central London for 30 pence a call. It is amazing how many girlie ads they can plaster inside those booths.

Paris

• Digital signage at every bus stop announces the wait-time for different bus lines via GPS. We’ve seen it in many subway lines, but never before for buses — although my colleague Mike Boland says they also have it in San Francisco. Great!
• Young women hand out copies of The PagesJaunes (Yellow Pages) at the bottom of the Champs-Élysées. It may not be the best way to achieve universal penetration, but it is probably good for building awareness.
• The French keyboard’s letters are in different places, and Wanadoo uses a round plug for DSL. That makes it hard for out-of-towners to plug and play.
• Google automatically defaults to the “local” country, without a readily apparent way to get an English-language version.
• Our taxi driver couldn’t find the location of our friend’s apartment near the Eiffel Tower using the GPS that was integrated into his dashboard. So he pulled out a personal GPS with more updated maps and found the apartment with no trouble at all.