Demand Media, Associated Content and Examiner.com are each building up an arsenal of highly searchable “long tail” content. Now add Perfect Market to their ranks, a new company that seeks to provide the same “long tail” search optimized earnings capabilities to archival content from newspapers and other media.

The site just added a $6 million round lead by The Tribune Co. That adds to $15.6 million previously raised from Trinity Ventures, Rustic Canyon Partners and IdeaLab — each of which is also participating in the new round. The site originated with IdeaLab.

The company also announced an executive team that includes President and CEO Julie Schoenfeld; Chief Revenue Officer Tim Ruder, a longtime exec at Washington Post.com; and Chief Strategy Officer Rob Barrett, who was previously executive VP for Tribune Interactive and head of LATimes.com.

UPDATED: CSO Rob Barrett will be joining Examiner.com CEO Rick Blair and Associated Content President Luke Beatty on our “aggregators” panel at Marketplaces 2010

Reply.com this week announced plans to raise $60 million in an IPO. ReachLocal had earlier announced similar plans to go public. The success of one or both companies’ efforts will have a major impact on other local-themed companies’ efforts to raise funds and/or go public.

Looking at Reply.com’s SV-1, we see that the company has 127 full-time employees, including 103 in sales and marketing, 14 in technology and 10 in general and administrative. It has raised $27.5 million since its inception, and last year grossed $34.3 million in revenues from more than 5,000 advertisers. It also delivered 700,000 leads.

The brainchild of AutoWeb Cofounder Payam Zamani, Reply.com was founded in 2001 primarily as a lead generation service for autos, with real estate added in 2003. In 2005, the company acquired Connecting Neighbors, which builds sponsored neighborhood Web sites for real estate professionals.

In 2006, Reply.com’s strategy made a sharp turn. It announced plans to sell Connecting Neighbors, which recently only contributed 5 percent of its revenues; and added “enhanced clicks” generated from auctioning inventory for a variety of local categories from the search engines and ad networks. The company reasoned that the search engines and ad networks had a massive amount of left-over local inventory that needed to be specially targeted.

The online auction marketplace was introduced in 4Q 2008 with auto and real estate components. Since then, it has added home improvement and has just added insurance.

In the SVI, Reply.com noted that 65 percent of its income comes from locally targeted national accounts, aggregators and channel partners. But an emerging sales focus is on channel partners offering white-labeled versions of its system. Traditional media companies with a large installed base of advertisers are being specifically targeted.

Reply.com COO Sean Fox is a featured speaker at Marketplaces 2010, taking place in San Diego March 22-24.

Yodle, the third-party SMB reseller, has now divided its business into “Yodle Sponsored” and “Yodle Organic.” The formation of the latter division, which has been live for a month with 150 clients, is a recognition that SMBs are increasingly relying on organic search as much as paid search — and they need help driving exposure to their Web sites, blogs, YouTube, and social sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

For $400 a month, with six-month initial contracts, Yodle Organic is set to pump up its clients’ organic search rankings. It will provide personalized consultations, design and code Web sites to maximize search rankings; help create and syndicate video; distribute local business profiles to search sites and directories; and provide a dashboard that allows SMBs to measure goals.

Yodle CEO Court Cunningham says the timing feels right. “SEO’s price-per-lead and price-per-click is substantially lower than SEM. But it isn’t ‘either-or.’ They complement each other,” he says. “SEO takes time to build your site so it becomes visible and builds authority in the eyes of the search engines. It is about building equity in a brand that is long lasting.”

The challenge is to properly scale the effort for each client and make money — Yodle gets an average of about $1,000 per month from its 7,000 paid search clients. “No one has productized and automated and put clear accounting” around something like this, he says. But “we’ve been building Web sites for three years. We’re experts in automation.”

Still, it is an ongoing experiment as Yodle works to get clients non-paid traffic in such new areas as maps, article sharing sites and even Google’s 7 Pack. “We look at these things as organic distribution,” says Cunningham.

Content production is probably the biggest question mark for Yodle (and for any company entering this space). Out of the gate, Yodle is using a combination of external contributors, internal editors and curated content from other sources. It hopes to provide at least 10 fresh pieces of content a month to each client.

The Berry Co. announced today new alliances with Yodle and Web.com that will add to the portfolio of online product and services Berry will offer its small-business customers. The deals are part of a new branded offering called Berry Leads that the company will roll out market by market in 2010.

The deals fit into Berry’s broader strategy of becoming less print centric and more about selling a wide array of local media solutions, supported by performance measurement. To achieve this, Berry is collecting a growing list of partners to deliver components of this strategy, Yodle and Web.com being the latest two. Berry already resells Yellowpages.com and Google, and it has formed a deep partnership with 3L Systems and Salesforce.com to create the systems to enable the company to sell and provision media across multiple products and platforms.

“Our goal is to ensure that our small and medium-sized business clients are generating local leads from the multiple sources and platforms that today’s consumers use,” said Scott Pomeroy, president and CEO of Berry, in the announcement today. “We believe that Web.com and Yodle will bring best-in-class products, fulfillment and digital expertise to our clients, complementing our client-focused approach.”

A year ago, we talked with Yodle after it raised a US$10 million round. At that time, the company reported 5,000 advertisers and 250 employees. Yodle, like rival ReachLocal (which recently filed for an IPO), deploys a direct sales force.

As we learned recently, SuperMedia CEO Scott Klein is open to the idea of companies like ReachLocal reselling its inventory. The Berry-Yodle deal has Berry reselling Yodle’s products. However, we wonder if the Berry-Yodle deal couldn’t be a two-way street, given Yodle’s direct contact with SMBs?

Germany’s Kennst Du Einen, an SEO site that helps local businesses get top search rankings and collect recommendations in the mode of Yelp and ReachLocal, says its run rate reached the 1 million euro mark level in 4Q 2009. That translates to $1.44 million, or almost $5.8 million a year (if every quarter were the same).

The site, which launched in 2008, just landed Round B funding. Its customers come from 65 categories, including financial planners, doctors, dentists, contractors, beauty salons and language schools, as well as franchises.

Three years ago, BIA/Kelsey created the Marketplaces research program and conference because we saw that local advertising was quickly “verticalizing.” Indeed, money and talent have poured in for the new breed of vertical products that would take their place among existing vertical success stories, such as AutoTrader, Cars.com, Realtor.com and ServiceMagic.

The Marketplaces 2010 conference reveals just how fast the industry has evolved. This year’s event, now under construction, is set to highlight all the major trends in Marketplaces, including:

• AOL’s $50 million investment in Patch.com, and ongoing transformation of its Mediaglow vertical properties (and Mapquest)
• eBay’s renewed efforts to build up classifieds as entry-level e-commerce via Kijiji, eBay Motors and other services
• Examiner.com’s  big bet on local/vertical content, and its network of 26,000 “examiners.”
• Groupon’s “smart mob” theory of local commerce, backed by a $32 million investment, that allows hundreds to make a volume purchase of local services and products.
• Redbeacon, AlikeList and others’ efforts to remake ServiceMagic-like home and trade leads with social media
• Adify and Pulse360’s  bid to verticalize ad networks for local merchants and national brands
• OpenTable’s big bet on mobile to let diners make reservations wherever they are.

The two-day conference takes full advantage of its location in sunny San Diego. It includes rich research presentations, top-flight demos of the latest services, and a preconference showcasing all the best tools of Marketplaces 2010. Come to San Diego March 22-24 to learn, enjoy the unbeatable networking and participate. You can register at early-bird rates here.

CONFIRMED SPEAKERS (in Alpha)

• Ethan Anderson, CEO, Redbeacon
• Jeff Beard, CEO, Localeze
• Rick Blair, CEO, Examiner.com
• Jon Brod, EVP, AOL*
• Craig Donato, CEO, Oodle
• Jim Delli Santi, CEO, AlikeList
• Todd Dubner, SVP, NCI
• Russ Fradin, CEO, Adify
• Krista Glotzbach, VP, Vast.com
• Mark Goldstein, Chairman, Loyalty Labs
• Martin Herbst, GM, Kijiji U.S., eBay
• Scott Jampol, Senior Director, Marketing, OpenTable
• Jaan Janes, CEO, Pulse 360
• David Kidder, CEO, Clickable
• Steve Larsen, CEO, CallSpark
• Andrew Mason, CEO, GroupOn*
• Colin Pape, CEO, ShopCity
• Ben Saren, CEO, CitySquares
• Craig Smith, President, ServiceMagic
• Mat Stover, CEO, Local Matters
• David Vazdauskas, President, Local Thunder

*keynote

Real-time reservations have moved beyond restaurants, hair salons and parking garages and are now being offered for self storage units. G5 Search Marketing, which specializes in self storage, has teamed with Centershift and United Stor-All Management to launch Web sites that integrate G5’s SEO and clickthrough solutions with unit availability, pricing, promotions and payment.

The effort allows United Stor-All to consolidate the Web presences of 80 facilities in 17 states and D.C. that it currently manages, while generating brand awareness and Web traffic for its storage unit owners. It is the first of several third-party integrations that G5 has planned for 2010.

“Integrating at the point of sale enables us to close the loop and truly track a new customer all the way back to the origination point online,” says G5 CEO Dan Hobin. “Our clients like to know that they have a managed service.” At the same time, Hobin says clients expect “full access” to their sites and want to be able to make changes at will.

ReachLocal, the fast growing search and display sales channel for small businesses with operations in the U.S., U.K., Canada and Australia, has filed with the SEC to raise $100 million in an IPO. The company recently reported that it has 500 + salespeople and 300 staffers.

Reach earned $146.7 million in revenues in 2008, up from $68.4 million in 2007. It had a net loss of $7 million in 2008. It has raised more than $60 million, including $55.2 million two years ago, when it was rumored to be valued at $305 million.

The IPO, assuming it goes out, will be closely watched by other SMB sales companies that may pursue a similar route, including WebVisible, Yodle, Clickable, Matchcraft, Orange Soda and others. Marchex has been public since 2004.

On a recent visit to Stockholm, we sat down with Eniro President and CEO Jesper Karrbrink, who is managing Eniro through a strategic shift described in a presentation late last year as moving “from print dependence to online opportunity.” In a videotaped interview, Karrbrink insisted that Eniro’s product is its content. Print directories, the Internet, mobile phones and so on are merely “distribution formats” in his view. “This is a database company,” he said. Karrbrink compared directories to the music industry, which he said would be out of business had it determined its business was manufacturing records rather than distributing music.

The interview covered a wide range of issues, including:

• Eniro’s relationship with Google. He jokingly describes it as “love-hate.” He believes the key is for Eniro to provide search results on its eniro.se, .no, .dk, etc.,  platform that are more relevant to Nordic consumers than to compete in general search. “From an end user standpoint, they will always be competition. There is room for a couple of search engines out there.”
• Reselling competitors’ traffic. He didn’t rule out Eniro launching an SEM product but suggested it was not high on the company’s priority list. “We have discussed that, and we think we have a pretty good offering ourselves. And there is some risk to [selling others' traffic].”
• Sales channel strategies. He suggested that Eniro is reconsidering its current separate print and online sales approach. Going back to a single channel would be more cost efficient and more consistent with Karrbrink’s one product, multiple distribution channels philosophy. He says the company will do what makes the most sense. “This is not a religion.”

A more detailed write-up with more video excerpts will soon be delivered to clients of The Kelsey Report.

Closing remarks at the Warrillow Summit Toronto yesterday gave advertisers targeting the small and medium-sized business market some hope despite the alarming descent in optimism on the current Canadian economic situation.

A recurring theme over the past two days of the conference was the effectiveness of reaching small-business owners during times of major disruption. Two examples of those disruptive hot spots were times of significant growth and, conversely, times of declined cash flow profitability.

During economic downturns, small-business owners are focused on the following:

1. Increased productivity
2. Tools to more effectively market their business

The 2008 Warrillow survey revealed that the top trusted sources of pre-purchase information for small-business owners break down as follows:

As a result of the strength in word of mouth (48 percent), there was a lot of content around the use of social networking and the importance of finding influencers and brand advocates. Visa’s partnership with Facebook (new small-business card acquisitions were rewarded with $100 credit toward advertising with Facebook) and their development of a small-business community residing on the Facebook platform was highlighted as a great example of how to monetize the SMB social graph.

Another deep area of focus was ratings and reviews. With 35 percent of SMBs placing their trust in this source of information, it makes a lot of sense to capitalize on positive reviews when they’re generated. An emerging trend is the use of reviews as content for search engine marketing campaigns. Buying keywords and developing ad messages around positive reviews is one way to leverage this growing spring of trusted content.

Finally, there was an emphasis on the time-crunched nature of the SMB owners and the importance of communicating effectively — for example, limiting BlackBerry e-mails to 90 characters as this represents one screen, and using terms that resonate with them and their business problems as opposed to using industry jargon.

Two days of laser focus on the needs of the SMB market made it clear there are tremendous opportunities emerging to reach this elusive target. The combined effect of the proliferation of diverse media vehicles available through Web 2.0 and today’s disruptive economic environment brings this segment closer into reach than ever.