Yelp launched its local review site in Australia today and cofounder Jeremy Stoppelman traveled to the country for the occasion. Since 2004 the company has accumulated a database of more than 22 million reviews, none of which has included Australian businesses until now.

Yelp’s revenues have come from the sale of online ads on its review site to U.S. businesses. In Australia Yelp is partnering with Sensis, which is providing business listings and online advertisers.

The Australian expansion comes as Yelp is poised to raise up to $100 million in an initial public share offering next year, according to documents filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The IPO could value the company at $2 billion. Not a trivial sum, but a fraction of the $100 billion Facebook hopes to generate from its IPO next year.

Yelp had an average of 61 million unique users in Q3 2011. A large base of amateur reviewers are rewarded with badges and social events. However, the company has experienced both gains and losses in 2011. Its SEC filing revealed a net loss of $7.6 million this year to Sept. 30.

Yelp is heading down under to Australia via a partnership with the directory company Sensis where it will integrate Sensis’ local business listing data into its site. In turn, Sensis’ local sales force will sell Yelp.com.au to Australian SMBs.

Neither company has revealed the financial details of the partnership, but Sensis CEO Bruce Akhurst did discuss the idea behind the new alliance. “Small businesses are looking for customers to come through their door, and the whole phenomenon of Yelp and what they’ve been doing is a rich source of leads and customers for small businesses,” Akhurst said in an article from The Australian.

Just last week, we reported on Yelp’s sizable growth. Since March of last year, reviews on the site have doubled. It now boasts 20 million user-generated reviews. Yelp was founded in 2004 by two former PayPal execs. Cofounder Jeremy Stoppelman said the Sensis partnership was the first time Yelp had chosen to team up with a directory service business for an international launch.

Yelp’s previous international launches include Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, France, Austria, Germany, Spain and the Netherlands.

The new partners expect that Yelp.com.au will go live by the end of this year with Sensis’ Yellow Pages sales reps offering Yelp advertising options to customers in 2012. This deal represents the continued evolution of Sensis in terms of how it views competitors. In the not too distant past, it’s fair to say Sensis would have been loathe to consider a partnership with Yelp. Today, it seems to take the view that it’s better to work with than against potential competitors.

Rating and review sites for things like dining, nail salons and events (i.e., Yelp) are inevitably going to battle it out with Google. CityGrid Media’s Insider Pages wants to go in a different direction.

Since last year, the site has steered most of its energies into building up a health specialty, with deep ratings and reviews and other aggregated information. Along the way, it has learned that the value of health-related advertising (i.e., pharmaceuticals) grows astronomically as it gets more specialized and targeted. Now, the San Francisco-based site is prepared to launch up to 30 unique URLs for specialized health communities, starting in a few months.

GM Eric Peacock said it looked like a fairly dim future for review sites like his in 2009, as Google “got more and more aggressive in the local space.” Traffic was flat that year. But “we’ve been clawing back a generation of new content, more reviews” from Insider Pages, Citysearch and other sources, and a new focus on health and medical in general, he says. The emphasis on health is something that is also being pursued by Angie’s List, Avvo and others.

Early last year, Insider Pages launched Doctor Finder as a partnership with HealthGrades.com, which provides detailed provider information. The result has been growth in page views from 14 million last January to 18 million page views in December.

“We’ve scratched an itch with local search around health,” says Peacock. “It is information that is hard to find and not always available.” With virtually no marketing, Doctor Finder has especially engaged people, he says.

Instead of going to Google and leaving with a single phone number, Doctor Finder users study profiles and other information for anywhere from five to 10 doctors, averaging 12 pages per visit. “The potential is to get very, very targeted,” says Peacock. Top categories include pediatricians, OB/GYN, family practice and dentists. Meanwhile, top specialty searches include allergists and cardiologists.

For Insider Pages, the next step is to “take this and go more vertical” by zeroing in on specific medical conditions and diseases. Members of these communities will all go through the classic stages of grief, shock and acceptance. But at the same time, they won’t just be getting a doctor; they’ll be assembling a whole team of providers to help them recover and cope. Eight-five percent of the information types will work with multiple diseases, says Peacock.

Local media brands continue to look for ways to populate their sites with local bloggers and Twitterers. In return, they provide them with a bigger platform.

The latest to jump into the game is NBC Universal, which paidContent reports has developed “The 20” to highlight selected Twitterers in all 10 of the markets where it has owned and operated stations. The effort, which is expected to zero in on politics, sports, culture, education and crime, complements NBCU’s The Feast, which focuses on Eat, Play and Shop content, and relies on NBC writers and aggregated content from the Web. NBC will periodically adjust its list of Twitterers.

The 20 launches after New Year’s in Washington, D.C., New York and San Diego and will roll out in the remaining markets throughout 2011.

NBCU VP Greg Gittrich is speaking on the Progressive Traditional Media panel at ILM:10 next week, alongside Peter Weinberger of Advance Internet and Stephen Weis of Hearst Newspapers.

Avvo, the Seattle-based vertical site that launched its lawyer ratings service in 2007, has now added doctor ratings, using the proceeds, in part, from a $10 million raise it did in March. In launching a doctors site, it goes head to head against Angie’s List, Everydayhealth.com and dozens of others that view doctor ratings and other medical practitioner information as uncharted territory.

Avvo Doctors, which works off a common platform with Lawyers, is launching with numerical ratings and profiles for 800,000 doctors in all 50 states, or 90 percent of all U.S. doctors. It also includes medical misconduct information for roughly 50 percent of doctors — a percentage it hopes to boost to 90 percent by Q1 2011 as state medical boards improve their reporting systems.

The site include 400 questions and answers from certified doctors. It expects the Q&A forum to grow at a faster rate than its legal counterpart, which receives more than 50,000 contributions per month.

Avvo has also put together a medical advisory board that includes the former president of the American Medical Association, a chief surgeon at the University of Washington, and two doctors who run their own elective clinics on the East and West coasts.

“In the online marketing world, doctors look a lot like lawyers did before Avvo arrived,” notes CEO and Founder Mark Britton on the company blog. “Consumers are lost when trying to find a doctor, let alone trying to understand the doctor’s background and reputation. Few doctors understand the art or science of marketing – especially online marketing. Doctors still spend over $500 million dollars annually in the Yellow Pages (yes, the yellow pages).”

MerchantCircle is joining the ranks of companies creating local and vertical content, including Demand Media, Associated Content, Examiner.com, AOL’s Seed and Patch, Perfect Market, Helium, Brafton Media and others. MerchantCircle’s new Local Content Studio is being led by Andy Halliday, who many of us remember as former head of e-commerce at Excite@Home and who has since been engaged in several entrepreneurial efforts.

The basic idea for MerchantCircle’s Local Content Studio, and the others, is to create optimized content that can be used to economically and efficiently spur local traffic to its directories and profiles, while driving ad impressions. Presumably, MerchantCircle will have an edge over rivals via 1.3 million SMBs that have claimed profiles on the service, covering 95 percent of U.S. communities.

The SMBs may be seeking to build attention for themselves (i.e., real estate agents), and/or earn awards or make a little cash — $1 or $2 per article. The cash can eventually add up: Some SMBs, in early testing, are already being sent checks for $300 and up.

The Studio, in fact, may be seen as an extension of MerchantCircle’s Answers division, launched last September, in which members are encouraged to provide their expertise on a wide range of subjects (where to fix, how to fix, etc.). Both efforts are part of a broader effort to broaden MerchantCircle’s identity and engagement with consumers and businesses beyond the core directory.

At the heart of the Studio is an online authoring and publishing system which can support thousands of simultaneous content development projects. The projects can be claimed by local merchant members or other writers remotely, submitted, reviewed for approval or corrections, and published to local and topical “Expert Pages.”

MerchantCircle VP Darren Waddell says the creation of the Studio does not alter the company’s extensive and successful relationship with Demand Media, which includes syndication of MC’s Answers, domain registration for MC members, and expert articles and other content to MC profiles for $9.95 per month, among other activities.

MerchantCircle’s efforts to launch more local content is not occurring in a vacuum. We have watched with interest as Yahoo has been developing local news and information via the hiring of writers in New York and San Francisco, and recruitment of writer/editors in San Jose, Chicago and Denver, per reporting in paidContent. Their written and edited material will likely be paired with material from Associated Content, which Yahoo purchased this spring. It represents a very different take from Patch.com, which is hiring journalists for hyperlocal reporting in up to 500 communities.

Center’d’s The DealMap, which serves up more than 350,000 “live at any time deals” from over 150 daily deal and offer/coupon sources, has released an iPhone app that “mobilizes” the service’s top features, including game mechanics, real-time discovery, crowdsourcing and user-generated content.

The app, much like the Web site, utilizes a location-sensitive “relevance algorithm” to select salient deals for users across eight deal types and 10 business categories within a one-mile radius of their present ZIP code. CEO Jennifer Dulski told us that the equation behind the algorithm tabulates “location + price + sentiment + time” to equate with purchase intent.

Offers originate from national deal providers, a booming list of deal-a-day companies, social media and other sources. The DealMap has formalized revenue sharing agreements with “several dozen” deal-a-day companies and derives the majority of its revenues from its affiliate partners.

Dulski says that where the app distinguishes itself from the online hub is in mobile’s real-time saving, sharing and user-and-merchant-creation functionalitites. The platform offers a suite of standard sharing capacitites — Facebook, Twitter, e-mail — as well as the ability to save deals for later viewing and add deals from local business that are not advertised elsewhere, all of which closes the customer feedback loop.

User deal generation promotes an element of “real-time discovery” endemic to mobile by uncovering local sales and deals that otherwise would never surface beyond the storefront. The DealMap incentivizes user submission through increasingly popular game mechanics, which reward deal submissions, downloads and pass-alongs with tangible rewards. A points-driven leaderboard tracks activity.

Merchants can also submit their own deals directly without funneling through third-party providers.

Dulski believes that the app marks a major advance in fostering a “true cross-digital platform” that incorporates Web, mobile, social and APIs that allow developers to build on top of The DealMap’s aggregated offerings. This networked positioning with partners, publishers and developers could aid The DealMap in separating from the increasingly dense playing field, with sites like Yipit, 8Coupons and Deal Radar also vying for market share.

As to our suggestion that a deal a day does not especially lend itself to mobile, where people are “on the go,” Dulski delineated between “impulse deals/buys” and “timeless buys.” Mobile is very good for impulse deals, she suggests.

The latest attempt to make hyperlocal a sustainable reality came today with Allbritton Communications’ launch of TBD.com, a hyper metro site for the Washington, D.C., area. Allbritton, which has sunk “under $5 million” into the project to date, hopes it will grab hold of the D.C. audience in the same way that its Politico has done with political types — simultaneously via the Web and TV, where it takes over the slot formerly held by Allbritton’s former News Channel 8.

I’ll say right off the bat that I like it a lot. Although I had the opportunity to visit the newsroom with other members of the BIA/Kelsey team about six weeks ago, I got my first glance at the site today. My takeaway? It’s fun, useful and totally up to date with social and mobile media.

Most important, it seems like something I’d probably read (and watch) every day if I still lived in D.C. It just seems natural and un-self-conscious — completely opposite D.C.’s staid (and untrue) image as a stuffed shirt of a city and other hyper metro sites that I won’t name here but that make NPR seem wild and crazy.

The site integrates, a little, with Allbritton’s WJLA TV, and it is co-located with the WJLA newsroom. You’ll see the WJLA programming schedule and its landmark weather reporters Doug Hill and Bob Ryan headline the weather page, for instance.

But it has a totally separate identity, helped by a dozen writers led by former Washington City Paper Editor Erik Wemple. As Wemple notes in a public letter: “One of them writes nothing but lists. One is all over pedestrian life. One holds politicians throughout the region accountable. Three carry a year-round obsession with the Redskins. Three are covering some of the fastest-developing communities in the region. Three are the final authority on all things arts and entertainment.”

The entire site will eventually ramp up soon to about 50, including the TBD News team carried over from News Channel 8, and six community reach-out staffers.The site also seamlessly integrates with 129 D.C.-area bloggers and picks up news from all the D.C. sites, including The Washington Post, and also from WJLA competitors such as WTOP-AM. And much of its substantial neighborhood news comes via a news filter that sorts by ZIP code.

It has also taken some unique approaches that only time will tell will pan out, such as TBD TV, the “companion” channel that takes over from News Channel 8, the 24/7 news channel that had been featured on cable and dish services throughout the metro area. It features programs that sometimes borrow WJLA personalities (i.e., The Arch Campbell Show) but also has begun to produce some of its own unique offerings (i.e. Capital Golf Weekly).

The site was initially slated to launch at the end of August. It is obviously up early — the testing URL leaked and they decided to roll with it. Consequently, the mobile apps (i.e., All Over the iPhone, All over the Android and All Over the Mobile Web) aren’t ready yet, although they’re being promoted, and there is a lot of content that you’d expect to see that isn’t there (i.e., high school sports) and exurban content. It is possible that they’re leaving the tough (and expensive stuff) for the thinning Post to cover.

But we know there are plans to do other things that will be totally innovative if they pull them off, such as having local bloggers for the site featured on the local news when there is a hot breaking story (i.e., the fighting among 70 teens at L’Enfant Plaza Metro station the other night).

The advertising strategies also aren’t fully unveiled, and the site will obviously focus on building up an audience first. Currently, you’ll just see some run of site ads such as Belfort Furniture and contextual tile ads, such as The Washington Ballet under arts, and McCrea Heating and Air Condition under weather.

Will this site ultimately be self sustaining? That’s the big question. It is expected to lose up to $2 million a year as it gets going. But if the site maintains its promising start, the local dollars should theoretically follow. Another question is whether the TV companion will take off.

In the course of writing this post, I was chatting about the site’s debut with hyperlocal pioneer Rob Curley, who ran The Post’s ambitious hyperlocal strategy two years ago before moving on to Greenspun Communications’ Las Vegas Sun. Curley was very enthusiastic about the site’s design. The amazing thing is that they probably showed that sites are more likely to win with a TV station as a partner than a newspaper, he said. That’s food for thought.

Yelp has added to its international portfolio, following up on its May launch in France with a launch in Germany. Berlin and Munich are Yelp’s first German markets. Fifteen additional German markets have been seeded with “scout” reviews, but won’t be fully turned on for a bit.

These markets include Bielefeld, Bonn, Bremen, Dortmund, Dresden, Duisburg, Dusseldorf, Essen, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Hanover, Koln, Leipzig, Nuremberg and Stuttgart. German versions of Yelp for iPhone and Yelp for Business Owners will also be available in the near future. Yelp had previously launched Yelp UK in January 2009 and Yelp Ireland in June 2009.

The German and French services are Yelp’s first non-English language markets. While English speakers may see the interface in English, the reviews are all in native language and at this point, there is no translation of reviews by non-German and French speakers (i.e., American tourists).

Everyone is fighting for a better, more cost-efficient way of producing content for Web sites. But is the so-called “content mill” search optimized approach of a Demand Media, Associated Content or Examiner.com the only way to achieve this?

Whether you agree or disagree with the characterization of these companies (we largely disagree), alternatives are out there. One alternative is presented by Helium, a 29-person, Boston-based firm that brings in text articles from 160,000 writers and editors, filters it via peer review to let the best voices rise to the top, and allows media partners to generally choose from multiple entries for the best fit.

Helium was founded in October 2006 and has received $16 million in Series A funding. Most interesting to us, it is also 20 percent owned by mega publisher RR Donnelly. Indeed, RRD, with 1,200 sales reps, is its principal reseller to local media clients including TV stations, radio stations, newspapers, Yellow Pages and Web pure plays.

Using Helium, media partners can personalize the content for their own purposes.

One TV company we recently talked with said it liked Helium’s approach more than the others because it had confidence in the quality of the articles since they are refereed, and the company is able to let local reporters add their own touch to pieces that run on its Web sites. It isn’t so much about using outside content as “letting the company’s talent do more,” it said.

This company would be among Helium’s pay-by-the-article customers. The cost can range anywhere from $30 to $50 for general interest content, to up to $1,000 for a high-end medical specialty piece. There are also monthly plans. The company’s content is also distributed on its own ad-supported Web site, which receives 9 million page views per month, growing 5 percent to 7 percent per month.

President and CEO Mark Ranalli tells us that writers are paid on an algorithm based on a portion of ad revenues. The payment scheme is similar to that of Demand Media, Examiner.com or Associated Content. “Many, many writers receive from $5,000 to $10,000 a year,” he says — enough to be a good source of supplemental income. But that also does not differentiate the company. The difference, he contends, is that the content may be “reviewed better than professionally written material.”

“We are not oblivious to what the search engines are doing,” says Ranalli. “You want to be on Google at the end of the day.” And the other content creators may have been perfectly optimized for Google. But instead of producing articles specifically to top the search engine, Helium is bent on producing the best article. “That’s perfectly aligned with Google,” which really just wants to highlight the best content, he says.