We are pleased to announce our third and final keynote speaker for the “Search Starts Here” conference: Jason Finger, CEO of CityGrid.
During our fireside chat with Jason, he will discuss the current environment and future of “local” including merchant product offers and the investment landscape. In addition, he will give a glimpse of what’s to come for CityGrid’s properties such as Citysearch, Urbanspoon and Insider Pages.
CityGrid is one of the largest content and advertising networks for local and small businesses. Jason oversees the entire ad network in addition to all of CityGrid’s owned and operated websites that include Citysearch.com, insiderpages.com, Urbanspoon.com and GetFelix.com.
Prior to CityGrid, he cofounded SeamlessWeb in 1999 and was responsible for growing the company’s presence to 22 cities throughout the U.S. and London. SeamlessWeb was acquired by Aramark in 2006 at which time Jason was responsible for setting and executing corporate strategy for 260,000 employees in 19 countries.
In addition to his success at CityGrid and SeamlessWeb, Jason has been named Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year, Innovator of the Year by the Corporate Executive Council of New York, and to Crain’s 40 Under 40 list of leading young executives.
In addition to a visual makeover of its website, local business reviews pioneer Citysearch has announced a full revamp of its user interface. Meant to capture the on-the-go spirit of the mobile user and the pithiness of social media sites like Twitter and Tumblr, Citysearch has entered a new era of recommendations – not reviews.
When searching for a local business, the new Citysearch listing doesn’t include the traditional three or five star rating, but a simple thumbs-up or thumbs-down. These recommendations are calculated into a percentage score – making it simpler for searchers to make a snap judgment, and faster for reviewers to give their feedback.
In addition, Citysearch will limit text reviews will be restricted to a Twitter-style 140 characters on mobile and 280 on the web because “brevity is key.”
As part of its visual overhaul, Citysearch has added more room for business photos and a blog-like layout to its main page.
The new Citysearch feels reinvigorated and more relevant to today’s on-the-go local searcher. Check it out!
Borrell surveyed and reviewed revenue figures from 5,700 local media companies including Yellow Pages, radio, newspapers, local TV and cable companies, as well as pure-play digital companies. Based on that data, Borrell projected that local online advertising – including everything from banners and streaming audio and video, to e-mail advertising, paid search and mobile advertising – will reach $19.9 billion in 2012, up from $16.4 billion in 2011.
Credit: Borrell Associates
Interestingly, the Borrell report indicates that Yellow Pages providers in particular are capitalizing on growth in the local online advertising space. According to the report, Yellow Pages providers today represent about $2.5 billion, or 12.6%, of total local online advertising revenue.
The Borrell report emphasized that directory companies are making the fastest transition to local online when compared to other local sources. And within Yellow Pages organizations, the share of digital revenue to total revenue is expanding at an “unprecedented rate,” representing one-fourth to as much as 50% of total revenues. Borrell said strong Yellow Pages representation is the result of changes providers have made to their sales staffs and new strategies to focus on digital sales. Just makes sense, since after all Yellow Pages were the original search engine.
Credit: Borrell Associates
Of the top local online advertising revenue leaders, Yellow Pages providers appear at the frontend of the list: AT&T Yellowpages.com at #2, Yellow Media at #7, Yellowbook at #9, SuperMedia at #10 and DexOne at #11. Local sites also rank high, including ReachLocal at #11, CityGrid Media at #18, and Yelp at #29.
I’m proud to see such a strong showing for our members in this report. It’s a testament to the hard work underway in our industry to adapt our business models to changing consumer trends, and demonstrates our leadership position in the evolving local online space. More to come!
Google Places, the popular service that features pages for millions of local businesses across the country, made a major move last week by removing snippets of customer reviews featured on its site that were taken from third-party local sites such as TripAdvisor, Yelp and CitySearch.
The change was welcomed by the affected local sites, which have argued that their reviews were proprietary. Moving forward, Google Places will only feature reviews written by its own users.
CityGrid, a leading local content and advertising network that includes various Yellow Pages websites such as DexKnows.com, Superpages.com, and YP.com announced its new private label reseller program this week.
The move will enable sales organizations, including Yellow Pages companies, to sell CityGrid’s extensive advertising products under their own brands. While open to all partners, the program will be particularly attractive to regional Yellow Pages companies that don’t currently have an online advertising product or are looking to expand their local product offering.
According to the release, the offering will allow organizations to immediately start selling CityGrid’s online ad offerings and move ahead with building content ads and distributing those ads across CityGrid’s web and mobile sites. The program also offers partners with turnkey online sales tools and analytics interfaces that make the sales process easier to manage.
I’m excited about the opportunity that this new program presents for our members to further expand their portfolios to deliver integrated advertising options to their clients.
This week, we’ve discussed the importance of multi-platform advertising for local businesses seeking to reach ready-to-buy consumers wherever they are. Now, I’m eager to highlight the significance of inter-platform advertising opportunities as a means of generating additional visibility and leads.
On the digital front, our industry is not only expanding the reach of Internet Yellow Pages directories, we’re also partnering with a variety of popular local search sites including Yelp and Citysearch in an effort to provide our clients with more ways to reach online consumers.
Under the new arrangement, sponsored listings from YP.COM will have the opportunity to appear on CityGrid, Citysearch’s extensive local content and advertising network. The new agreement builds on an existing relationship between Citysearch and AT&T Interactive where Citysearch listings, user reviews and editorial content have the opportunity to be displayed on YP.COM.
Additionally, YP.COM advertisers will have the opportunity to place ads alongside content on Citysearch or other CityGrid publisher web properties, and CityGrid reseller partners will have access to distribute advertising across YP.COM.
This open arrangement benefits local businesses by allowing them to explore new, exciting online advertising opportunities— all within their established Yellow Pages marketing strategies.
Today is the final day here at BIA/Kelsey’s Marketplace 2010. I’m glad I had the opportunity to hear so many great speakers and learn about the innovative approaches and strategies various companies are using in local search space.
Our friends at the BIA/Kelsey are keeping the outside world up-to-speed on all of the sessions via their blog, Local Media Watch. Some interesting posts include:
Urbanspoon CEO Jay Herratti talks about his company’s popular local search iPhone app, which has been downloaded 9 million times. Interestingly, since CitySearch bought Urbanspoon last year, the company’s Web site has shot up 220% to 7 million unique monthly users.
Dex One is once again partnering with a popular online local business listing and review site in an effort to enhance the listings on its own Internet directory, DexKnows.com.
Now, the company is entering into a distribution agreement with Citysearch—the online local media company— that will give Dex One advertisers the option of having their listings appear across CityGrid, the largest content and ad network for local, in addition to DexKnows.com. According to this morning’s release, the agreement expands Dex One’s online distribution network of industry-leading partner sites by giving consumers exposure to Citygrid’s 140 million unique users across the Web.
I think these recent announcements represent an interesting approach by Dex One in which the company is looking to leverage the success of its online competitors to gain new visibility and value for both its local business customers and its regular users.
Local-social search has been a popular topic in the news this week, with both Google and Citysearch, the local online search directory, announcing plans to integrate real-time Twitter updates and other social networking features into their platforms. Both moves are representative of the fundamental shift currently taking place in how local information is being searched and shared – something we’ve talked about frequently on this blog.
Over the next few days, Google users will be granted access to live updates from Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook, MySpace, Jaiku and Indenti.ca related to their search terms. For example, users searching for a local restaurant may come across the latest Twitter and Facebook updates about the establishment. These could include anything from a tweet by the restaurant owner with a promotional message, to a negative comment by a recent diner who wasn’t happy with their order.
Citysearch is unveiling a new Twitter integration that will feature the latest tweets about a local business on its listing page. Businesses will have the option of integrating their Twitter presence into their Citysearch page and tweeting directly with visiting users. Like with Google, users will have instant access to online conversations taking place about the businesses they’re researching – whether that buzz is good or bad. Those conversations will be in addition to the existing online user reviews currently available on the site.
The opportunities – as well as the risks – to local businesses brought about by the growth of local-social search offerings are endless. If anything, it’s clear that local businesses can no longer ignore the online conversations taking place about their services. Those conversations, once limited to social media networks, are now expanding at rapid pace into the local search domain.
Greg Sterling posted some screenshots of the redesigned MSN City Guides pages, and his initial review is positive:
Without doing lots of searches and checking out all the new functionality it appears to be a big improvement. Local ads are from Yellowpages.com and events information comes from Zvents. There are also reviews from Yelp prominently featured on profile pages.
It certainly is an interesting mix of local information coming together, which could help MSN City Guides compete against competitor CitySearch. CitySearch also launched a redesign of its site last fall.
Last week, MySpace and Citysearch announced the launch of MySpace Local, a joint online venture that will merge CitySearch’s local business listings and reviews into the MySpace social network.
Given the huge momentum behind online local search it’s not surprising to see established big-name online players like these jumping on the local search bandwagon.
Yellow Pages has been in the game over 100 years, but the CitySearch-MySpace collaboration is another sign that this business is changing – and fast.
One major question yet to be answered is: which businesses will win in this domain? Outside of bars and restaurants, it will be interesting to see what listing categories appeal to both consumers and advertisers within a social networking environment – particularly in light of the increased competition in the local online directory space.
One thing is for certain: strong new players in the local search space mean more competition for the Yellow Pages and more motivation to innovate and invest in online and mobile search.
CityGrid is one of the largest content and advertising networks for local and small businesses. Jason oversees the entire ad network in addition to all of CityGrid’s owned and operated websites that include Citysearch.com, insiderpages.com, Urbanspoon.com and GetFelix.com.
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