Ghost of Midnight

Yahoo’s take on Local Online

Peter Krasilovsky reports today about Yahoo Exec VP Hilary Schneider’s keynote at the Kelsey Local ’07 conference this week. Schneider…

emphasized that the company is really zeroing in on local to play a major role in Yahoo’s growth plans. Local search’s share of overall search within Yahoo went from 11 percent to 14 percent in 2006, and local search itself grew 28 percent in the last four months, per ComScore.

Yahoo divides local as:

• Maps – 32M unique visitors
• News and info – 30M
• Social media – 20M
• Classifieds – 20M
• Directory – 18M

Further:

Yahoo Local itself is pretty well built out, with 6,000 city pages and 80,000 zip codes. But it only has 600 neighborhoods. “There are obviously many more than that,” says Schneider. “ We have a long way to go.”

Yahoo looks at the local market as:

• National local – 17,000 businesses spending $22.4 billion in ad dollars
• Regional local – 85,000 businesses spending $48.3 billion
• Local local – 22,000,000 businesses spending $33.6 billion