Ghost of Midnight

Yodle selling ads to small businesses

Greg Sterling writes today…

I had an interesting conversation this morning with Court Cunningham, CEO of Yodle (formerly NatPal), a local SEM firm. Yodle is in the hunt for SMB online advertising dollars and says its growing ranks of advertisers are spending roughly $1K per month — a figure that I’ve heard from others.

This translates to an average annual spend of roughly $12K, which compares with an approximate annual spend in print yellow pages of $4.5K or so…

The company is driving clicks but selling calls. It doesn’t guarantee clicks or calls but uses predictive modeling to set expectations (e.g., for that spend you can expect to receive X calls, based on Y clicks). Cunningham said that his sales team offers what amount to small, medium and large packages that are budget based and very simple to sell and buy.