I’ve been reading several postings about Google’s first Local Symposium that they hosted at their HQ the other day. Here’s one.
Danah Boyd asks… who clicks on web ads? Part of her answer…
Over the summer, Dave Morgan (AOL Global Advertising Strategy) blogged about a study that they did to investigate who clicks on ads:
What did we learn? A lot. We learned that most people do not click on ads, and those that do are by no means representative of Web users at large.Ninety-nine percent of Web users do not click on ads on a monthly basis. Of the 1% that do, most only click once a month. Less than two tenths of one percent click more often. That tiny percentage makes up the vast majority of banner ad clicks.
Who are these “heavy clickers”? They are predominantly female, indexing at a rate almost double the male population. They are older. They are predominantly Midwesterners, with some concentrations in Mid-Atlantic States and in New England. What kinds of content do they like to view when they are on the Web? Not surprisingly, they look at sweepstakes far more than any other kind of content. Yes, these are the same people that tend to open direct mail and love to talk to telemarketers.
TechCruch reports today that FatDoor.com just landed $5.5M of funding and a new CEO from Yahoo…
Fatdoor aims to connect you with your neighbors by providing a localized social network for your physical community. Although the site will be in private beta until the spring of 2008, a handful of details have been publicly available since at least June. The website will integrate with Microsoft Virtual Earth to display local business and residential listings on an interactive map. Once users claim their listings, they can add profiles and put down their interests. Users can then plan events and form local interest groups with the site.Fatdoor will also pull in information from other web services such as business reviews from Yelp, events listings, and driving directions. Users will be able to add their own business reviews but they won’t be displayed outside of the network on Yelp’s website. Fatdoor’s homepage will display something akin to the Facebook news feed with information about upcoming events and recently created groups.
So my FatDoor scorecard reads… great space with huge potential, new CEO with impressive credentials, money to burn… this could prove interesting. Or not… time will tell.
Most Silicon Valley successes are made by roping in some small percentage of the population over a huge geographical expanse… e.g., 5% of the United States on board some website would be 15 million people… yipee.
But to succeed at the local or neighborhood level, you need a relatively large percent of the population in a small area (e.g., our Front Porch Forum has 25% of our pilot city registered, but Burlington, VT only contains a fraction of 1% of the U.S. population). This is a very different game and one that most mainstream dot.coms and start-ups aren’t pursuing well or at all… thus the opportunity.
I’ve noted before that Smalltown.com is one of the few local online efforts that is working on a model that is both authentically local and scalable. Most local online efforts seem to fall either in the “one off” mom-and-pop side or the “local, as in WalMart is local because they have a store on the edge of your town.” Smalltown is aiming between these two extremes with early signs of success… good for them.
Today we hear from their blog…