Bob Tedeschi wrote in the New York Times today about LifeAt, meettheneighbors.org and i-neighbors.org… three services taking aim at online social networking for neighbors. About LifeAt (see my recent post)…
Matthew Goldstein, LifeAt’s chief operating officer, said the company is only now completing its advertising strategy. For now, the company, based in Brooklyn, is surviving on the roughly $6,000 it receives from each building that signs up for the service. It does not charge the buildings yearly fees.
More than 335 buildings have joined since LifeAt began in March. About 600 more buildings are scheduled to introduce LifeAt Web sites by year’s end. The company does not currently share ad revenues with the buildings, but Mr. Goldstein said that could change.
Among buildings with LifeAt Web sites, Mr. Goldstein said, residents of 64 percent of the units have created personal pages. Property managers, who give residents login and password information, also use the sites to post news about maintenance work and vacancies.
And about meettheneighbors.org…
Since late 2004, MeetTheNeighbors.org, a for-profit company based in Manhattan, has operated a social networking service for apartment dwellers.
That site, which is free, has about 15,000 users, and last year began serving residents of Boston, London and Dublin. Jared Nissim, the company’s founder, runs the site as a sidelight.
Mr. Nissim said some buildings have considerably more active Web sites than others, thanks mostly to the efforts of volunteers in the building who are responsible for managing the content of the site. “It may be one of the flaws of our system that it relies on one primary contact to get the ball rolling,” he said.
The meettheneighbors site reports 2,204 buildings set up with 11,621 members… about five people per building.
And i-neighbors.org…
I-Neighbors continues to grow, with 45,000 people now using the free service.
I seem to recall that this service hosts about 5,000 neighborhood groups across North America. That’s a lot of people… although averaging 9 people per group.
About 25% of Front Porch Forum‘s pilot city has subscribed via word of mouth. Our average neighborhood forum has about 50 households.
An interesting article in the Business 2.0 finale this month about Marchex.
Marchex CEO Russell Horowitz is launching websites for thousands of cities, big and small. The play? To beat Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo to the punch in connecting businesses to nearby customers.
With smart people, powerful tools, and hundreds of millions of dollars behind it, I’m sure that this effort will produce something of value… in fact it already has. But I wonder about “soul”…
Marchex is having a hard time selling its vision. Since so many of its sites sat idle for so long, packed with nothing but ads, Marchex looked like a giant domain play except with much higher overhead. But the company has been developing new technologies. And in June, Marchex lit up 100,000 of its sites – with another 150,000 or so to go – changing them into destinations with a smattering of content and reviews. The goal is to create sites that, as Horowitz puts it, “have a soul.”
In May 2006, for example, Marchex bought a review site called OpenList, a local guide that pulls together reviews for restaurants, hotels, and local attractions. The company then developed software that crawls the Web, sorts out duplicate content, and then generates a review. Look up San Francisco’s Hotel Triton on BayAreaHotels.com, for instance, and the software-generated write-up reads like a Zagat guide: “What travelers said they loved: ‘The location,’ ‘the staff,’ and ‘the room.’ Guests can enjoy yoga and other local activities.” Users add their own reviews too.
Hmm…
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.
Smalltown announced today that it just bought Local2Me. Here are some of the reports about it…
As I’ve written in the past, I admire Smalltown’s narrow and deep focus on their initial five California towns. Local2Me is in the same geographic area as Smalltown. From Local2Me founder Michael Olivier…
The Local2Me service launched in 2000, and over the last seven years community members have posted over 31,000 neighborhood messages in 90 towns about wide-ranging topics, from great pediatric dentists to Halloween costumes for sale, trustworthy appliance repair, neighborhood crime issues, anti-raccoon measures, and more!
Each of these services has some similarities to Front Porch Forum. Although it’s probably more apples to oranges than anything, FPF had about 15,000 messages in its first year operating in one small metro area (including 19 towns).
Michael Taylor writes about “local online” start ups with lofty advertising sales ambitions…
In a recent post on Venturebeat.com, Dan Kaplan reveals ReachLocal is aiming to dramatically increase the size of its online sales force. “Local search marketing company ReachLocal will use its massive $55.2 million infusion to build a gigantic sales force that it hopes will dislodge the Yellow Pages as the de-facto place local businesses spend their promotional dollars.” Kaplan makes a good points on the grand goal set out by ReachLocal “To add some perspective, ReachLocal has around 300 salespeople; the global Yellow Page market employs more than 41,000 in sales alone. Zorik Gordon, ReachLocal’s chief executive, doesn’t balk at that figure, and suggests that a sales force of 10,000 or more might be in the cards. This is an unprecedented goal for an Internet-focused company, and a risky one. It comes at a time when the market for talented salespeople is extremely tight.”
Kathleen Burge writes in OMMA this week about several neighborhood-level online efforts. She includes FatDoor, BackFence, eNeighbors, MeetTheNeighbors, and Front Porch Forum. The conclusion… full of potential, but two big problems… (1) generating sufficient revenue, and (2) scaling and adjusting the formula that works in San Francisco so that it plays in Peoria. Worth a read.
Seems like the word is getting out about “local online.” Some recently reported developments…
Greg Sterling takes a look at “mommy sites”… lots of them popping up all over. Some of these are similar to Front Porch Forum… very local and talk about whatever (not just reviews or just classifieds).
Marketers and local businesses should consider some of these mom sites in their thinking about targeting local audiences and in terms of “online word of mouth.” While it’s considerably more challenging to market within online communities, a little time and attention to some of these sites could pay off in a meaningful way. Regardless of whether marketers pay attention to them, these mom networks are in fact driving lots of recommendations and business referrals all over the US. It’s very much an untold story in local.
Bill Day writes for Marchex a post titled “Building relevant and useful sites for neighborhoods.”
How do you cover a landscape as fragmented and targeted as the 42,000+ neighborhoods/ZIP codes that exist in the U.S.? And what needs to be done locally versus done centrally to ensure a solid consumer experience? As a company that owns ZIP Code Web sites covering most of the U.S., we are dealing directly with the challenges and opportunities that come with building highly relevant and useful local sites covering each of the ZIPs.
Hmm… a ZIP Code is interesting, but too crude of a cut. Just in my own experience I’ve lived in ZIPs that feel like home, others that feel disjointed and jerrymandered. And they change. Does that mean the “neighborhood” changes too? Perhaps a techie’s solution to a human challenge. Who knows?
ReachLocal, a provider of local online marketing solutions for SMBs, has raised $55.2 million in new financing. This comes on top of the $12.7 million it has raised since its founding in 2004. The new funds give ReachLocal an estimated valuation of $305 million, since it was previously valued at $250 million.
That’s a lot of money. Reminds me of Big Tent… social networking for soccer moms. And Ning… DIY social networking. Both of which I believe have huge sums of investment.
Finally, Cameron Ferroni on the Marchex blog seems to agree with my assessment that the local online space is getting both broad and deep…
There is so much data out there that some set of consumers will love, and others will think is irrelevant. Deciding how to bring it all together and get consumers excited – now that is the challenge.
Greg Sterling wrote about online advertising revenue projections this week…
According to the just-released IAB/PwC online ad revenues report, US online ad spending reached $5 billion for the second quarter and $10 billion for the first half of 2007. Year over year growth was just over 26%. Online ad revenues should hit or exceed $20 billion for the full year, 2007.
The distribution of revenues across ad categories is also follows:
- Search remains the largest revenue format, accounting for 41 percent of 2007 first six-month revenues. Search advertising revenues totaled $4.1 billion for the first six months of 2007.
- Display-related advertising revenues totaled $3.2 billion or 32 percent for the first six months of 2007. Display-related advertising includes Display ads (21% of 2007 first six-month revenues or $2.1 billion), Rich Media (7% or $699 million), Broadband Video (1% or $100 million), and Sponsorship (3% or $300 million).
- Classifieds revenues accounted for 17 percent of 2007 first six-month revenues or $1.7 billion.
Lead Generation revenues accounted for 8 percent of 2007 first six-month revenues or $799 million.What’s striking is that:
Online advertising continues to remain concentrated with the ten leading ad-selling companies, which accounted for 70 percent of total revenues in the second quarter of 2007.
Assuming that the projections are fulfilled and US Internet ad revenues reach $20 billion, that will mean that as an ad medium the Internet is larger than:
- Yellow pages
- Radio
- Outdoor
- Most categories of TV (though not in the aggregate)
- Most categories of magazines
But consumers don’t trust online ads vs. traditional media advertising. That’s a problem for marketers that want to shift more of their budgets online to pursue those audiences. Internet ads have to be done much more thoughtfully than traditional advertising.
Ghost of Midnight is an online journal about fostering community within neighborhoods, with a special focus on Front Porch Forum (FPF). My wife, Valerie, and I founded FPF in 2006... read more