The Local Onliner reports today…
I love to see examples of grassroots innovation in local online marketing. One of my favorites is an e-newsletter from Sprocket Entertainment, the producers of a local comedy night in my hometown of Carlsbad, CA.
Sprocket is a startup by two comedians which also produces shows in Spokane, WA. It gets everyone to sign up for the newsletter when they use PayPal to buy tickets to their once-a-month event at a renovated theater, which they consider an alternative night out for “people who aren’t into loud music and pickup bar scenes.”
So far, Carlsbad Inn, Overstock Spas, Spoon Grill & Bar, and Tamarack Beach Resort have all signed up. From the looks of things, Sprocket is doing about as well with local advertisers as more concerted efforts by Carlsbad.com, a chain of beach town city guides.
Some similarities with Front Porch Forum here. We’re testing the waters with local sponsors… a half-dozen have signed on during our testing phase, including…
Another 70 or so have joined our waiting list as we move beyond testing in the months ahead.
More valuable information via The Local Onliner…
My former colleagues at Borrell Associates have carved out a unique role in the local online advertising space with their annual survey of local media revenues. This year is the survey’s fifth, and was conducted with 2,885 properties in the U.S and Canada.
What Borrell found was cumulative local online revenues of $7.5 billion, with 31.6 percent growth (compared to 20.7 percent for national online advertising). Within the local ecosystem, newspapers account for 35.9 percent– which is impressive, but down, percentage wise, by several points. Pure play Internet companies have 33.2 percent, and Yellow Pages have 11.7 percent. Other local revenues come from “Other Print,” including Shoppers and other local magazines, which have 9.2 percent; TV stations, which have 7.7 percent; and radio stations, which have 2.2 percent.
Dedicated, online-only sales people were up 26 percent in 2006, and Borrell sees budgets for an additional 35 percent in 2007. “Some of the largest local sites are now employing two dozen or more online-only salespeople as they migrate from the up-sell model and begin to fully embrace Web-only sales,” says Borrell. “The median gross revenue per online-only salesperson was $278,570; the largest sites were seeing triple that rate.”
According to a new report, online ad revenue climbed to about $17B in 2006, a 35% gain over 2005.
Branded display ads and search placements helped the online ad industry post its best year ever in 2006, according to numbers released Wednesday by the Internet Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers. Overall, revenue increased 35% last year to $16.9 billion–due in large part to record fourth-quarter revenue of $4.8 billion.
Both search revenue and display revenue climbed 31% year-over-year, to $6.8 billion and $5.4 billion, respectively. Search accounted for 40% of last year’s revenues, slightly lower than the 41% it commanded in 2005. Display advertising, classifieds and referrals accounted for 32%, 18% and 8% of last year’s full revenues, respectively.
See more details here.
Front Porch Forum is just getting its sponsorship program rolling, and we’re going with a flat rate per ad approach. This report states that 48% of online ads work that way, while 47% of the ad deals are based on ad performance.
Front Porch Forum has enjoyed a surprising level of success facilitating neighbor-to-neighbor connection. In our first half-year, 20% of the City of Burlington has subscribed and put our free service to great use. Thanks and congratulations to the thousands of people who are making it all happen.
Now, we’re focused on developing a local-business-to-neighbor component… our new sponsorship program. We intend to provide snippets about local businesses largely not available elsewhere, AND, in the process, we aim to generate enough income to cover the expenses associated with hosting 130 neighborhood forums across Chittenden County.
We’ve been working on this (and posting updates on the various neighborhood forums) for the past few months. Now, this week, we tested our first sponsor message from Seven Days, the local free weekly newspaper (Cathy Resmer blogged about it)…
SPONSOR MESSAGE
By Seven Days, http://sevendaysvt.com, web@sevendaysvt.com
Wed, 16 May 2007Should Zoe Christiansen be allowed to play her clarinet on Church Street? Find out why this young busker was banned from the Marketplace. Listen to her music and tell us what you think at http://sevendaysvt.com.
We’re sensitive about balancing this new program with the desire to keep each neighborhood forum focused on the neighbor-to-neighbor conversation, so your feedback will be much appreciated. We’re excited about the sponsorship program because it will support (hopefully!) Front Porch Forum as we move forward AND it will give local businesses and nonprofits a chance to connect with various neighborhoods.
We’re still in an early testing phase, so we’re only working with a few sponsors. If your business, nonprofit, agency, special event, etc. is interested in sponsoring a few to all of the neighborhood forums in and around Burlington, please add your information to our sponsor wait list. If you already have joined that wait list and would like to join Seven Days and others in our initial test, please contact me directly. Cheers! -Michael
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:
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:
Looks like a great event shaping up next week… all about local online: DRILLING DOWN ON LOCAL ’07 – The Annual Silicon Valley Summit. Organizer Peter Krasilovsky blogs about it here. Most of the mainstream heavy hitters appear to be on the agenda. I wonder how many locally based entities will attend and/or speak vs. national and global efforts that deliver “local” from afar?
Put another way, how much “local online” is delivered by local business (and other entities)? Might be an interesting question for the good folks at the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies, the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, and my friend and author Michael Shuman (Going Local, The Small-Mart Revolution).
Regardless, I wish I could be there next week… sounds like a powerful conference.
Smalltown.com landed $3M in new funds recently to ramp up it’s model of local online. Peter Krasilovsky reports:
Smalltown [is] an IYP site with social aspects via reviews, calendars and (now) Top 10 lists. Five months after launching SME-oriented sites in San Mateo and Burlingame, Smalltown has announced three new Bay Area locales, added video uploads, hired a VP of Sales, and begun a Google campaign.
This is a very interesting effort:
Usage-wise, Rucker says he’s got 3.5 percent of the launched communities visiting on a weekly basis. About 1.8 percent have registered, which gives them the right to review sites, etc. Rucker is aiming for a registered base of three percent.
After six months, Front Porch Forum has about 17% of Burlington, VT registered.
And I just heard that i-neighbors has a new version of their service up and running, although I don’t have any details.
Peter Krasilovsky reports today:
Outside.In, the place-blogging site that collects everything that appears on the Web in a geographical context – blogs, traditional media, individual contributions — has won $900,000 of funding… The money will allow the the three co-founders to expand to a staff of ten, add new resources, including a “meet your neighbors” section, and expand internationally. The site currently serves 63 cities and 3,217 neighborhoods.
I’m intrigued by Outside.In. If I understand the site, it attempts to tame the flood of information available on the web (or at least some of it) by lining it up according to place. I’ve tried to register this blog on their system for Burlington, VT and it says I was successful, but then I can’t find any mention of it… I must be missing something.
But more important than my incompetence as a visitor (I wonder how many non-techies will embrace this site?), I looked at some places where I’ve lived in the past that are also well-established Outside.In locations and I’m left with conflicting reactions… (A) wow, cool vs. (B) too much… make it stop! I absorb a lot of media on any given day… not as much as your average hyper-blogger, but way more than most of the John Does I know. And what I’ve seen on Outside.In is a good start, but the information has not been tamed enough. Makes me feel like someone left the tap running. So I should take another look to understand it better.
The Local Onliner goes on to say:
Union Square’s Fred Wilson [one of the investors], in a press release, presents an interesting hypothesis about his latest investment. “The best Web services are two-way systems. They take content in, add something to it, and then send it back out. YouTube works this way. So do Delicious and Flickr. To date, we haven’t seen such a service for local information online. Outside.in will hopefully fill that void.”
Front Porch Forum does this at a neighborhood level with neighbors’ words. We’ve taken in thousands of postings, added value, and put them back out to our neighborhood forums.
On his blog, Wilson has more: “Look at the advertisers who populate the local paper, the Yellow Pages, and the local radio stations. They need a place to go online and when they find it, the dollars that will flow are large, very large. Clearly search will get a big piece of that pie (search always does), but the killer local service is one that can serve the residents and the merchants of a city, town, and neighborhood the way the local paper has in the past.”
We plan to test our sponsorship program in Burlington, Vermont this month. Initial reaction from our members (17% of the city subscribed in our first six months) is encouraging. Those I’ve spoken with don’t see the messages from sponsors as advertising, rather just another message about their neighborhood or side of town. Can I be hopeful and skeptical at the same time?
I love the Local Onliner! Here’s another interesting post from today. My answer to Peter Krasilovsky’s refrigerator question below… “Yes, Front Porch Forum.”
Krillion, a startup with deep pockets… launched the first iteration of its “localized search engine” today. The highly attractive, ad-supported service is kicking off with a dedicated appliance search… Krillion is crawling national retailer feeds for appliance availability, store location and sales info. Retailers include Home Depot, Lowe’s, Best Buy, Ikea, Sears (and in the Bay Area, Orchard Supply Hardware). In addition to providing very good product and price information, Krillion provides a click-to-call capability.
Competitors such as ShopLocal, Yokel, Nearby Now and CNET provide similar services. ShopLocal, for one, would seem to have more data sources, since it sucks in all the retailer info from its newspaper partners; Run of Press and circular ads; as well as from a Web partnership with shopping.com.
For now, Krillion says its crawling is far more extensive than any of its competitors, with 275 million pages of relevant local search results displaying local product information for major appliances in every burg in the U.S. “It is an important piece of the local search puzzle,” says [former RHD executive Simon] Greenman. He adds that most local results are like “Swiss cheese.” Greenman also says that the focus on national retailers is smart since the focus stays on big ticket items, and “you get scale issues when you go local.”
But a question I ask is: isn’t there a way to feature both the big box stores and the local merchants? Sure, Krillion turns up an impressive number of GE Profile refrigerators from several big box stores. ShopLocal, meanwhile, only turns up one (from AM Royal). But one of the biggest (and cheapest) stores in my hometown of Carlsbad,CA is actually Pacific Sales. They advertise heavily in local papers. Can’t someone find it?
Front Porch Forum’s answer? Ask your neighbors! Questions like this get asked all the time on our neighborhood forums. “Where’s the best place to buy a new refrigerator?” The writer will hear about the local versions of Pacific Sales, along with comments about service and other issues he might not be considering… “look at the Energy Star ratings” or “check out RecycleNorth for great deals on slightly used models.” Or, even… “ask for the manager, Herb, and tell him I sent you.”
Sure, research online, but then ask the neighbors and SHOP LOCAL! (By the way, that means locally owned retailers.)
The Local Onliner reports today:
The decline of their ad share with retailers has newspapers worried to death. But several execs speaking at the NAA marketing conference last week in Las Vegas said they can bring retailers back into the fold with special vertical sites.
Ken Riddick, VP of Interactive Media at The Minneapolis Star Tribune, said that the newspaper has attracted 300 businesses to its ShopMN site, which is a partnership with the Minnesota Retailers Association… Riddick is especially bullish on neighborhood-level search. “It can be very powerful, especially for smaller advertisers,” he says.
Jim Michels, director of new media for The Evansville Courier & Press, says his paper’s vertical approach has similarly had strong dividends. Home improvement is the paper’s first vertical. “We had research showing that people want to put money into their house,” he said. The resulting site, Tri-State Home Show, has sold 125 enhanced listings at up to $29.95 per month. “It is bringing in $55,000 of extra revenue,” he says. He thinks the paper can probably boost sales up to 150.
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