Matt Richtel wrote yesterday for the New York Times about the growth of websites aimed at older audiences.
Older people are sticky. That is the latest view from Silicon Valley. Technology investors and entrepreneurs, long obsessed with connecting to teenagers and 20-somethings, are starting a host of new social networking sites aimed at baby boomers and graying computer users.
The sites have names like Eons, Rezoom, Multiply, Maya’s Mom, Boomj, and Boomertown. They look like Facebook — with wrinkles.
And they are seeking to capitalize on what investors say may be a profitable characteristic of older Internet users: they are less likely than youngsters to flit from one trendy site to the next.
And the money is flowing…
Last week, VantagePoint Ventures, an early investor in MySpace, announced that it had led a $16.5 million round of financing for Multiply, a social networking site aimed at people who are settled.
In August, Shasta Ventures led a $4.8 million financing round for TeeBeeDee, a site coming out of its test stage this month. The name is short for “To Be Determined” (as in: just because you’re not trolling for a mate on MySpace doesn’t mean your life is over.)
Also in August, Johnson & Johnson spent $10 million to $20 million to acquire Maya’s Mom, a social networking site for parents, according to a person briefed on the deal. The site has been in existence about a year.
Thanks Damien for the heads up.
How much would you pay for the rights to the web address localsearch.com? Really… take a guess.
Well if your bid is anywhere south of $3.3M then you would have lost out to today’s winner who paid just that much. From New England Tech Wire today…
Fairfield, Conn. — AmericanTowns.com, a Fairfield-based network of local community-oriented websites, has received a strategic investment of undisclosed amount from Idearc Media, the Dallas-based publisher of Verizon Yellow Pages. In connection with the deal, Idearc has acquired the LocalSearch.com URL for $3.3 million. AmericanTowns.com was founded in 2000. The company plans to use the investment proceeds from Idearc to continue growing its database, which is projected to feature over 10 million local events this year. AmericanTowns.com will expand its hyper-local offering to more than 22,000 U.S. towns this year, Idearc announced.
Thanks Lee.
Marty Himmelstein writes today in Screenwerk about Google and local search. I recommend reading the whole piece. Himmelstein appears to be thinking systemically… holistically. Impressive… even if his state is upside down.
And given Front Porch Forum‘s initial local success, his recognition of neighborhood’s role is noteworthy…
The importance of community and neighborhood to local search: The fundamental role of a community in local search is to establish an environment of trust so that users can rely on the information they obtain from the system. Businesses exist in a network of customers, suppliers, municipal agencies, local media, hobbyists, and others with either a professional or avocational interest in establishing the trustworthiness of local information. These community members can contribute unique perspectives to create a rich and accurate depiction of the businesses with which they are involved.
Following up on our previous posting about Grayboxx, here’s the headline from Peter K. at The Local Onliner today… Grayboxx CEO: OK, Burlington Probably ‘Too Small’
I’m glad to hear a reasonable explanation for the funky results seen by people who live in Burlington. I hope Greyboxx does well elsewhere and improves in Burlington.
Peter appears to have stolen Montpelier’s crown as Vermont’s capital and bestowed it upon Burlington. 😉
And while Grayboxx says it should work better in areas with more than 100,000 people, that doesn’t quite jibe either, since greater Burlington has about 130,000 (the City proper is 38,000).
I tried to join this new service, but haven’t been able to yet.
I think I visited Smalltown.com a year ago and thought it looked interesting. Well, it seems they’ve been busy! They now host sites in five California communities…
Smalltown is the website where you can discover local treasures from the best source: your neighbors. Find a great babysitter, carpenter or stylist. Read reviews of the high school play. Watch a video clip about a new restaurant.
Smalltown recieved $3M of Series A investment about a year ago. But what caught my attention was co-founder Hal Rucker’s recent blog posting…
Which makes more sense for local: generate deep and uniquely useful content in a small geography, then replicate that process for hundreds of towns, or launch the whole US with shallow content all at once? (Choose one, because you can’t launch with deep local content everywhere at the same time.) InsiderPages went wide and shallow and it didn’t work out. Backfence tried to go deep in several regions at the same time and it, too, couldn’t get enough traction. Smalltown is going very deep in a very small geography, with plans to replicate that success quickly when we have all the technology and marketing knobs dialed in.
This gets at my previous postings about authentic local sites vs. global giants masquerading as local sites. As the number of web offerings explode, quality of information and genuine local knowledge will become more and more valuable. Sites that tap into that will become gems among the countless “wide and shallow” offerings.
I can foresee each city in the country having its own authentically local site (or sites) in the next few years that clearly dominate their town’s online space. Just like when every city had 1, 2, 3 or more daily newspapers. Just like in the past when you wanted news, sports, weather, debate, advertising, coupons, classifieds, etc… most people reached for the Gazette or Sentinel or whatever dominated the local newspaper scene.
Some sites will be homegrown entrepreneurial efforts (e.g., iBrattleboro), others may be a morphed newspaper that gets online done right, some areas will be covered by a “chain” like Smalltown or Backfence (RIP), and other poor towns will only have soulless cookie cutter sites supplied top-down by a giant dot.com.
So Smalltown appears to be doing the hard work of developing truly local sites based on their proprietary platform and process. I’m impressed with the concept. I’m not familiar with their initial communities, so it’s hard to assess the results to date, and I haven’t focused on the technology they’ve developed. More power to ’em. 🙂
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
