State of Local

ClickZ.com’s Kate Kaye provides a useful 2007 summary of the hot issues surrounding Web metrics.  Kaye nails it when she says that mere “baby steps” were taken by analytics firms to catch up with the rapidly progressing widget- and AJAX-infused Web.  When you boil it down, there were three highlights in 2007.  And, as I see it, three key issues exist in 2008. 

First, the highlights. 

In March, comScore announced its new visits metric.  The firm claimed that metrics like page views were “diminishing in significance” due to new technologies, which is hardly accurate.  When sites spend money upgrading their dynamic content serving capabilities, they need to understand how consumers are clicking around.  KPIs are getting more complicated, but none is truly diminishing.  (Well, cookie visitor counts might be doomed.)

In April, things got nasty when IAB CEO Randall Rothenberg slammed comScore and Nielsen Online (then Nielsen//NetRatings) for using an outdated panel sample methodology producing counts two to three times lower than IAB client server logs.  Rothenberg called for “a solid and transparent foundation for audience measurement,” and urged comScore and Nielsen to undergo independent audits by the Media Ratings Council.

Highlight #3 was in July, when Nielsen came out with its “total minutes” metric, heralded (by Nielsen) as the “best measure of online engagement.”  But, as anyone who’s ever done site redesign research will tell you, lingering visitors are often confused, angry visitors.  When its first rankings had AOL (with its omni-present IM window) dominating the uber-efficient Google, I wasn’t left feeling like Nielsen had mastered the evaluation of engagement. Read More… »

TV news stations love their brands. They splash their logos, slogans and anchor mugs on air, on billboards and the sides of big-city buses.

Stations also brand themselves online with the same smiling anchors and punchy mottos. The strategy generally enjoys limited success, with many stations still struggling to gain a sizable share of local online traffic.

One veteran executive of the digital news world has some advice for those stations: Help your brand pack its bags, drive it to the station and give it an emotional kiss goodbye. Then go home and get to work doing something useful online.

Nancy Bruner’s been doing new media for more than a decade. She just made the switch from heading digital content for the The Seattle Times Co. to leading online development for Fisher Communications. Fisher, based in Seattle, is a publicly traded firm that owns 19 TV stations and nine radio stations, plus a satellite and fiber distribution system and a data center.

Fisher brought Bruner on board shortly after buying Pegasus News, a Dallas-based site that’s trying to forge a next-generation mold for local digital media. Pegasus has a bit of everything – staff writing, aggregating, events listings and a “Daily You” algorithm that learns users’ preferences. Fisher plans to hone the model in Dallas and then adapt it to other markets. Read More… »

A holiday trip to my sleepy Massachusetts hometown never ceases to teach me something.  It was a wicked shockah, indeed, when I noticed, affixed to the weekly townie paper, a bright yellow Post-It shouting, “How Local?  Wicked Local… WickedLocal.com.”  On the site, it was relatively easy to find my local paper.  I was happily greeted by a clean design and simple navigation.  There were top stories that allowed commenting, blog posts, user generated photos, current weather conditions… Heck, there was even a little RSS feed just for my town’s news.   

Most impressive was that stories had been created throughout the week.  No longer do the people of my small hometown have to wait until Thursday to learn of the latest town hall scandal, boys hockey upset or embarrassing cow-tipping arrest.  True, the news fodder is thin, but this is certainly a terrific platform for instant, hyper-local information.

I quickly scrolled down the page to see who was behind this.  The firm is called GateHouse Media.  Its site boasts 101 daily publications reaching a local audience of 10 million readers across 23 states.   A quick look at its publications list shows about 500 properties, from paid weeklies to shoppers.  Monetization is achieved through standard IAB ad units and, of course, a slew of classifieds.  At the core of its classifieds is TotallyLocal.com, a consumer-facing yellow pages venture powered in part by Premier Guide, a Local.com company.  Read More… »

Lately I’ve seen more and more space devoted to the Independent Yellow Pages (IYP) and frankly, I don’t get it.  After reading pieces by Greg Sterling at Screenwerk  and Media Post I’m left with the conclusion that the IYP is not only a valid publication, but that it hasn’t yet suffered much loss of traction as a result of the Internet.  This absolutely astounds me.

Admittedly, I’m a sample of just one, but I can’t recall the last time I used a Yellow Pages for anything other than a doorstop. I have always felt it to be a nearly useless resource.  When it gets dropped on my doorstep, it goes directly into the recycling bin.  Same goes for the little “local” editions as well.  From poor design (i.e., too much clutter) making it hard to find listings, and the onus being on me to decipher where some listings will appear.

I simply don’t want to work that hard when I’m looking for something.  Frankly, I’ll use a white pages and search in the business listings if the Internet’s not available, or if I know the business name for which I’m searching. Or even better, if I need a mechanic, plumber or electrician — I’ll ask a trusted friend for a recommendation. Read More… »

As prognosticators go, I find Jeff Jarvis hits the mark only about 20% of the time. But when he does get it right, he’s really worth reading.

Jarvis has long argued that when it comes to online advertising, “small is the new big.” In other words, while national advertising is obviously important, it’s also vital to reach and encourage local advertisers. Particularly those small clients who couldn’t afford a major local campaign on TV or in print. But could afford online ads, if scheduling ads was easy enough and cheap enough.

His latest post was sparked by Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal article “Local Papers’ Web Scramble.”

Now, for the first time, pure-play Web companies have the biggest share of the local online-ad market. In 2007, Internet companies had a 43.7% share of the $8.5 billion local online-ad market, while newspaper companies had a 33.4% share, according to the media research firm Borrell Associates. Just three years ago, newspapers had 44.1% of the local online-ad market. (Directories such as the Yellow Pages have 10.1%, and local television outlets 9.3%.) Read More… »

If there was ever a doubt in your mind about the folks at Ask.com and their desire to become the search engine of choice, they just got better. On Monday Ask.com added a very cool new element to its site: AskEraser.

AskEraser enables you to have greater control over your search data. More specifically, AskEraser allows you to keep your search activity from being tracked — and with a simple click — it erases Ask.com cookies and stops recording your search history.

In this day and age where online privacy is so vitally important, this is a pretty neat little application for Ask.com’s battle with its better-know brethren, Google and Yahoo. Despite the fact that today’s web is increasingly more personalized, this is still a smart move. With the brouhaha surrounding the Facebook Beacon debacle, and subsequent Clinton-like public apology by CEO Mark Zuckerberg, this looks like a move made specifically with the user experience as the driving force. Ask.com is in effect saying, “you’ve asked for it, and we’ve delivered.”

From a monetization standpoint, Ask.com is clearly leaving the potential for targeted advertising dollars on the table and instead looks like the uber responsible party, concerned about its users. And that’s pretty refreshing.
It will be interesting to see how or if some of the other search engines respond, or if some of the social networks try to do likewise.