State of Local

With the introduction of Apple’s 3G iPhone & iPhone App Store on July 11, NowLocal debuted as the first news application. We saw tremendous interest from iPhone users – as NowLocal has since become the 5^th most popular news app on iTunes. Equally impressive was the attention garnered by bloggers and trade press:

• Time.com’s Top 11 iPhone Applications
• TMC.net
• Lost Remote
• The Frager Factor
• Somewhat Frank
• MinnPost.com

Ultimately designed as an application for publishers, NowLocal is a local news aggregation tool that detects the user’s location and provides a feed of local stories from thousands of local news sources.  As a user changes location, NowLocal automatically updates the feed of stories based on their new location, providing hyper-local news results from the most trusted relevant local sources. 

For IB, the iPhone app was a great opportunity for us to leverage new technology, understand the needs of the market and adapt in order to provide the best tools to help consumers find the news and information they depend upon.

If you haven’t had a chance to see NowLocal yet, be sure to check out this quick demo.

Dan Finnegan, the former head of Yahoo’s HotJobs property, is quoted in the NY Times today saying this:

Businesses like travel, shopping, music and even HotJobs were all great products, but none were going to make a huge difference in the fight with Google unless we used them to drive the main search business.

HotJobs has been the main focus of the Yahoo / Newspaper consortium to date. While, in the short-run, HotJobs did get Yahoo the ability to distribute search onto all their newspaper partner sites, is that how Dan meant the quote? My experience has been that Dan’s sentiment generally = vertical search (or, more accurately, Universal Search). It’s about driving query volume for the core search property. If that’s actually the case - and Yahoo is starting to focus on driving core search volume at the expense of their “local” verticals - how much will that hurt help their newspaper partners?

Ken Doctor and Terry Heaton have been providing good insight into the Yahoo - Newspaper consortium for some time now.

This past week, J.P. Morgan released a very detailed, and bullish, analysis of the 2008 Internet sector titled “Nothing But Net.”

Key assumptions underlying the survey:

1. US economic growth to remain fairly steady. At this point, this is becoming a contrarian view.
2. Advertiser demand for “premium” inventory will increase. Though overall CPMs may increase, industry trends we’ve seen show “premium” CPMs coming under pressure due to increased alternatives from better targeting technology (geo / behavioral) and newer publishers.

Summary:

• Total online ad market growth rate: 21% in 2008, down from 26% in 2007.
• 20% growth in “graphical” ad spend due to more UVs, higher PVs/UV, more ads per page, higher CPMs and higher sell-through.
• CPM growth rate will accelerate by 4% due to scarcity and better targeting capabilities
• Internet will continue to cannibalize Newspaper ad spend, which declined ~8% in F’07
• Large companies will continue to seek out investments in social media (e.g. MSNBC/Newsvine)
• Top 20 ad networks will earn approximately $2B+ in revenue in 2007 (~14% of the display ad market). Ad network revenue to grow 25% CAGR through 2010 (outpacing overall market).
• Acquisition and consolidation to get scale in ad network space. Motivations are: Traffic (scale), Technology (tools), Transactional (buying profitable firms)
• Mobile ads will be like video ads: A whole lot of talk, not a whole lot of $.

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… »

Here’s a pretty neat “local” website (in Beta) that I can see providing a great service for local consumers some day. While I have to admit that I like the concept of the site, I mostly like the catchiness of the site’s name: WhatsOpen.com (punctuation error notwithstanding).

In fact, just yesterday I was asking myself this very question.  I had to help my inlaws out by buying them a new computer at 4:30 in the afternoon–on New Year’s Day–and with three major electronics retailers close by, I wanted/needed to know what’s open? In my case all three are geographically close, so it wasn’t too big a deal, but had they been in three different directions maybe a quick mobile search on What’sOpen.com, could have helped determine which direction to point the car!  (By the way, for those of you following along, I used ancient technology i.e., the telephone to call the stores, for my answer).  Read More… »