Lost Remote has a great description of the pending battle for local attention and advertising. It’s a great summary of the challenges and opportunities for each media outlet.
- Television
- Newspapers
- Radio
- “GYM” aka Google/Yahoo/Microsoft et al.
- Craigslist and paid classifieds
- Pure play locals
- City guides
- Yellow pages and other directories
- Alt weeklies and local magazines
- Outdoor
The local market is a huge opportunity. Just evaluating a single player in Canada shows the potential of building a strong advertising business based on helping people find things in their neighbourhood. The Yellow Pages Income Fund reported just over $879.9 million in gross operating profit in 2007 (that’s a total net income of over $527.7 million). The commitment to local focus has seen YPG re-zone their Toronto Yellow Pages to smaller areas to “improve searching and finding both locally and more broadly such as the addition of maps for high traffic retail areas”. YPG has done a great job building partnerships and relationships with regional phone companies and has a circulation of over 30 million copies of their phone directories with approximately 420,000 unique advertisers. There is a huge opportunity to continue to refine the space and services needed by local businesses.
Y Combinator has identified areas like: 12. Fix Advertsing; 20. Shopping Guides and 25. A Craigslist competitor, that they’d be interested in funding. It’s no surprise then to see a plethora of local startups that fit in a variety of the above categories:
I’d love to see an equivalent of EveryBlock for Canada. But until then the recommendations provided by GigPark are enough to help me find services in my neighbourhood.
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We’re thrilled that GigPark is meeting your needs for local services, David!
But, as much as we’d like to, we can’t take ALL the credit … you see, GigPark is simply a tool to find out which plumber, lawyer, baby doula, etc. your friends use. So, you must just have helpful group of friends (and you’re probably a good friend yourself
)
Noah Godfrey
Founder, GigPark
http://www.gigpark.com/people/noahgodfrey
David: What features of EveryBlock do you find the most useful?
As an aggregator of local data we can always pull in new sources. The main problem is choosing the right data source. (We are thinking we should just crowd source this.
)
You should also take a look at http://www.neighbourknowledge.com. This is a Toronto-based, Canada-wide site that launched recently that is intended to be a place where people can share information about their local neighbourhoods (as defined by their postal codes). I used to work for the company that developed this, although I did not work on this project myself. It’s another attempt to provide localized information and advertising targetted to the local market.
this is going to be tough
Busby SEO Test
nice list battle too post..
I think Google is into localization for their searches too.
thank you
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