Paper G: PlaceLocal
So ReachLocal is now a public company for a whopping week now and I spent the last few hours last night reading through their prospectus. I had met them very briefly at an AdTech conference and had always been meaning to have a deeper look… I had always mentally put them in the same bucket as Local.com but it turns out they’re pretty different. While Local.comprimarily runs consumer destination local search sites, ReachLocal on the other hand is providing a service to local business owners, helping them dip a toe into digital marketing, first with search and now with an offering that includes display advertising.
I’ve grown to the believe that there is a huge opportunity in the area that ReachLocal is targeting… there is so much advertising money floating around in the local markets and until recently so little attention being paid to servicing brick and mortar retail folks who just have a few thousand dollars a month to spend on digital advertising.
While Google is now up to something like 1.5 million advertisers, and has done a great job of servicing the long tail of online oriented advertisers. It’s the long tail of offline advertisers, which is proving to be a bit tricky to convert to online, not just because they’re the long tail and there are tens of millions of them, but they don’t live and die by traffic to their website… heck many don’t even have websites and can be pretty ambivalent toward the whole thing!
One of the newest companies to pop up on my radar screen in this area is a company called Paper G recently started by some Yale and Harvard students. Read more
A Look at Local.com
I was over at AdTech last week, trying to scope out the latest and greatest happening in location. Unlike a few weeks earlier at the search engine marketing conference SMX East, where local search was quite a hot topic, permeating many booths and break out sessions. The local emphasis among the larger internet marketing community seemed much more subdued. Folks like Quova, who have provided geo IP targeting oriented solutions for websites for years had updated their offering to include mobile location aware targeting through a third party partnership with Navizon, which was a nice extension but nothing too exciting.
A company called HelloMetro was busy trying to build up city oriented sites to compete with Citysearch… although it sounds like they’re still a long way off for the moment in terms of size.
The biggest booths seemed reserved for folks trying to create local business directories for consumers like Local.com and Localpages.com and also ReachLocal.com which is trying to create a platform for buying and selling local ads across the existing and search, directory and display ecosystem.
In the current age of search and with all the innovations that the existing search engines are doing to infer local intent (Google 10-pack), the idea of going back and creating a local directory seems so old school, but there they are.
Here is a drill down on what I picked up about Local.com
There are a couple of different components to their business: Read more
