Fox: Time Warner battle for future of local TV
With local TV stations enduring a huge drop in revenue, their parent companies are battling to grow new revenue in the form of retransmission agreements with cable companies. Fox is pushing for a big increase from Time Warner, and the negotiations are going down to the wire — the deal is up at the end [...]
Twitter takes big step into location-aware future
Twitter has acquired Mixer Labs, the creator of GeoAPI, which provides several services for location-aware applications like Foursquare and BirdFeed. “We’ll be working to combine the contextual relevance of location to tweets,” explains Twitter’s Ev Williams. “We want to know ‘What’s happening?’, and more precisely, ‘Where is it happening?’ As a dramatic example, twittering ‘Earthquake!’ [...]
Local TV revenue down 22.4 percent this year
BIA/Kelsey says the drop is steeper than the 17 percent it predicted. As for next year, BIA/Kelsey is predicting a small increase, and as you can see from the chart below, there’s no big recovery on the horizon. “While television’s numbers are tapering down due to audience erosion from other media delivery options, we continue [...]
Apple shopping network TV video service
The WSJ says Apple is shopping a proposal to offer subscription packages to watch network TV over the internet — perhaps, a customized selection of shows. “If Apple signs up enough networks to launch a viable service—still a very big if—it could ultimately alter the economics of the television business,” explains the Journal. Not only [...]
PaperG signs more media clients for SMB ads
Gannett, New York Times Regional Group, New York Post, and Metromix have signed on with PaperG for its flyerboard self-service ad product (above). Meanwhile, PaperG is working on a new self-serve ad product called PlaceLocal, which it describes as the “industry’s first to fully automate the custom creation, sales and management of rich online advertising [...]
ESPN’s Los Angeles site debuts
ESPNLosAngeles.com launches today with a top-notch local staff, which isn’t very difficult to find these days, given the job market among local journalists. The site follows debuts in Chicago, New York and Dallas.
Brightkite experiments with augmented reality ads
If you own an Android phone with the Layar augmented reality app, you can pop up the Brightkite layer, point your phone around and see markers for Best Buy stores in the distance. Screen grab and write-up about the AR ad right here.
Jobless journalists compete with former employers
“One of the problems is newspapers fired so many journalists and turned them loose to start so many blogs,” writes Alan Mutter, author of the Reflections of a Newsosaur blog, in this NYT story. “They should have executed them. They wouldn’t have had competition. But they foolishly let them out alive.”
Google, Yelp walk away from talks
TechCrunch first reported that Google was poised to buy Yelp for as much as a half-billion dollars, but now the parties have walked away from the talks — possibly because of the leaked TechCrunch story in the first place. The news of a possible acquisition (which could still happen) sent shockwaves through the local interactive [...]
Reputation management ‘will define future’ of local
One of the brightest emerging businesses in local is “reputation management,” or the ability for local businesses to track everything that’s being said about them, from Twitter to CitySearch — even watch how their reviews are trending. Here at ILM 09, Marchex and CloudProfile demo’d their reputation systems, and they’re slick. (You can watch a [...]
Yelp: Patient growth key to success
Here at the ILM 09 conference, Yelp COO Geoff Donaker says that it takes 18 to 36 months for Yelp to gain an adequate density of reviews in a new city. This measured city-by-city growth — instead of blanketing the country all at once — has been key to its success, he said, adding that [...]
TV, radio sales teams gaining online traction
Here at ILM 09, the BIA Kelsey folks released some fascinating survey stats on sales channels — where local businesses go to spend their online ad dollars. The vast majority, 49%, use self serve to buy search ads. 24% go to yellow pages sales teams. 8% to ad agencies. 8% to newspapers. And 9% go [...]
Bing Maps mashes neighborhood blog posts
Here at ILM 09, MSN’s Cyrus Krohn took the audience through a demo of Bing’s new neighborhood blog application, Local Lens, which is currently in beta. Hundreds of blogs in a dozen or so cities are mapped by neighborhood, or if there’s address information, by a specific location. In the left pane, you can browse [...]
CNN.com invests in Outside.in
The Wall Street Journal reports that CNN invested an undisclosed amount in Outside.in, the hyperlocal aggregation company. The investment was part of a $7 million funding round. This last summer, msnbc.com purchased EveryBlock.com, which provides block-level news and data. The local race continues to heat up. Update: Outside.in says that its headlines will soon appear [...]
