Palore’s Hanan Lifshitz writes an interesting column at SEL in which he says that the best sales prospects for publishers seeking to attract SMB ad dollars are those local businesses that are either already advertising elsewhere or those who’ve claimed online profiles but aren’t ye...

One of the homespun stories of interactive local media is the rise of HelloMetro, a city guide company that started in 1999 as an entrepreneurial effort in Louisville, KY, and has since grown to include 15 staffers, including five direct salespeople. The company, which has hundreds of Hello(City nam...

Emily Steel writes an interesting piece in the WSJ about search ads expanding beyond search engines: Even as No. 1 search engine Google’s share of the online ad market — including search ads — continues to grow, marketers have started shifting ad purchases to other digital media, f...

The following is a guest post from Long Hill Consulting’s Marty Himmelstein:   Local search’s most significant failure is its inability to provide an accurate stratum of content about neighborhood businesses. The necessity for this base layer arises from the defining characteristic of loca...

Chris Smith, who used to be with Idearc, writes today’s Locals Only column at SEL in which he makes a range of specific recommendations to directory publishers. Here’s his list: Come up with some way to stop distributing books to people who no longer use them. Make it clear on your phone...

The recent TMP/comScore data shows print yellow pages falling behind search engines as a local information resource. However a release out today from Knowledge Networks reaffirms print yellow pages’ place as the most used local resource. It’s kind of like disagreement among the various c...

I moderated a panel the other day at the Where 2.0 show on maps and monetization. We discussed online and mobile. The panel tried (in 30 minutes) to explore all the business models and revenue sources that publishers and developers could use to monetize their creations. (Perry Evans has captured som...

From a Locals Only column by YPA president Neg Norton this a.m.: Search engine consolidation could certainly create gaps in the market as the companies involved are likely to take their eyes off the local search ball while dealing with integration issues. This would create an Internet Yellow Pages (...

My “Locals Only” column today elaborates on my preliminary thinking about the local aspects of the Microsoft bid and the challenges there: Last Friday, shortly after the Microsoft bid for Yahoo was made public, Danny Sullivan and I had an opportunity to discuss the proposed acquisition w...