Forum Moderators: bakedjake
From the article,
CitySearch, the network of city sites owned by Barry Diller's USA Interactive, plans to announce a new search engine and advertising program today that puts a local spin on the highly successful pay-per-click advertising approaches of sites like Google and Overture. And the biggest search sites are also moving aggressively to serve the local market. "Google, Overture, Yahoo — they're all looking at this," said Neal Polachek, senior vice president of the Kelsey Group, a research company in Princeton, N.J. "The search business is going to become increasingly local, because these companies realize that local is the way the world runs."
Judging by recent tests on CitySearch, Briggs Ferguson, CitySearch's president, said local merchants appeared willing to adopt this pay-per-click approach. Without disclosing specific dollar amounts, Mr. Ferguson said that in the Boston and Atlanta markets, advertising revenues increased 50 percent in the first six weeks the local sites offered the pay-per-click model.
And, you can always plug in 'local terms' into a major SE ( like Google, WiseNut, Gigablast, etc) and get fairly good results.
I get that they believe they can get some PPC $$$, but what about the punters?
Will it catch on with them? The highlight from the release indicates that advertisers are hip, so the ROI must be there...unless they forgot to track it. :)
