CitySearch - The First 7 Months

[Brett_Tabke]

[webmasterworld.com...]

Anyone playing City Search?

[martinibuster]

I'm interested in knowing, too.

[Brett_Tabke]

cool service though. I found out a couple things about my hometown that I didn't know.

[eWhisper]

Anyone know what yellow page listings they are using? They don't seem consistant with either ppc, or any online yp or physical yp I'm aware of, and it's not ppc as there are people listed who don't know what that stands for.

[TomWaits]

We considered it, didn't do it. Got a free listing instead.

[hobbnet]

I used to buy PPC featured ads in their Automotive Category, within the Yellow Pages section.

The CPC price was on average with the rest of the industry but the volume was pathetically low (20 cicks a day, tops)

[martinibuster]

I heard that the AOL Yellow pages charges $35/month. This is a problem. Everyone has their own localized thing going on, you'll go broke trying to have them all covered.

[hobbnet]

AOL will do nationwide listings too, but they always do it on a flat fee basis. I have never been able to convince them to allow me a PPC campaign.

[martinibuster]

In an article at DMNews about CitySearch [dmnews.com], Barry Diller is quoted as saying that CitySearch will "end the year with 25,000 local search advertisers..."

The way Barry tells it, the search engines are all negotiating with him for a slice of his pie.

"CitySearch is currently being courted by Google, Yahoo and MSN to have their huge national pipes linked to the local... All the national portals, all search engines are saying they would like to attack the local," Diller said. "The difference for CitySearch is it's... one thing to geo-tag things, it's another thing to actually have the data."

[eWhisper]

We've had 14 locations listed with citysearch for 3 weeks. We're the only sponsored listing in our prime category. Citysearch estimated we'd need to spend $100/month/location to catch all the traffic.

We've spent a grand total of $0 to date.

[HughMungus]

"I don't think our advertisers would like it at all," Mr. Marshall said. "They don't have the sophistication to manage a bidding environment, and they don't have the time."

This is the correct answer. Local businesses simply do not have the time or inclination to pay for web advertising. Maybe high-margin, highly-competitive markets like mortgages or autos, but not general merchandise or services.