Daily Drive By: Ingenio and The World Association of Newspapers

June 22, 2006 | Leave a Comment

Short on time? Here's the bottom line. Short on time? Here’s the Bottom Line!

Please note that this article was written prior to Local Na8ion’s re-launch and as such the content may not be relevant for today’s audience of local marketers.

From MediaPost on Ingenio, Pay-Per-Call Firm Launches New Product For Phone-Based Consultants

“PAY-PER-CALL COMPANY INGENIO TODAY WILL launch a new division that aims to help sellers of technical support, consulting, or other on-phone services to market and sell their services online.

“Certainly we’ve seen a lot of goods being sold over the Internet. But services–the things we have to say, all the things that comprise the service economy–we haven’t seen online,” said Scott Faber, Ingenio co-founder and general manager of the new division, dubbed Ether.”

Localna8ion: Diversification. Not making enough from local advertisers yet eh? To be fair this is a great idea and I could see it really taking off for content experts (the little guys with big brains that make up Localna8ion) who would have an easy way to start making money by generating calls from their blogs and social software sites. With the phone charges and credit card charges taken care of by Ingenio and a standard 15% commission to pay for it all and you can see this working. Getting the word out beyond the geeks of the world will be the challenge.

From the World Association of Newspapers — WAN

“Overall, the audience for newspapers keeps on growing, both in print and online. Newspapers are increasing their reach through the exploitation of a wide range of new distribution channels, ranging from daily free newspapers to online editions. They are proving to be incredibly resilient against the onslaught of a wide range of media competition.” — Timothy Balding, Chief Executive Officer of WAN

Here are some pertinent facts from the study, which has been conducted for the last 20 years:

“More than 439 million people buy a newspaper every day, up from 414 million in 2001. Average readership is estimated to be more than one billion people each day.”

“2005 saw the best advertising performance in four years, with a revenue increase of 5.7 percent.”

“Seven of 10 of the world’s 100 best selling dailies are now published in Asia. China, Japan and India account for 62 of them. Newspapers in seven European Union countries increased their total circulation in 2005.”

“The circulation of US dailies fell -2.35 percent in 2005 and -4.02 percent over five years. Most of the decline came in evening dailies, which saw a year-on-year circulation decline of -6.6 percent, compared with only -1.6 percent for morning dailies. Over the past five years, evening dailies declined -17.5 percent, compared with a -1.4 percent drop for morning newspapers.”

“Newspaper advertising revenues in the USA, by far the largest newspaper advertising market in the world, increased by +1.51 percent in 2005 and +7 percent over the last five years.”

“Newspaper online consumption rose +8.71 percent in 2005, and +200 percent over the past five years.”

“Internet advertising revenues continue to grow rapidly, and were up 24 percent in 2005, the highest growth for five years.”

Localna8ion.com: As an online marketer you’d expect me to laud the last two points focused on interactive newspaper consumption and online ad revenues but I won’t. The key story here is that readership and ad revenues have done as well as they have given the incredible onslaught of the Internet over the last 5-10 years. Yes, the rate of change may take a hockey stick to print newspapers’ ass in the next few years but this is a good reminder that there’s a hell of a lot of people still taking their daily rag on the commuter train and to their favorite ‘quiet time’ reading place.  Here’s a shocking prediction from Localna8ion.  Newspapers will evolve spurred on by good content, longer reader life spans of boomers, and enabling technologies that will reduce their costs and expand their capabilities.

Posted by Julian | Filed Under Blog, Connect, News, Reviews & Rants 

Local search goes looking for users…and buyers

June 20, 2006 | Leave a Comment

Short on time? Here's the bottom line. Short on time? Here’s the Bottom Line!

Please note that this article was written prior to Local Na8ion’s re-launch and as such the content may not be relevant for today’s audience of local marketers.

I read an informative article over on MarketingSherpa yesterday titled Running Ads in Google Local vs. Main Google Search — Disappointing Results (So Far) about Google Local Search. The story casts a spotlight on the central issue that local search does have which is a) traffic b) the right kind of traffic.

The Traffic Question:

“Partly this was due to the fact that although Google Local ads may get high clicks, there just isn’t much traffic there to begin with. According to Hitwise data (see link to chart below), less than 1% of total Google traffic goes to Local. However, Krutick assured MarketingSherpa that his Local ads got more than enough clicks to the coupon page that there should have been redemptions if the conversion pattern even remotely matched the main Google.com lead redemption.”

The right kind of traffic:

“So why didn’t Local clicks convert? No one knows for sure as no survey was conducted. But, the head of Krutick’s search team did share this speculation, “Marketers are thinking Google Local is going to be used like the yellow pages. You know, you look there when you’re ready to buy something and you want to know about local merchants.

“In reality it didn’t turn out that way for us. Our theory is at Google.com, people are buyers and they are looking for a local store that sells mattresses. However at Google Local, the most searched for term tends to be store name, not category. It’s possible people are only going to Local if they are actually searching for the store itself.”"
And these aren’t easy problems to solve.  The search engines are forging new territory and unlike general search or the Print Yellow Pages that have a proven usage pattern and clear value proposition to users it looks like it’s going to be a trial and error learning process.

Posted by Julian | Filed Under Blog, Connect, News, Reviews & Rants