Newspapers Becoming Local SEMs

Like their yellow pages cousins before them newspapers are starting to use the same set of third party vendors to offer simplified search marketing to their local advertisers.

On Thursday, at SES Local, WebVisibile announced the expansion of the “SearchMax” program to McClatchy’s Miami Herald. SearchMax is the same type of program WebVisible powers for yellow pages publishers, allowing them to sell paid-search to local advertisers and totally outsource the campaign set up and managment to take the complexity out of the product, for the sales channel and the local advertiser.

All of the major (and several secondary) yellow pages publishers have versions of these programs in place. To my current knowledge (though it may be a bigger group now), here are the newspapers offering essentially the same product:

• Hearst’s Houston Chronicle (Vendor: Marchex/TrafficLeader)
• McClatchy (Vendor: WebVisible)
• Freedom Communications (Vendor: LocalLaunch)
• MediaNews Group (Vendor: WebVisible)

This is the way that most local businesses will adopt search/online marketing — through a third party that simplifies it for them, while taking a margin on the actual cost. A year or so from now all the major newspaper publishers will have these programs in place.

As I said in a previous post:

I spoke a long time ago with Inceptor’s EVP Mick Sack (Inceptor is now owned by SuperPages) who said that he worries about a time when you have several channels in a market selling essentially the same product, maybe from the same vendor-supplier. All these offerings are still in their early stages (and there will be acquisitions and consolidation). But we’re starting to get a glimpse of what Sack suggested, especially when you consider that local TV affiliates and radio, as well as local cable companies will all be selling a simplified online/search marketing product in addition to most metro dailies and YP publishers.