Internet Trumps All Other News Sources

There have been surveys like this in the past so the findings aren’t particularly revelatory but it’s worth posting. A new Zogby poll (n=3,000) found that Americans now believe the Internet to be the “most reliable” and preferred news source vs. all others:

[M]ore Americans would choose the Internet as their only news source than TV, radio and newspapers combined, and Internet reports are considered much more reliable that other media.

It also shows only 1 in 200 people surveyed believes newspapers will be a dominant source of information in 2014.

The survey discovered 56 percent of adults nationwide would pick the Internet if they were allowed just one source for their news, while television, newspapers and radio earned the support of 41 percent – together . . .

The survey . . . revealed 38 percent believe news from the Internet is the most reliable, followed by television at less than half that figure – 17 percent. Newspapers were in third at 16 percent and 13 percent chose radio . . . The poll said 49 percent of all respondents said national newspaper websites were very important and 43 percent said national television websites were important to them as a key source of news.

A total of 41 percent said local newspaper websites were important sources while 34 percent said local television stations were the same.

This is generally bad news for all traditional media, although it’s nothing terribly new or shocking.

___

Related: Google apparently testing new more visual news destination.

Can a Wikipedia for Cities Succeed?

I would never have predicted the success of Wikipedia itself so I certainly won’t dismiss WikiCity a new Wiki site for 22,000 US cities and towns that formally launched yesterday. According to the press release:

WikiCity is a project designed to make communities accessible, defining each not just as a dot on a map or a collection of statistics, but as a chorus of raucous, opinionated citizens falling in love with their hometown all over again. Much like Wikipedia, WikiCity is a free wiki, and anyone can contribute. However, WikiCity is different because it is designed to promote local community, commerce, tourism, and everyday life within the towns it serves – thus welcoming content that it typically not suited for Wikipedia.

Given that there are two people behind this, it won’t take much revenue to make it sustainable. The real question is whether people will become as engaged with WikiCity as with Wikipedia in terms of content creation. Probably so, as people take “ownership” of their communities.

Smaller towns is probably where this will see traction first.

AT&T to Build a Yelp-Like Site for Younger Users?

AT&T has apparently decided to that attract a younger demographic (those under 30) it’s going to build a different kind of yellow pages with a different brand. It will be a mix of listings and user-generated content. According to Forbes:

Later this year, AT&T plans to roll out an alternative brand for local search, geared primarily at younger users. The site will feature the same core data–listings and advertiser information–as Yellowpages.com, but differ in how it presents information and how it uses user-submitted information. While Yellowpages.com returns data based on advertisers’ profiles, similar to a directory, the new site will prioritize results based on a user’s social connections and recommendations, says Yoo.

Though perhaps about three years late, the concept is sound. The question is whether AT&T can build the site and make it more than simply a copy of Yelp, Yahoo Local, Citysearch, GoodRec or others in the segment. This is the problem that exists in search too —  historically companies have built me-too products that are unable to compete with the market leader.

If AT&T is simply looking for incremental traffic and usage then this approach might be fine. If the company is looking for a brand and UX that are going to pull people from their existing allegiances and behaviors that’s going to be much more difficult.

A smart move perhaps would be to simply buy Yelp and run it as a separate division but with AT&T advertisers as the monetization engine. Perhaps that has already been explored.

SEO DIY for SMBs

David Mihm has written a nice primer on SEO and online marketing for SMBs over at SEL. Although a general introduction, it covers the waterfront from search to social media.

People who read this and related blogs will already be familiar with much of the advice but it’s a very solid overview.

RetailMeNot Puts out Local Coupons Data

RetailMeNot, which in April added local coupons to its basket of online coupons, is now starting to release data on coupon usage. According to the first such report for May (.pdf):

The “savings” number appears inflated because they’re valuing each coupon at $5.

Top 10 most searched categories:
1.       Food
2.       Apparel
3.       Sit-down + Restaurant
4.       Dining
5.       Chicken
6.       Restaurant
7.       Pizza
8.       Children
9.       Auto
10.     Haircut

Top 10 most searched brands:
1.       Stanley Steemer
2.       Arby’s
3.       Chik-Fil-A
4.       IHOP
5.       KFC
6.       Fantastic Sams
7.       Great Clips
8.       Sizzler
9.       Popeye’s Chicken
10.     Edible Arrangements

Top 10 most searched zip codes:
1.       10199 – New York, NY
2.       33763 – Clearwater, FL
3.       75034 – Frisco, TX
4.       30188 – Woodstock, GA
5.       89109 – Las Vegas, NV
6.       22601 – Winchester, VA
7.       66062 – Olathe, KS
8.       19444 – Lafayette Hill, PA
9.       37421 – Chattanooga, TN
10.     60148 – Lombard, IL

Top 10 most coupon-conscious states:
1.       Georgia
2.       Missouri
3.       New Jersey
4.       New York
5.       Virginia
6.       Illinois
7.       Colorado
8.       Massachusetts
9.       Kentucky
10.     Tennessee

It would be interesting to hear the number of downloads vs. the number of in-store redemptions, though that data would be difficult for RMN to get. Historically only a tiny fraction of coupons published are ever actually redeemed.

Mobile distribution is another big area and opportunity for coupons. If you want to read about that there’s plenty I’ve written over at LMS.

comScore: Bing Continuing to Grow

comScore just put out some new numbers showing that Bing is holding and growing. Take it with caution but here are the numbers (without context):

Is Time Going the Way of Life?

Two related pieces this morning caught my eye. One, from AllThingsD, is about Time magazine’s efforts to figure out a paid content strategy: Time Inc. CEO Ann Moore: Let’s Put the Digital “Genie Back in the Bottle.” The second is from The Atlantic, contrasting the rise of The Economist with the decline of Time and Newsweek:

Unlike its rivals, The Economist has been unaffected by the explosion of digital media; if anything, the digital revolution has cemented its relevance. The Economist has become an arbiter of right-thinking opinion (free-market right-center, if you want to be technical about it; with a dose of left-center social progressivism) at a time when arbiters in general are in ill favor. It is a general-interest magazine for an ever-increasing audience, the self-styled global elite, at a time when general-interest anything is having a hard time interesting anybody. And it sells more than 75,000 copies a week on U.S. newsstands for $6.99 (!) at a time when we’re told information wants to be free and newsstands are disappearing.

The article asserts a number of reasons why The Economist is succeeding and argues that Time and Newsweek will increasingly follow its formula:

The easy lesson might be that quality wins out.

The Economist prides itself on cleverly distilling the world into a reasonably compact survey. Another word for this is blogging, or at least what blogging might be after it matures—meaning, after it transcends its current status as a free-fire zone and settles into a more comprehensive system of gathering and presenting information.

While other publications whore themselves to Google, The Huffington Post, and the Drudge Report, almost no one links to The Economist. It sits primly apart from the orgy of link love elsewhere on the Web.

This turns out to have been a lucky accident. Unlike practically all other media “brands,” The Economist remains primarily a print product, and it is valued accordingly. In other words, readers continue to believe its stories have some value. As a result, The Economist has become a living test case of the path not taken by Time and Newsweek, whose Web strategies have succeeded in grabbing eyeballs (Time has 4.7 million unique users a month, and Newsweek has 2 million, compared with The Economist’s 700,000, according to one measure) while dooming their print products to near irrelevance.

Like Craigslist it may be that the success of The Economist cannot be easily emulated by others and may have to do with its unique history and a range of events and circumstances that cannot be duplicated now.

The fate of Time and Newsweek as print publications is all but certain, continuing decline. The prestige and relevance of these publications is quickly going away.

The recent Stephen Johnson cover story about Twitter would have in the past been a major coup for writer Johnson and for Twitter itself. Now it the event passes with only marginal notice (at least in my view). Time is just one of a veritable sea of undifferentiated print publications that now languish on newsstands because the world is moving too fast for them.

Like Life magazine, which was one of the most visible and important publications of its day, Time may simply be nearing the end of its lifecycle.

The Transfer of Local Dollars Online

MediaPost has an interesting article this moring in which it analyzes declines in local ad spend across media and argues that much of the “missing” money from traditional media has gone online:

Although quarterly figures are not available, local online ad spending rose from $4.8 billion in 2005 to $12.6 billion in 2008, an increase of $7.8 billion. Total local ad spending for newspapers, radio and broadcast TV fell from $54.6 billion in 2005 to $48.9 billion in 2008, a decrease of $5.7 billion.

Where local revenue growth rates have gone increasingly negative for traditional media, local online spending was booming from 2005-2008, with annual growth rates of 78%, 19%, 31.6% and 68%, respectively.

The first “local online ad spending” number is probably from Borrell, although not sourced. The numbers cited otherwise are from various sources. There are no definitions of “local” for online except a reference to “local search.”

At a high level the analysis is accurate; ad dollars previously spent on local TV, radio and newspapers have gone elsewhere. However the implied 1:1 transfer of those ad dollars to online (especially to local online) is somewhat misleading. That’s because they’re not directly transferring into online “ad spending” in a direct or equivalent way.

Realtors who stop advertising in the newspaper are not taking those identical dollars and simply spending them at Trulia or Zillow for example. Nor are SMBs who decrease their print YP ad spend taking that money and simply spending it on SEM at Google or an IYP site.

And in the wake of the churn that I’ve been writing about and that Borrell documented in the Local SEM segment, it’s also clear that the issue “on the ground” is more complex — and problemmatic in the case of SMBs — than the 30K foot view suggests.

One SMB’s Imperfect Social Media Strategy

I was walking downtown in San Francisco and saw this sign in the window of a photography store:

It took me some time, using Google and Facebook search, to find the company’s page (no vanity URL here yet):

But if you go to the company’s last-generation website, there’s no reference to Facebook:

I wasn’t able to check Twitter because it’s currently down for maintenance. (Update: checked Twitter and didn’t find anything for the store.)

So while it’s great that the store is using Facebook, it needs to put that information on its site, right after it redesigns that site.

Kenshoo: Anyone Have Experience?

I’ve never spoken to anyone from Kenshoo, probably the only one of the major Local SEM platforms that I don’t have much information about. Does anyone have direct experience and how would you compare it to other offerings?

MySpace Lays Off Almost 30%

An excerpt from the release:

MYSPACE REDUCES STAFF BY NEARLY 30%

Return to Start-Up Culture a Focus for Company Moving Forward

LOS ANGELES—June 16, 2009—As part of a plan to restructure itself into a more innovative, efficient, and entrepreneurial business, MySpace announced today that it will reduce its staff by nearly 30%. This restructuring plan crosses all U.S. divisions of the company and lowers the total number of domestic staff at MySpace to 1,000 employees.

“Simply put, our staffing levels were bloated and hindered our ability to be an efficient and nimble team-oriented company,” said MySpace Chief Executive Officer Owen Van Natta. “I understand that these changes are painful for many. They are also necessary for the long-term health and culture of MySpace. Our intent is to return to an environment of innovation that is centered on our user and our product.”

“MySpace grew too big considering the realities of today’s marketplace,” said Jonathan Miller, News Corporation’s CEO of Digital Media and Chief Digital Officer. “I believe this restructuring will help MySpace operate much more effectively both structurally and financially moving forward. I am confident in MySpace’s next phase under the leadership of Owen and his team.”

comScore: Online Sales Softened in May

According to comScore Chairman Gian Fulgoni: “comScore data shows that online sales softened in May: down 4% versus year ago.”

The recession is of course the answer to that question — in part. But let’s not forget, US consumers are not using the Internet less (vs. other media except maybe TV). They’re just not buying online. What are they doing? They’re shopping online (to the extent they’re shopping at all) and buying offline.

How long have I been beating this horse? A long time.

Local is the last mile. Location is the thing that connects the digital and the real worlds — the search to the sale . . .

Yellowbook Has New Site Builder, More Ads

Yellowbook announced a new partner to build SMB websites: Websplanet. The company has also launched a new video/TV ad campaign “Yellowbook moments.” The one below is kind of funny.

Is the Internet Destroying Your Family?

According to a report (via AP) on a new survey from the Annenberg Center for the Digital Future at the University of Southern California:

28 percent of Americans it interviewed last year said they have been spending less time with members of their households. That’s nearly triple the 11 percent who said that in 2006 . . .

[W]hen the center began its annual surveys on Americans and the Internet, only 11 percent of respondents said that family members under 18 were spending too much time online. By 2008, that grew to 28 percent.

In the first half of the decade, people reported spending an average of 26 hours per month with their families. By 2008, however, that shared time had dropped by more than 30 percent, to about 18 hours.

It’s interesting that (in the reporting on the report) TV is now a medium viewed as family friendly compared to the Internet, which is impliedly isolating and destructive of the family.

While there’s all kinds of nasty stuff online that kids can find, I’d rather have my daughter engaged in some semi-constructive Internet site than passively sitting absorbing marketing messages from advertisers on commercial TV.

Has the Internet impacted your life and family in a negative way or positively?

Yahoo! Grows NP Consortium

Yahoo! said that it has added several papers to its consortium: “Freedom Communications’ flagship newspaper, Orange County (Calif.) Register and The Gazette in Colorado Springs, Colo.; the North Jersey Media Group’s The Record and Herald News; and The San Diego Union-Tribune.”

According to the PR Yahoo!’s NP consortium represents “814 newspapers from 43 media holding companies, and accounts for 51 percent of all Sunday circulation.” Now for the milestones:

• Several newspapers have topped $1 million in weekly sales of Yahoo! targeted ads
• 288 newspaper sites have launched Yahoo!’s core search products: contextual-advertising, paid-search, and web search;
• 350 newspapers now receive more than 23 million referrals a month from the distribution of news headlines across the Yahoo! network and through its services, including Yahoo! Front Page, Yahoo! News, and Yahoo! Finance, as well as across Yahoo! Mobile and on Yahoo! Messenger;
• More than 160 newspapers are now live on APT from Yahoo!, Yahoo!’s ad management platform, since its launch in September 2008 with two pilot newspapers;
• More than 4,000 newspaper sales representatives have participated in sales training sessions provided by Yahoo!.
• 592 newspapers have selected Yahoo! HotJobs as their exclusive online recruitment solution;
• 288 newspaper sites have launched Yahoo!’s core search products: contextual-advertising, paid-search, and web search;
• 350 newspapers now receive more than 23 million referrals a month from the distribution of news headlines across the Yahoo! network and through its services, including Yahoo! Front Page, Yahoo! News, and Yahoo! Finance, as well as across Yahoo! Mobile and on Yahoo! Messenger;
• More than 160 newspapers are now live on APT from Yahoo!, Yahoo!’s ad management platform, since its launch in September 2008 with two pilot newspapers;
• More than 4,000 newspaper sales representatives have participated in sales training sessions provided by Yahoo!.

MerchantCircle Crosses to the Consumer Side

There are many people who may never forgive MerchantCircle for its early “robocalling” customer acquisition strategy. I’m told by the company that’s not happening any longer. But let’s put that issue aside for the time being because MerchantCircle is doing some really interesting things that are worth discussing.

As background for the rest of this post, I was recently told by Darren Waddell, MerchantCircle’s marketing VP, that the company now has 750K small businesses that have claimed a listing or are engaged with the site’s services to some degree (this is obviously not an advertiser number). He said that “member” number would be over one million before the end of the year.

While many of these merchants aren’t doing a great deal on the site (or may have shown up only once), there are many thousands of SMBs that are very actively using it to market themselves. And that’s turning into spontaneous Twitter recommendations in some cases:

Another impressive statistic: Waddell said “We’re driving 35 million page views, 17 million uniques per month of local traffic.” All of this is coming through SEO/search traffic.

As a result of this traffic the site is making a fair amount of money off ads that are getting very attractive CPMs vs. the rest of the market. All the SEO-based traffic the company is receiving has, according to Waddell, brought its customer acquisition cost down to nearly zero.

There is a range of advertising products that the company is selling to SMBs, from fixed fee to performance-based PPCall and PPC (WebVisible is a partner). According to Waddell, while there are several ad programs and products, there’s an overall emphasis on simplicity and low cost. Most services utilized by merchants are free.

Now, in order to enhance the value proposition for SMBs, MerchantCircle quietly expanded into consumer content. The new program is called “Neighbors” and it offers consumer-users a profile and personal “dashboard” where they can connect with one another, collect coupons, track merchants, generate favorite lists and reviews.

The following image is a screenshot of a community page from MerchantCircle’s Tulsa OK site:

Here’s an image of the consumer dashboard:

The dashboard enables the consumer-user to track (tabs across the top):

• Coupons (I’ve collected from various merchants)
• My reviews
• Merchants I’m following (more on that in a moment)
• Lists I’ve created and my “friends” (on MC). Here’s a snapshot of new lists created by consumers in San Francisco:

On to following; users can “follow” merchants in the same way that one has Twitter followers. Note the follow link under the phone number in the profile below:

After I click to follow, I’m connected to that business and it can directly communicate with me:

In much the same way that MerchantCircle has sought to create a social network of merchants, it has now begun that same work on the consumer side. But the object here is not so much to link consumers to one another as generate more interaction between consumers and merchants and stimulate demand, further activity and content creation. The content and pages populated by consumer-users in turn become more fodder for Google and SEO as well. The company appears to have hit some sort of inflection point with traffic from SEO.

Currently the way that MerchantCircle prompts consumers to join the Neighbors program is through the reviews process. When consumers land on a page via organic search results, some number of those users wind up writing a review of a local business on one of MerchantCircle’s merchant pages. Those review writers are then targeted by MerchantCircle for the Neighbors program:

MerchantCircle is also part of Facebook Connect. And if users log in with their Facebook username and password, their actions and activities on MerchantCircle are broadcast back to through their news feeds on Facebook.

If MerchantCircle is successful in getting consumers to join, create reviews, clip coupons and follow businesses, it will build considerable additional value for its merchants at no cost to itself. Waddell says that the SMBs active with MerchantCircle (mostly in smaller markets) and consumers may not line up 1:1 at the start. But given that MerchantCircle is making money and has been so successful getting SMBs to join, at the rate of 20K per month, it can afford to take the long view.

Is Social Media ‘Perishable’?

Two broadly related articles make me ask the question in the headline. First, TechCrunch reports that according to comScore Facebook has finally caught MySpace in the US. It can now be unequivocally said that Facebook is the largest social network. Does MySpace become the new Friendster — around but limping along? What do you think?

The second piece appeared in iMedia Connection this morning. It argues, audaciously, that Twitter will be obsolete “in a year or less.” Part of the argument is about spam, but also about the fickle nature of audiences in the social media market.

It seems almost impossible to believe that Twitter will be “obsolete” this time next year or that Facebook will take a big fall. However it does seem to be true that “replacement cycles” for online networks are getting shorter.

Do you think Twitter will be on the way out by this time next year? And do you think a potential succcessor to FB will emerge in the near future — or has already emerged? By the same token, do you think that MySpace is now in decline?

More Verticals from Citysearch

This is old news to some, but I just discovered another vertical from IAC/Citysearch — Sugarbomber. As opposed to the search orientation of Citysearch itself, these verticals are socially focused and have a browse-centric orientation:

You browse the desserts until you get to the level of an individual restaurant or cafe. At that point, if desired, you can click through the the listing on Citysearch (in this example the name of the business is incorrectly reflected on Sugarbomber):

Although I don’t know how they’re “performing” for Citysearch, I think the strategy is smart and some of these vertical sites make good candidates for mobile apps.

Twitter’s #IranElection Beats Cable

It’s amazing that the best coverage of what’s going on in post-election Iran — protests and police response — is happening on Twitter at #IranElection. Who thought cable TV news would be superseded by something like Twitter.

Business Owners Sound Off on Yelp

Jeremy Stoppelman points to an Inc. article that profiles three businesses and their attitude toward reviews on Yelp and how they deal with criticism:

Would Stoll consider responding directly to his critics on Yelp? “I think it is a lose-lose proposition,” he says. “You either wind up coming off as defensive or accusatory. There’s no way I would get on there and answer somebody’s review.”

Eric Kirsammer, owner of Quimby’s Bookstore in Chicago, also avoids engaging his critics openly online. Instead, Kirsammer uses negative reviews as a tool to improve customer service . . . Kirsammer and his store managers now regularly check the business’s Yelp page for tips on what they could be doing better.

Sarah Dunbar, owner of Pretty Penny, a vintage clothing boutique in Oakland, California, says she makes a point of responding privately to each critical review . . . Dunbar says getting back to her online critics is just good business sense. “If there’s a legitimate complaint, I want to know how we can make it right for them,” she says. “I’ve offered people on Yelp my cell-phone number, my store number; I’ve given them the hours I’m working and asked them to come in to the store and talk to me.”

And from our survey last August:

• Online reviews are a good thing and are helping us improve our business — 56.3%
• Online reviews have helped get us new business — 32.5%
• Online reviews have limited impact on our business — 30.7%
• Online reviews sites are unfair because they often don’t give businesses a chance to respond — 12.5%
• Online reviews are a fad that will eventually go away — 9.5%

Source: Opus Research, AllBusiness.com, August, 2008, n=631 US small businesses