TV As Internet Device: Do We Want It?

A minority of viewers already get Internet access and content on their TVs through an IP hookup or set-top box. Akin to that Netflix is doing lots of streaming deals with set-top box makers. Yahoo! has its widgets initiative, and so on. There’s lots of activity in the space. LG, Samsung and Sony all have Internet-enabled TVs on sale this holiday season.

While I was in Best Buy this past weekend I saw two prominent “Interactive TV” displays for Samsung and LG. Here’s the LG display.

It’s very clear that once Internet content (broadly defined) is available to mainstream audiences on TV it will create an interesting new market that is in some ways parallel to mobile, because it will need to change to accommodate the limits and capabilities of the device — in this case a large screen “10 feet away.”

It will also eliminate the need for many to subscribe to conventional cable TV, although they’ll need an IP connection from some source. This also potentially marginalizes TiVo or other cable DVRs because it offers broader content and it’s all on-demand. In this world we also quickly get the convergence of online and TV video advertising. Pre-roll that runs on YouTube runs on my TV if I’m watching a show or content on YouTube “in the living room.” And what about Hulu? That’s even more like conventional TV today. Will Hulu ad rates go up, will there be interstitial ads? Will there be an ad-free subscription model?

Think about: Facebook on your TV . . . Skype . . . Google Street View . . . interactive/social shopping on TV. Think about new “social programs” where people watch and chat at the same time. Then there’s gaming and how it might evolve. Very interesting stuff to consider.

Cumulatively all these changes will radically transform advertising for “television,” which could result in a massive decline in traditional ad rates and revenues. And that in turn will affect production budgets, the nature and quality of programming and so on.

Is Crap the Future of Online Content?

More and more professional editorial is giving way to low-paid freelancers or upaid UGC. David Carr’s piece The Fall and Rise of Media contains the following observation:

That carnage has left behind an island of misfit toys, trains whose cabooses have square wheels and bird fish who are trying to swim in thin air. The skills that once commanded $4 for every shiny word are far less valuable at a time when the supply of both editorial and advertising content more or less doubles every year.

Where do all the burgeoning pixels come from? Everywhere, and cheap at that. An outfit called Demand Media now tests headlines for reader salience and cranks out thousands of articles and videos daily that it pays about $20 apiece for.

While user-generated content and “crowdsourcing” work well for certain kinds of content creation (e.g, online reviews), it’s not equally applicable for all situations and use cases. This is not a new view of course, but experts and professionals have an important role to play in the future of online content. This is where Yahoo! and AOL both hope to excel BTW.

Salon CEO Richard Gingras makes the point that brands matter even more today than in the past:

“I do think that in the content space, as we see the print publications decline, I think brands matter more than ever,” he said. “I think brands with sharp personalities matter more than ever, and I think that presents an opportunity for salon.”

I totally agree with him. Trust and quality, two values that content brands should stand for, will continue to gain in importance in this new world of digital serfs and sloppy UGC.

What do you think? Will people care about experts and editorial quality going forward?

iPhone’s Culture of Paid Content

The iPhone and its “paid apps” have created a culture that makes users more inclined than the general population to pay for content. As was widely reported last week UK law firm Olswang released findings from a consumer survey (in the UK, n=1,013) that showed iPhone users are more willing to pay for things than others.

In the charts below the blue bars are iPhone users, the red all respondents. The question, essentially, is what would you pay for:

At the very top above, 30% of iPhone owners say they would pay for “newspaper articles or columns which you can read on a PC or portable device . . .”  That compares with 19% of the general respondent sample. The numbers are higher for magazines: 38% vs. 29%  overall.

While it will be very difficult for newspapers (absent some clever pricing/bundling) to get people to pay for their content online, mobile and eReaders represent an opportunity to create a new “culture,” that will support paid subscriptions. The problem, however, is that already much of the newspaper content is available for free on the iPhone and other smartphones via the mobile Internet or apps.

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Related: See David Carr’s eulogy (of sorts) for traditional print media . . . and Andrew Shotland’s SEO-related advice for newspapers.

Black Friday into ‘Cyber Monday’

Somebody really needs to invent another term for “Cyber Monday.” Cyber connotes Sci-Fi (as in the 1980s novel Cyberpunk) and the Internet is now more like a toaster than something otherworldly.

Anyway, e-commerce and offline sales were pretty decent according to various reports out this weekend and this morning. The NY Times reports:

Consumers began looking for discounts early, with more of them visiting stores this year before dawn. An estimated 31.2 percent of shoppers were at stores by 5 a.m., compared with 23.3 percent who were at stores by that time last year, according to the federation’s survey, which was conducted by BIGresearch . . .

The National Retail Federation said shoppers’ destination of choice appeared to be department stores, with almost half of holiday shoppers visiting at least one, a nearly 13 percent increase from last year. Discount retailers were also top choices, attracting some 43.2 percent of shoppers.

As for online sales, comScore, the Internet research company, said retail e-commerce spending for the first 27 days of the holiday season, this year Nov. 1 to 27, rose 3 percent, to $10.57 billion, compared with the period last year. Online sales on Friday were $595 million, up 11 percent from last year.

The most popular purchases of the weekend were clothing and books, according to the federation. And many more consumers bought toys, up nearly 13 percent from last year. More shoppers also bought sporting goods, beauty items and gift cards. The NPD Group said its research showed the three hottest categories to be electronics, clothing and movies.

Here’s more on the comScore data:

A national retail federation survey shows that people also plan to shop online this week but much of the behavior, which originally took place at work (on Monday) because of high-speed connections has now shifted to home (where “broadband” is now prevalent). Just as with offline sales much of that behavior will be driven by deep discounts and special promotions:

A survey released last week found that nearly nine in ten (87.1%) retailers will have a special promotion for Cyber Monday, up from 83.7 percent last year and 72.2 percent in 2007. The most popular promotions are expected to be specific deals (42.9%), one-day sales (32.9%), and free shipping on all purchases (15.7%). Half of retailers (50.0%) will distribute promotions and deals to shoppers through a special Cyber Monday email.

While some Cyber Monday shoppers will choose to shop from the office, the large majority will shop from living rooms and kitchens all across the country.* According to the survey, 91.5 percent of Cyber Monday shoppers – or 88.2 million Americans – will shop from home on Cyber Monday while 13.5 percent, or 13 million people, will shop from work. (A Shop.org/BIGresearch survey released last week estimated that 69 million Americans would shop from work at some point during the holiday season.) 

According to the survey, 3.8% of people will use mobile devices on “Cyber Monday” (5% of men and 7.3% of 18-34 year olds). 

Shopping engine TheFind reported a significant increase in mobile lookups on Friday:

Searches from mobile devices jumped from around 5,000 on Black Friday in 2008 to roughly 200,000 this year, said Siva Kumar, chief executive of TheFind.com, a product search engine.

According to Hitwise, Amazon was the most visited site among the top 500 retail sites on Friday:

• Among the top 500 Retail Web sites, the percentage of U.S. visits were up 4% on Black Friday 2009 versus Thanksgiving Day 2009. Year-over-year the visits were down 9% compared to Black Friday 2008. The U.S. traffic to Black Friday sites on  Black Friday was up 9% compared to 2008.
• The top visited Retail Website on Black Friday 2009 was Amazon receiving  13.55 % of U.S. visits among the top 500 Retail Web sites. This is the second year in a row that  Amazon was the top visited site on Black Friday.
•  Wal-Mart was the second most visited with 11.18 % of visits followed by Target.com with 5.65%, BestBuy.com with 4.62%. followed by Sears with 2.95%. 

Source: Experian Hitwise

I would argue that to this day, other than the traditional retailers, Amazon (maybe eBay) is the only online shopping “brand,” hence the traffic and sales. I would also argue that a large percentage of the traditional retailer site visits is “multi-channel”: people checking prices before heading into stores to buy items. 

Just to “check out the scene,” and to get my hands on a Motorola Droid, I went into my local Best Buy on Friday; it was a complete madhouse. I saw people doing price checks and lookups on smartphones and saw one woman using a barcode scanner app on a TV price tag to do the same.

What Do Longer Queries Signify?

Hitwise again reports growth in search query length. The greatest growth is coming at the high end: seven and eight or more words. Does this reflect:

• Greater user sophistication
• More directed and specific user intent
• Greater task orientation
• All of the above?

YouTube and Hulu’s Rise

In the US Hulu is now the number two video site after YouTube. This reflects the divide between UGC video and “network” or professional video. YouTube has all kinds of jewels as well as lots of crap (although it’s trying to move toward Hulu), whereas people go to Hulu for “catch up” (DVR) TV and to see clips from shows they know and like already.

Considering the competition that existed when Hulu arrived, Hulu’s rise is impressive. And a paid model is coming. 

Black Friday Now in Process

The shopping began at midnight in some cases, and at 4 am in others. There’s something crazy and even pathological about it — although I understand the attraction to the low prices.

It’s almost as if the day after Thanksgiving shopping has become something of a sport for many people, while others are desperate to save money on lots of things they probably don’t need. 

Pull Articles from Google, Lose Traffic

The newspaper “de-indexing” movement is gaining steam it would appear. This is partly an irrational “revenge” play by newspaper publishers who blame Google for their own inability to really adapt to a culture in transition. Wounded and reeling from subscriber and ad revenue losses they’re “striking back.”

There are now several publishers in league with Murdoch & Co. considering pulling their content from Google (we’ll see if it actually happens).

I’m mostly taking the day off but I’ll say this . . .

The strategy will utterly fail. Google will not be hurt, Bing will not see a great uptick in traffic (if it’s the exclusive partner) and the newspapers will lose visibility, page views and ad revenues as a consequence. Contrary to their fantasies, it will also hurt their brands (how much would remain to be seen).

The current newspaper predicament is the result of inertia and a failure to act over a period of years, as well as hubris to a degree. Their belief in the value of their content (especially at News Corp.) and, if removed from Google, its capacity to humble the search engine is misplaced. Newspapers need to build more user-centric experiences and have myriad, different ways to distribute their content — as well as offer clever subscriber incentives, etc. (Obviously this is a crude list of recommendations.)

This emerging “take that” approach will simply boomerang and accelerate their current decline.

Needed: SMB Testers for Marchex Rep. Tool

Marchex has a terrific reputation management platform and tool, which I wrote about here and here. From my earlier post:

The tool can be used to determine where business listings exist online and how consistent and complete they are; but it’s most valuable, as the name suggests, to track reviews and what’s said about a business. SMBs can also compare themselves to others and direct competitors. And there’s the ability to share reviews via Twitter, Facebook, etc, which takes this beyond simply a monitoring tool into the realm of outbound marketing . . .

The company is seeking additional small business beta testers for the platform. This is a great opportunity for SMBs to try this out and provide feedback.

Here’s where you’d register to participate in the beta program.

Social Media & SMBs: What Did I Tell You?

Many fiery critiques came at me when I posted the results of a survey with Merchant Circle (despite clear disclaimers) that indicated SMBs were starting to adopt Facebook and Twitter in larger numbers. The survey (n=2,403) tapped into a group of SMBs that we identified as “more engaged” and a potential leading indicator of where the larger market may be headed.

Email marketing provider Vertical Response recently conducted a survey (n=831) that validates this thesis and shows increasing intent to adopt social media by SMBs (I’m reminded of it by Seb P.):

Small businesses are getting more comfortable with social media, when reporting marketing plans for 2010, 35.1% of all respondents say they plan to increase their use of social media by a little and 33.3 % plan to increase it by a lot.

Here are the survey’s other top-line findings:

• Well over two-thirds of respondents report that they plan to increase their use of email marketing and social media in 2010.
• Email marketing continues to prove its worth to small businesses, as 96.2% plan to use email marketing in 2010.
• Plans reported for 2010 indicate the email marketing industry will continue to thrive next year, with 38.9% businesses of 1-10 employees and 34.1% of businesses with 11-100 employees planning to increase their email marketing by a lot in 2010.
• Over half—or 54.2 percent—of all respondents stated they won’t do online banner advertising in 2010, versus just 23.8% of respondents won’t do SEM such as Google, Yahoo and Bing next year.
• Almost a quarter of small businesses of 1-10 and 11-100 employees won’t do search engine marketing in 2010. Of the businesses who are using this medium, only 4% of businesses with 1-10 staff and 3.3% of businesses with 11-100 will cut this channel or together or cut it down slightly in 2010.
• A large portion of businesses do not plan on online banner advertising in 2010—represented by 56.6% of businesses under 11 staff and the 48.2% of businesses with 11-100 employees not planning on banner advertising.
• Online banner advertising spend did not increase much over 2009—with only 4.5% of smaller business increasing this by a little in 2009, and 11.4% of businesses with 11-100 reporting the same. Just 6.1% of businesses with 11-100 employees reporting they increased their online banner advertising spend by a lot over the past year, and just 2.7% of businesses with less than 11 staff.

Vertical Response found that SEM was the “most important tool” for marketing success:

23.8% of all small businesses reported that search engine marketing was the tool most needed for their business to succeed in 2010.

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Related: Here’s more survey data about email marketing and social media usage by SMBs:

Newsletters, sales and promotional offers and announcements are the most common ways small businesses say they are using email marketing. Among digital marketing tools used by small businesses, email newsletters are second only to the use of social media marketing. Opportunities to integrate both tactics are on the rise.

Google Product Search: Nearby Stores

There was a fairly major upgrade to Google Product Search, some of it long overdue and some of it probably motivated by Bing. But one of the new features is “nearby stores”:

This is based on store locations and not product inventory data.

Originally Google was taking data from ShopLocal and StepUp (now part of Intuit) and showing local stores where users could buy products in their area on Google Maps. That was maybe three or so years ago. But there wasn’t enough data and Google killed the feature. This resurrects it in a way and paves the way for future local inventory information to be displayed (you can bet on it).

There’s also a nice mobile implementation (as per Google’s now routine PC-mobile bridge approach):

The dilemma for a company like Milo (which will have many suitors eventually) is whether to syndicate its data to third parties. Syndication is the fastest route to acquisition (strategic partners will want it all to themselves) but syndication will likely kill the destination dream.

Milo Raises $4 Million for Local Shopping

Milo is seeking to do what nobody has really done successfully so far: create a true online-offline shopping destination. There are several companies out there aggregating and distributing inventory data (e.g., Krillion), but no one has created a successful consumer destination. ShopLocal has largely abandoned its consumer shopping model and become a marketing services company for its retailer clients.

Seeking to become that company Milo has raised $4 million from a range of institutional and individual investors.

The historical challenge has been getting the inventory data and getting enough of it across categories. Milo has developed a methodology that the company believes will give it a powerful shot at becoming a shopping brand and delivering the experience that mirrors the dominant consumer shopping behavior pattern: shop online and buy in stores.

For those who believe that e-commerce is the inevitable future: today it’s flat to declining roughly 3% YoY (per comScore, although YoY it will grow over the holiday season). As the economy improves it will grow in the low single digits across most categories. It’s inching up to 3.7% of total US retail ($922B in Q3):

Source: US Commerce Dept.

Of course the future is multi-channel, with some purchases happening online — mobile adds an interesting wrinkle (in-store price check leading to online purchase) — but the overwhelming majority taking place in physical stores. (Reserve/buy online and pick up in store is also going to be pervasive.)

Here’s my earlier post on Milo. Mobile shopping is also in the company’s near future.

Google’s Local (Mobile) Coupon Move

Google’s going to include coupons in mobile distribution of local business information on Place Pages. I’ve written up the announcement on Internet2Go:

Google has had a big opportunity in local coupons that it has largely neglected perhaps until now. But now Google is making a push into mobile distribution of local coupons for small businesses.

According to the Google LatLong blog, when local businesses create coupons through the Google Local Business Center those offers will be shown automatically on Place Pages for local businesses accessed via mobile devices (smartphones). Accordingly, just like paid-search ads, mobile coupon distribution is an opt-out according to the FAQs on the site . . .

Google could have “owned” the online coupon space but it has failed to be very aggressive in this area for reasons that aren’t entirely clear, although there’s no revenue that flows as a result of coupon creation by local businesses.

Now, recognizing that mobile users are interested in deals, Google is doing mobile distribution of local business coupons. It has to get the businesses to create them in the first place (still something of a challenge) but the PC-mobile distribution will surely raise the profile of coupons at Google.

And consumers are very clearly interested in mobile offers. Here’s data from a recent Compete survey of 970 US smartphone users (but there’s much more like this), which reflects their interest in offers or coupons on the go:

How Much Do You Care about Newspapers?

There’s lots of discussion and controversy stemming from a report that appeared in the Financial Times yesterday. In the article Microsoft is said to be seeking News Corp’s participation in a plan to withdraw content from Google:

Microsoft has had discussions with News Corp over a plan that would involve the media company being paid to “de-index” its news websites from Google, setting the scene for a search engine battle that could offer a ray of light to the newspaper industry.

The impetus for the discussions came from News Corp, owner of newspapers ranging from the Wall Street Journal of the US to The Sun of the UK, said a person familiar with the situation, who warned that talks were at an early stage.

However, the Financial Times has learnt that Microsoft has also approached other big online publishers to persuade them to remove their sites from Google’s search engine.

News Corp and Microsoft, which owns the rival Bing search engine, declined to comment.

One website publisher approached by Microsoft said that the plan “puts enormous value on content if search engines are prepared to pay us to index with them”.

Essentially then Microsoft would be paying newspaper publishers to allow indexing of content in Bing and de-indexing that content from Google. There’s lots of discussion on Techmeme and Danny Sullivan at SEL has a long and thoughtful article about why this wouldn’t work. By contrast, some like Mark Cuban think it’s a smart plan.

I’m going to take a much cruder approach to this debate and argue that newspaper brands have generally become weak and news content available from multiple sources. Accordingly the strategy wouldn’t help Microsoft as much as the report impliedly argues. People care less and less about newspaper content (per se), as a practical matter. They care about content and information not that the information came ultimately from Source X or Source Y (e.g., newspaper vs. directory or portal). Brands do matter, but this is a more nuanced conversation.

If Microsoft were to create a “kick ass” online news experience with exclusive content from top publishers it might gain usage as a destination. It wouldn’t impact Bing search volumes in any material way however, in my view. Furthermore, it also wouldn’t impact Google usage in a material way either.

If I want the score in the Cal-Stanford “Big Game,” from Saturday I could still get it on Google. If I want news headlines, there will be enough sources indexed to get the information. Google’s deal with AP would cover most national news and its AFP deal would do the same for international news.

More likely people will navigate to those news sources/aggregators that they like and trust to get news content. For example, I go to Yahoo! News and the NY Times for most of my news checks during the day. I don’t really look to search Google for news, except to do a quick navigational lookup for a specific story. (I suppose this is the Bing plan, pulling that from the Google index.) As a practical matter content that isn’t indexed will simply fall off the radar screen for the majority of the online audience.

Do you disagree? Let me know what you think.

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Update: There’s plenty of research and data that says people go to newspapers sites and care about news content. According to recent Scarborough data:

• 79% of adults in white-collar jobs read a newspaper in print or online.
• 82% of adults with household incomes of $100K+ per year read printed or online newspaper content.
• 84% of college graduates or those with advanced degrees read content from either the print or online version of a newspaper each week.

I’m arguing that people don’t necessarily care that news content shows up in search results, nor will they miss any particular publication in search results if it’s removed.

WebVisible Data on Q3 Local Search Spending

I’m just now getting to a report put out by WebVisible on search trends and small business advertising spending in Q3. There’s some great data there.

In the the top 20 SMB paid search spending categories:

Attorneys and Dentists made up the top two largest advertiser categories in Q3 2009, with 7.7% and 5% of total advertisers respectively. These categories also had higher than average spending, and higher than average keyword counts. Air Conditioning Services and Physicians & Surgeons were the only other categories that comprised more than 2% of the total:

Source: WebVisible (Q3, 2009)

Other findings:

• In Q3 2009, the small business search advertiser spent an average of $1,658 on search advertising, an increase of 91% from Q3 in the previous year and
• 93% from the previous quarter.
• Campaigns had an average of 55 keywords (excluding geographic modifiers) in Q3 2009, which increased from 43 keywords in Q3 2008.
• In Q3 2009, Google accounted for 60.4% of search advertising spending. Yahoo! accounted for 26.2%, Bing 10.5% and Ask 2.4%. Google lost 5 points
• year-over-year (YoY) as spend shifted among the other engines.
• Click-through rates (CTR) improved YoY across all the engines, with the biggest improvement on Yahoo!, whose CTR improved 123% from Q3 2008 to Q3 2009.
• Average CPCs are on the rise, with Google up 14% over a year ago. Google’s average CPC was approximately 30% higher than Yahoo! or Bing in Q3 2009.

These data represent campaigns that collectively amount to “$23 million in US small business advertiser spending in Q3 2009.”

Yet what’s interesting is the variation among the data from different sources. Borrell, for example, which estimates display, search and other forms of local online ad spending has a very different hierarchy of advertisers, dominated by the traditional classifieds categories: autos, jobs, real estate. I’ve also seen other data from different sources that show yet a different hierarchy.

The data above are largely but not entirely consistent with yellow pages category spending trends. In print YP attorneys is the highest spending advertiser category. Much of the spending that WebVisible is capturing is coming via its relationships with traditional media companies that cater to SMB advertisers.

There are two ways, potentially, to regard and interpret the data in the chart above:

• Because it’s influenced by local media sales reps and potentially as part of a bundle of ad spend it’s consistent with traditional media category spending trends
• It’s an indication that a lucrative category like attorneys is starting to turn to the Web in earnest, posing a longer-term threat to the print YP spend for example

Polluting the Social Graph

Many people have been thinking and working for some time to find a way to get friends and so-called influencers to advertise on behalf of companies or promote corporate messages to their followers or networks. The idea is to find a mechanism or system to mimic word of mouth at scale, using existing social networks for distribution.

The NY Times covers two such startups: Likes.com and Ad.ly. The idea of bloggers getting paid by sponsors or advertisers is fine. Blogging takes lots of time and I support the idea of people being able to pursue it. Problems start when surreptitious affiliate sales or advertising start to “infect” the social graph. The article points out that disclosure is the key to all this:

Ted Murphy, the C.E.O. of Izea, now a 30-person business backed by $10 million in venture capital, said the company initially “made a big mistake” by not setting disclosure standards for publishers and advertisers. Today, ad networks promote their standards; Izea’s ads on Twitter are typically demarcated with signifiers like “#ad” or “#sponsor.”

There are ways, along the lines above, to manage all this. But there’s a larger “philosophical” objection here about ads starting to “cannibalize” the social interactions among people on these networks.

If someone I don’t really know makes a pitch (directly or indirectly) for a product or service it’s something like a celebrity endorsement. (Indeed, Ad.ly appears to be substantially about inserting ads into celebrity tweets.) I don’t care so much, although it may be annoying. But if professional contacts, acquaintances and even friends start sneaking commercial messages — even if they’re disclosed — into my stream of updates and feeds I’m going to start blocking or “unfriending” those people pretty quickly. They will start losing credibility with me and in general.

Wouldn’t you similarly be annoyed or find this pretty objectionable? Or would it simply be a matter of disclosure for you?

‘What’s Happening?’: Twitter’s Geo-API ‘Huge’

Twitter’s COO Dick Costolo said this morning at the TechCrunch CrunchUp event that he felt the “geo opportunity” was “huge.”

The location-stamping or geocoding of content and the release of that data to third parties (online and in mobile) will unleash a wide range of creative applications and expressions for local tweets. Indeed, Costolo emphasized that mobile would be a prominent use case for this location-oriented data. That’s clear, as people look to Twitter-enabled local-mobile apps to find out who’s around and what’s going on.

Accordingly Twitter changed its tagline from “What are you doing?” to “What’s happening?” This intrinsically lends itself to location-oriented tweeting. 

With appropriate controls and filters Twitter becomes more viable as a “local search engine.” Right now there’s too much noise. To date some of the apps that have tried to ground Twitter data locally have simply located Twitter users on maps or augmented reality apps. Now the tweets and content itself will be capable of being located and can help “annotate” places (see Flook). 

Twitter and its ecosystem could also potentially could develop further in the Q&A arena. Some people ask questions on Twitter but the results and responses are inconsistent. Location-filtered Twitter communities could start to use the service to find out all kinds of information about things, places and events. There are also a ton of marketing implications, from analytics to enabling businesses to target broader groups of people in their service areas. 

I see lots of creative potential here and am eager to see how these applications play out in the next several months. 

With this move Twitter — or the Twitter data more properly — will likely become a significant player in local. All the traditional local players and competitors should be thinking about how to tap into this data to enhance their own existing services or to build new ones on top of this information.

TechCrunch: Real-Time Conference

If you’re not in the room, you can watch the entire “Real Time CrunchUp” on UpStream TV. There’s going to be lots of interesting conversation, including about location and “geo-streams.” 

Here’s the link. You can also click the video below. 

You can also follow the discussion on Twitter at #crunchup.

Google Moving Deeper into Real Estate

Google likes to do things that “scale,” which is why it has been difficult for the company to create vertical solutions of depth. Maps and local is an area that Google has invested hugely in but, by and large, the company has not built out compelling vertical content areas or services.

What’s happening with real estate is very interesting because it’s playing off of Maps and local developments — a case of “synergy” that enables Google to offer an increasingly credible real estate search capability. Google has offered housing/real estate search for some time. But now it appears to be getting much more serious. Matt McGee covers the integration of Place Pages into the mix. And the Google Australia Blog describes the ways in which Google may indeed become a force in the real estate vertical (at least in terms of listings):

We also wanted to tell you about the integration of real estate listings with Place Pages. Now clicking the “more info” link next to a listing takes you to a faster, easier-to-read page that gives you all of the information we have about a listing: photos, inspection times, videos, details, a Street View preview and nearby public transit information if available, allowing you to quickly find the listing you want and click through to the sources of the listing. 

Here’s a “real estate” search on maps for my old San Francisco zip code:

Each of the listings has a Place Page (this is the game changer for Google potentially):

As mentioned above, these pages may/will contain video as well. The content on these pages is also as good or better than the listings detail pages of most real estate sites. 

The key to successful real estate search is comprehensiveness and depth. Google’s goal is likely to be able to show all properties for sale in a given market. If in fact they can get there (which people can argue about) then real estate search on Google will become more widely used. The Place Pages supply the depth of detail about the listing that prospective renters/home buyers want. The advertising implications (together with Local Listing Ads for agents) are self-evident. 

Real Estate verticals “going forward” will need to compete with community, as well as value added services, data and other features.

Interesting Data from Palore: SMB Demand

In a column at SEL, Palore provides some interesting data from its webcrawling efforts about SMBs in Columbus, Ohio:

The numbers for the Plumbers vertical are different and there are some interesting comparisons and conclusions to be drawn. However, a “generic” inference here is that there’s some “pent up demand” for online marketing services: the difference between those with sites and those that have claimed their listings or have advertised online. This group with sites presumably recognizes the importance of online but hasn’t gotten around to or figured out online marketing. Claiming a listing is something that’s relatively simple.

These are leads for somebody who can identify these businesses.