Today Marchex announced the launch of 100 local and travel search domains. They’re nice-looking sites with meaningful content and some depth. These benefit from the recent integration of OpenList’s content and search functionality, which I wrote about previously here.
The use case for most of these sites is probably serendipitous discovery via search and isolated usage (one offs) rather than repeat usage. Here are some examples:
- http://www.manhattanpubs.com
- http://www.winecountrytours.com
- http://www.aspenresort.com
- http://www.deluxehotels.com
But there are some sites where users might well bookmark them or return to them via search (as navigation). For example:
- http://www.cuisine.com/
- http://www.fivestarhotels.com/
- http://www.sanfranrestaurants.com
- http://www.koshermeals.com
It remains to be seen how this “owned and operated” network performs over time but most of these sites benefit from being both local and vertically oriented.
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Related: The Motley Fool on Marchex and its financial performance.
Screenwerk 
August 9, 2006 at 6:13 pm
What do you think of the MyZip.com rollout?
Thanks in advance!
February 2, 2007 at 5:42 am
[…] contextually relevant ads parked at a domain. But Open List search and content (plus maps) have turned them into real sites, which improves their monetization capability as […]
September 27, 2007 at 4:52 pm
[…] and used OpenList’s content aggregation and search capabilities to make its domains into actual content sites. Fast forward to June of this year, Marchex launched 100,000 local and local-vertical sites using […]