Hitting them where they live
The Emergence of Local Online
Steven Berlin Johnson Chris TollesChairman, Outside.in CEO, Topix
“90% of consumer purchases are made within 20 miles of a person’s home or office.”
Source: Live Technology Holdings, Kelsey Group (2008)
We Spend Locally
Internet-Influenced Sales $1.2T by 2012
Source: Forrester Research (2008)
Local Online Ad Forecasts
•Borrell Associates: $12.6B in 2008
•Jupiter: $8.9B in 2012
•Veronis Shuler Stevenson: $19.2B in 2011
•eMarketer: $7.8 billion in 2011
Note: Definitions of local segment vary (classifieds, search, display, video)
It’s a very big market
The Geo-Web•6,000 placebloggers in outside.in
database
•Roughly 100K who write about location occasionally
Geo-tags are to the Geo-Web what links were to
the original Web.
You can disagree about what information means,
as long as you agree about
where it is.
The State of Geo-Tagging
•More than 5% of Flickr photos now geo-tagged
•70% of Twitter messages come with basic location data; <1% geo-coded precisely
•3% of hyperlocal posts tracked by outside.in come with structured geo-data
GeoToolkit
This is an ad.
A different approach (We needed it now)
•We had 30,000 ZIP code level news pages
•We could geotag news content semantically
•There weren’t enough stories to fill the pages
•We gave people the platform to roll their own
Uh OhThe Problem:Not enough local content
1,440 Local daily papers
2,303 News radio stations
1,686 Television stations
X 6
3
4
X
X
8,640
6,909
6,744
22,293
Number of populated ZIP codes in US
Total number of local stories per day
32,500
Original Local Stories
Insight:Local News is not (yet) a search problem
This stuff works outside of the big markets
1 city/somerset-ky 68,244
2 city/glasgow-ky 62,495
3 city/paragould-ar 55,389
4 topstories/topstories 52,427
5 city/london-ky 41,281
6 city/barbourville-ky 35,047
7 city/corbin-ky 34,558
8 city/paris-tx 31,238
Local Hits in a Defined MSA = 58.6%Local Hits Outside of a Defined MSA = 41.3%Commenting in 20,000 cities and towns every month
Rank Node Name Daily Pageviews
Creating local voice on the web
The punchline•Market for local advertising BIG
• Growing 4X-6X in next four years
• $8 Billion - $12B market by 2012
• People buy stuff in person where they live
•Geo-Web emerging to connect content to location
• Geo-tagged content in place, in volume, today
• Big opportunity for advertisers, publishers, people
Everybody (online) lives somewhere
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