I don’t get the whole local advertising on the Internet thing. I was a big fan of Switchboard as a substitute for my yellow pages until they threw in so many irrelevant listings that it’s totally useless. Now I just pick up my yellow pages and use my fingers to find my destination.

I’ve never been interested in using an online directory (other than the yellow pages) to find something, and all the local media outlets offering add-on web listings for my retail stores will only get the business if the add-on listing is free. I have yet to have someone come in and say I saw your listing on the Welcome Wagon website, and I would be surprised if I did.

I spend 80% of my time on this earth in front of this keyboard, and I seldom use the Internet to find anything local other than an address or a zip code.

Obviously I’m just a grouchy old bastard who doesn’t use the Internet to its full potential. We all knew this (at least the grouchy old bastard part), but now there’s proof. Brad Waller writes in ReveNews that he got his hands on a research report from Borell Associates that analyzes web revenues from more than 2000 local media properties.

Last year these properties booked revenues of almost $5 billion, an increase of 78%. Newspapers, known to be the last-adopters when it comes to the Net, booked almost half of that, about $2 billion.

Brad notes that ten years ago [he] could not convince these types of sites that the Internet was something worthwhile. We had meetings with newspapers who were afraid of diluting their content and audience and wanted to protect their print empire.

My guess is that the newspapers had to make the choice to either be on the bus or under it. Thanks to the Internet the old media is crumbling pretty fast, and it’s great to see that some of them are actually coming around.

Brad also cites broadband-related growth in audio and video for radio and TV stations, and local portals that are popping up all over the place.

What does this mean for us? Two things:

1. You might want to target some of your niche research toward local sites. It definitely requires some different thinking, but the money seems to be out there.

2. We need to integrate local spending into our promotional mix. Of course this is going to depend on the scope and theme of your site, but now might be a good time to see how you can integrate local marketing, even if it is as a small drive-to-web (local web to web?) campaign.

I’m still not convinced, but $5 billion is a lot of money.

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This entry was posted on Monday, April 24th, 2006 at 3:12 am.
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