Alert Blog Reviews

Search marketers are always interested in local marketing and search. It’s where the rubber meets the road for many businesses including the enterprise (i.e. big box stores) whose real representation of their brand is the local store that someone goes into to buy products. If the local experience is bad then the brand is bad in many consumers’ eyes. So getting down to the local level is critical for marketers especially in the age of continuing social media adoption and influence. Now there is local and there is hyperlocal. Hyperlocal is just as it implies it is getting down to the street level for reporting of local news and events. Noted hyperlocal blogger Matt McGee of hyperlocalblogger.com says this Hyperlocal blogging is writing about the streets where you live. It’s blogging about local news, local events, local businesses — anything that’s happening in your hometown, city, street, or neighborhood. Hyperlocal blogs often talk about things that traditional media ignores, the stuff that’s too small or not important enough to a wide range of people. Well, it appears that what traditional media ignores the VC and M & A crowd are finding interesting. According to theDeal.com While newspapers have been decimated by the economics transforming today’s media industry, Web sites that report news and deliver other content at the neighborhood, or “hyperlocal,” level, are bursting with life, with many of them becoming sought-after targets by big media and big tech companies. It is getting harder to ignore the concentration on the local level that is becoming one of the most important elements for B2C and some B2B online business success. The sound and fury around the mobile market with Google and Apple squaring off is just as much about local search as it is a device. The mobile device and its growth is perfectly suited for the hyperlocal crowd for both creating content and consuming it as well. Chris Brogan talks today about how interesting it would be to be able to geotarget outbound tweets to make sure the local interest of a tweet is not shared across a larger group that don’t have any access or real concern for the data. If you want to judge how big this is by the money it attracts thedeal.com tells us …hyperlocal startups continued to get funded. In December, Outside.in Inc., which pulls together neighborhood blogs and other local content, announced it had closed a $7 million Series B round of funding, led by existing investor Union Square Ventures, with participation from new investor Turner Broadcasting System Inc. As part of Turner’s investment, CNN.com will use Outside.in’s aggregation and curation tools to power hyperlocal news across all of its sites. The new round brings Outside.in’s total raised to $12 million. And let’s not forget FourSquare’s growing success Over the summer, one of the most competitive early-stage fundings the VC industry saw all last year was that of FourSquare Labs Inc., which encourages people to share their whereabouts from local restaurants and businesses via their mobile phones. Union Square and O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventureswon the honor of funding FourSquare’s $1.35 million Series A, announced in September, with Jack Dorsey, a co-founder of Twitter Inc. and the mobile payments startup Square, serving as an angel investor in Foursquare. How are you and your business addressing the hyperlocal craze? If you aren’t is your competition getting involved? It could be that in the very near future the first to find a hyperlocal hook into a market will be the winner.

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Hyperlocal Being Targeted by M&A and VC Crowd

Free wifi seems to be the new black as of late when it comes to Internet companies promoting their offerings. As you may or may not know, I am a disgruntled Blackberry Storm user who went with an iTouch so I could at least be in the same room as the cool kids but if there’s no Wifi there’s no go. Well, depending on where I may roam and when I am out and about I may have more connectivity then I am accustomed to thanks to a rush of folks thinking it would be cool if there were “Wifi for all” during the holiday season. Hmmmm, I wonder if they have ulterior motives other than just being nice…… Here’s a list of who’s doing what and where. Google – CNN Money reports that Google is providing free Wifi to travelers in 47 airports across the country . Pretty neat. All of the international airports in Florida will reap the benefits through the rest of the year. Not to be outdone Google is making sure that people in some less trafficked airports like Billings, MT can try out any new Google goodies while waiting for their flights. This offer is in addition the already announced free Wifi on Virgin America flights as well. Yahoo – Not to be outdone, Yahoo has announced it will provide free Wifi to Times Square in New York City for an entire year . Nice! A rep says it’s “the latest literal expression of Yahoo’s promise to be at the center of people’s online lives”—which is also a theme of the company’s $100 million ad campaign Don’t you just get a boat load of warm fuzzies when you hear that from Yahoo! (Hi, Carol!) eBay – For those flying Delta for the Thanksgiving holiday eBay will be providing free Wifi through Gogo. Nice touch. Don’t forget to do your holiday shopping while at 30,000 feet. Welcome to the new version of the “Mile High Club” which is G-rated and fun for the whole family. Even brands like Lexus are utilizing the free Wifi approach to get their word out. While more product related around the intro of a new vehicle, the car maker offered free Wifi for a week on American Airlines flights. Google is making sure that it does more than anyone else apparently as they tie a charitable effort to their promotion as well. The company is also running a charity campaign to raise money for three nonprofit groups: Engineers without Borders, One Economy Corporation and Climate Savers Computing Initiative. When Google WiFi users first log on, the landing page will offer them the option of donating to the organizations. Google will match donations of up to $250,000 per airport. Now, I don’t know the economics of this kind of effort but this kind of sponsored offering makes the most sense to me as a great way to spend marketing dollars and add utility all at once. If I could ditch my Storm and use the iTouch just about anywhere then maybe my hybrid Apple and Droid dream could come true. I would be endeared to anyone who helped make that happen.

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‘Tis the Season for Free Wifi

This year, we’ve seen a lot of pessimistic estimates of YouTube’s operating losses . While the site does bring in some advertising revenue, they haven’t quite covered that $1.65B price tag yet. And based on bandwidth costs, various analysts have estimated annual operating losses of anywhere from $470M to $175M . Note that the more conservative estimate here still includes a bandwidth bill of nearly $50M. But new reports are estimating that cost as even lower. After Arbor Networks’ recent analysis of 256 exabytes of Internet traffic, it seems YouTube may be paying nothing for their bandwidth . As we mentioned before, Arbor Networks found that 6% of all Internet traffic worldwide was going to Google . With that much traffic (we’re talking almost 17 quadrillion megabytes), it seems Google would have to have some serious pipage to support their popularity. According to Wired , The cost of bandwidth has fallen and so too have the profit margins for moving bits, even as traffic grows at an estimated 40 percent a year. With the growth of Google’s network and Content Delivery Networks, the economics of who pays whom to connect grows more complicated than the early days of the net when money flowed upwards — little ISPs paid regional ISPs who paid major ISPs who paid backbone operators. Now if you are Google, you might even begin asking Comcast to pay up to connect its Google Tubes straight to their local cable ISP networks. That way, YouTube videos and Google search results would show up faster, letting the ISP brag that YouTube doesn’t stutter on their network, a potential commercial advantage over its DSL competitors. Unfortunately, Wired says, the true nature of the Internet infrastructure is guarded by NDAs, so we may never know who owns the pipeline. What do you think? Is YouTube operating for pennies because Google owns so much pipe?

Originally posted here:
YouTube: Not So Stupid?