• recruitment - CareerBuilder, Fish4Jobs
• shopping - ShopLocal
• real estate - Apartments.com, Homegain.com, Homescape.com
• autos - Cars.com
• social news - Topix.com
• travel - ShermansTravel
• mobile news/search - 4Info
• women - Indymoms.com
• search marketing - PlanetDiscover

And MySpace is picking up momentum in Canada with a new mobile portal. It is launching its service in an initially-exclusive deal with Rogers Wireless, the country’s biggest mobile carrier in terms of subscribers. release But unlike some other social networking sites that offer mobile services for free, Rogers and MySpace will charge a C$5 (EUR 3.45) monthly fee to access the service, although users who sign up before October 31 will get six months of usage free.

Additionally the portal will only work on certain handsets. Users of the service will find many of the same features that MySpace’s mobile portals have in other countries, including the ability to post comments or blog entries, search for friends, and read and respond to MySpace email, as well as edit their profiles.

MySpace launched two Canadian portals, one in French and the other in English, in May of this year, and currently has around 4.1 million users in the country, according to Marketnews (MySpace has around 115 million registered users worldwide, according to comScore Media Metrics). It does not provide stats on mobile-only usage but Travis Katz, SVP and GM of MySpace International, claims there has been “incredible uptake worldwide for MySpace Mobile initiatives.”

The company release does not mention 4Info, but Matt Jones, Gannett’s director of mobile strategy and operations, tells us that it will be used in the new local site services. Gannett has had a growing relationship with the SMS-based mobile search company—in June announcing a US$10 (EUR 7.36) million investment and an intention to use 4Info’s mobile search and interactive advertising services for its national flagship title USA Today.

Jones says the local mobile initiative will not be crossing over with the online advertising venture Gannett has been working on with Tribune, which has its own local mobile sites. He says Third Screen Media will be one of the companies serving ads onto the local sites, but he did not confirm whether Google will be involved. Gannett was an early partner of the search giant’s business selling print newspaper inventory to Google advertisers; Google of course has high hopes of taking its advertising services mobile (not to mention getting deeper into local services to help further its advertising reach).

The mobile announcement comes at time of declining revenues in Gannett’s core newspaper print business and broadcasting business. In July, the publisher reported Q2 revenue fell to US$1.93 (EUR 1.42) billion from US$2 (EUR 1.47) billion last year, although profits rose to US$365.7 (EUR 269.4) million, from US$310.5 (EUR 228.8) million, an 18% increase from the same period a year ago.

Gannett has not yet said whether it intends to launch a similar mobile service with its Newsquest titles, the second-largest regional newspaper group in the UK.

Total operating revenues in the second quarter of 2007 were US$94.3 (EUR 68.5) million, versus US$107.4 (EUR 78) million in the year-ago period. Advertising revenues declined 12% to US$73.2 (EUR 53.2) million from US$83.6 (EUR 60.7) million in 2006. Classified advertising fell 18%, while retail and national advertising were lower by 9% and 19%, respectively. These declines were partially offset by a 58% increase in Internet advertising revenue.

Sales and marketing costs rose 12%, primarily related to additional marketing and re-branding efforts as well as enhancements designed to strengthen the link between print content and Internet content on www.suntimes.com.

“We have been clear all along that 2007 would be a tough year. Like all newspapers we continue to face a very uncertain advertising environment. Yet the turnaround plan we announced in May is beginning to show some results,” said Cyrus F. Freidheim, Jr., Chief Executive Officer. “We have a number of initiatives in the pipeline to transform the company. We remain confident that these plans will find their way to the bottom line despite the weak industry.

Latest figures show profit before tax from continuing operations for the company as a whole increased to GBP97.7 (EUR 145) million from GBP66.4 (EUR 98) million in 2006, profit after tax and exceptional items was up to GBP64.2 (EUR 95.3) million from GBP45.9 (EUR 68.1) million, while profit before exceptional items was down from GBP116.4 (EUR 173) million to GBP105.2 (EUR 56.2) million.

Classified revenues came under pressure during the year, declining by 11% year-on-year. This was driven by recruitment, which fell by 16.3%, and motors, which was down 20.2%. Display revenue out-performed the market, increasing by 1.4%, while digital revenue showed strong growth of 18.3% year-on-year.

Carolyn McCall, chief executive of Guardian Media Group, said: "Over the past year we have made significant changes to all our businesses in order to meet the new demands of our markets. The stability of GMG's financial performance is testament to the success of our approach.

"We intend to invest the proceeds in developing our existing businesses and to pursue acquisitions where we have the opportunity to be majority owners of operating companies."

Charter and Yellow Book will co-market products and services through a variety of sales and marketing channels, including each company’s advertising products and sales forces. The agreement also provides for the creation and distribution of co-branded Yellow Book directories in Charter’s markets.

This may seem a long way removed from classified media as seen from your markets but remember the quote from Professor Theodore Levitt of the Harvard Business School, that Peter Rees, the keynote speaker at the ICMA Lisbon conference used to illustrate the concept of marketing myopia: ‘ Industries decline because management define their business too narrowly’

Can you argue that might not apply to you?

While the Internet continues to rapidly expand its influence over consumer purchase behaviour, the overwhelming majority of transactions are made in local stores. Two of the most historically bullish proponents of e-commerce, JupiterResearch and Forrester Research, have now both predicted that Internet-influenced offline shopping will be a trillion-dollar category within the next five years. Stripping away the hyperbole, what this simply means is that most consumers will use the Internet to conduct product research before buying offline.

Krillion, launched in February 2007, is one of several companies seeking to bridge the online-offline gap. The CEO Joel Toledano has an interesting spin on what his site is doing: solving the "last mile problem" for manufacturers and retailers. In other words, Krillion seeks to show where, in the local area, someone can purchase a specific home appliance (and now TVs). There's no e-commerce option. Indeed, Toledano is running a kind of SEO operation for advertisers and Krillion is apparently ranking well in search results, which is the site's primary focus. Krillion is buying minimal SEM traffic.

Other similar sites include ShopLocal, NearbyNow, StepUp (now part of Intuit), Yokel, CNET, Google Product Search (formerly Froogle), BrandHabit, AskTheLocal (UK) and Data provider Channel Intelligence.

At some point in the next several years product inventory information will come online - and by extension into mobile (see, for example, GPShopper) - in a meaningful way. The availability of that information will only reinforce existing consumer behaviour and make the Internet an even more invaluable resource for local (offline) shopping.

Yelp was launched back in 2004 by ex-PayPal employees Jeremy Stoppelman and Russel Simmons as a site that brought together San Francisco residents to help identify and review the most popular hangouts. The site has since grown to encompass nearly every major city across the United States as "Yelpers" work to find and review every business in town with a US postal address.

It works in much the way that Amazon.com reviews or Yahoo Local reviews work. The main difference seems to be the fervour and devotion with which members use the site.

Check out this little snippet from Fortune:

"I'm making a ton of money from Yelp, and it's freaking me out." Woe is Christopher Hall, the 34-year-old owner of Splitends, a hair salon in Orange County, California. Its chic décor is more architectural firm than beauty parlour. He has appeared on a reality show, in the LA Times, and on TV news segments. He's photogenic and has a quick wit. He serves beer to customers. So business, unsurprisingly, was decent as soon as he opened the place last December. Until March 6. That's when things got crazy.

Now he's literally in pain from all the coiffing. "I've been doing hair for 16 years, and I'm busier than I've ever been," he says. "Saturday I came in at 6:30 a.m., left at 8 p.m., and did 22 people. I woke up Sunday and my hands were all swollen. I had to put them in an ice bucket."

What happened March 6? That was the day Anita Lau wrote about Splitends at Yelp.com, an online platform for user reviews of everything from dive bars to funeral parlours. Lau has posted 2,036 reviews and 1,340 photos, has collected 790 compliments on her work from fellow Yelpers, and along the way has amassed the power to put bodies into barbershop chairs. She gave Splitends the maximum five stars, praising Hall and saying, "I absolutely love my haircut."

The review started a logroll of new clients for the stylist and a couple dozen subsequent five-star critiques. "I've taken out ten ads in OC Weekly this year and have gotten maybe one call," says Hall. "I get anywhere from five to 15 calls a day from Yelpers. They come in and then write reviews. Then other people see the reviews, think it must be great, and call. It's its own little biosphere. It feeds itself."

Earlier this month, popular social networking site Facebook announced a partnership with Yelp's new "Hangouts application. The new feature will allow Facebook users to tie into Yelp's extensive database of location reviews to post a list of where the user will be heading on any particular evening. While the application has only garnered a few thousand users so far, it's bound to drive even more traffic to the already flourishing Yelp.

So how do you find out what's being "Yelped" about a business?

You can start by heading to Yelp and running a search for the business. If it has a yellow page listing, then chances are high that it will show up even if there aren't any user reviews yet.

Yelp pops up not only any listings that fit the search criteria, but also a map of the area with the business flagged and a rating and review snippet. Click on the business name and Yelp will take you to more detailed user generated content about the business.

Apart from traditional reviews, Yelp allows users or businesses to upload photos, to set a price range, share information about parking, payment types, business hours and so on.

Yelp also offers up branded widgets for your web site that point visitors to Yelp reviews. In areas like San Francisco and New York where Yelp is becoming a popular spot to research businesses, these tags could lend quite a bit of credibility to a new business with strong Yelp ratings.

Yelp also offers paid sponsor packages that will allow you to update your listing with even more data or to promote your reviews in Yelp search results.

With Yelp partnering with sites like Facebook and ranking well for local search keywords in Google, chances are high that the site will continue to draw new users and will have an even bigger chance of impacting your bottom line one way or another.

The approaches, according to DMGT, follow the group's recent sale of B&S, Loot's Irish sister title, for €20 million to Naldin, a company connected to the Boundary Group. DMGT added that it may still decide to keep and redevelop Loot.

DMGT snapped up Loot and B&S from Scoot.com for £45 (€66.7 at today's exchange rates) million in 2001. Launched in 1985 as the UK's first free-ads paper, Loot publishes 10 regional editions every week across the UK, including Manchester, Liverpool and London.

The title reported revenues of £16.8 (€24.9) million and operating profits, before amortization, impairment and exceptional costs, of £1 (€1.5) million in the year to September 2006.

A couple of years back when Milan’s famed La Scala Opera House reopened after a giant three-year facelift, Corriere della Sera produced six opera DVDs, a new one available each week which could be bought optionally as an add-on to the newspaper. In opera-mad Italy you just know a scheme like that works if the cost to the consumer is seen as a bargain, and RCS makes hundreds of millions of Euros annually doing such things right.

Other schemes have included producing a series of poetry books, each one an option at additional price for the usually slow Monday edition. Figures showed that about one-third of its customers spent the extra money for that poetry. The company also produced a 14-volume History of Italy that close to 50% of its customers bought each week in addition to the newspaper.

The newspaper’s culture department wrote reviews about the add-ons, which might be stepping across the fine editorial line in the US although not so in the UK - just take a look at the long bio promotional piece the Daily Mail – sister to Mail on Sunday – gave to Prince the day before the CD distribution.

Most of the Italian promotions are books, based on the simple philosophy that since people buy newspapers to read, then perhaps they might buy something else to read, too.

Just how big can all of this be? Back in 2003 Gruppo Editoriale L’Expresso, said it sold in such promotional add-ons to their regular publications some 34 million books, 2 million DVDs, and 1.6 million CDs, resulting in a net profit increase of 47%. Since then things have declined -- in 2006 newspaper circulation was down 1.6%, due to a reduction in the sales of the add-on items to 22 million from 26 million in 2005. But while it’s not as big a business as it once was, the group is still making in the hundreds of millions from the add-on business.

Obviously these schemes are easier to handle with newsstand sales than they are with home delivery, but that is not unsolvable. Print subscribers, for instance, can be told ahead of time the add-ons available and they can be ordered and paid via the Internet.

And there are other systems worth looking at. The new affiliation program started by the Washington Post compels close watching. As publisher Donald Graham said recently, he doesn’t know if the discounts offered to readers are sufficient but at least the readers and advertisers are signing up for the program at rates higher than the business plan, and time will tell.

Another example - in Geneva, Switzerland, take out a home subscription to the Tribune de Genève and you become a Tribune club member. The club offers discounts on travel, cheap movie tickets and the like with savings that are heavily promoted within the newspaper, and the club is a money spinner. When you’re fighting two free newspapers, plus two paid-fors in a fairly small town you need something to give you the edge.

The main point being made here is that newspapers have various ways to deliver additional product to their consumers and it can be on the newspaper’s own behalf or for third parties. Publishers need to start thinking what else they can deliver with their newspaper, at an additional charge, that they can offer as extra value. If it’s CDs and DVDs and the like then perhaps local advertisers selling those products won’t be happy, but it’s time publishers had their money people work out the economics of what is best for the newspaper.

These are changing times – the idea here is not to figure out an avenue for a newspaper to give something away – which is the British tradition – but rather come up with systems to sell something extra and earn addition revenues, big-time.

Start thinking, for instance, the youth market. The Prince giveaway showed the kids were willing to pay for a newspaper to get the free add-on. What if the newspaper charged a couple of pounds/dollars/euros – might it not have worked just as well? It still would have been a great bargain. Or what if each day the newspaper prints a coupon hidden on a different page or section that can be used as discount for buying a video, game or somewhat in a local store by handing over the full page with the coupon at the cash registrar, etc. It may not get the kids reading very much but at least it gets the newspaper in their hands and they are turning the pages, and that’s a start.

There’s an old saying – keep the best and leave the rest – and so it is with these thoughts, but the underlining principle in all of this is very solid – newspapers need to think outside of the box and come up with new ideas on how to improve their bottom lines.

Waiting for the digital revenues to flow through in a timely manner isn’t going to do it soon enough, relying just on editorial content is resulting in continually declining revenues, so newspapers need something more - some radical marketing thinking.

Adapted from an article in Followthemedia.

What about actually doing something to leverage this advantage? The Washington Post, one of the few 'national' newspapers in the US, has gone completely to the other end of the spectrum and launched a site devoted entirely to in-depth coverage of news and events in Loudoun County, Virginia, a suburb of Washington, DC.

LoudounExtra.com will feature news, videos, blogs and user-generated content about the community. Rob Curley is the vice president of product development for Washington Post.Newsweek Interactive and says that plans are already in the works to launch a site for Fairfax, Virginia within the next few months.

A team of five reporters will file stories daily to the LoudounExtra.com site in addition to working for the print publication of the Washington Post. Some of the other “hyperlocal” features on the site include a database of local restaurants, information about all the churches and other places of worship in the county as well as schools. Each high school football player will have a page dedicated to them.

Can this approach to local coverage work? Curley said he believes it will since local has often been an underserved market, particularly among large metropolitan newspapers. Many top-notch blogs have popped up across the country that focus on particular communities.

And clearly, the Washington Post is not alone in its enthusiasm for local coverage. Yahoo! has actually done a pretty impressive job of bulking up its local presence online. Arguably, this is one of the few areas where it has outdone Google.

Another Internet company called Marchex is making a huge bet on local advertising. It owns more than 100,000 Web domain names for specific zip codes as well as generic domain names like newyorkdoctors.com and lasvegasvacations.com. Barry Diller’s IAC also has a big presence in local through its Citysearch business. Then there’s sites like online classified service craigslist.org and review site Yelp. They are intensely local.

Curley said the goal of the Loudon site and any future local sites that Washington Post develops is to make sure that it is serving its readers’ best interests and of course provide local businesses a spot to advertise.

“This is clearly built for small restaurant owners and not Toyota or United Airlines,” Curley said.

So it seems that the only thing left that needs to be done to really make “hyperlocal” sites a huge destination for readers and advertisers is to effectively tie marketing to the story.

And surely, that's something that we are really best placed to do.

The issue: "Domain parking" has long been a dirty phrase in the web-marketing industry. Companies buy up either commonly misspelled or generic domains, fill them with cost-per-click text ads from Google or Yahoo and hope consumers end up there ready to click on the ads. While it's a brilliantly high-margin business, it can be incredibly frustrating for consumers.

The new twist: Marchex, a Seattle company that holds a variety of online assets, including 200,000 domains, is trying fill more than half of them with directory-style content that consumers might find useful. It's hard to build out sites at that scale, so the company is tapping a content-aggregation technology it acquired for US$13 (EUR 9.5) million in March 2006 called Open List. All together, the sites attracted about 31 million unique visitors in March.

Open List searches the web for content related to particular topics, categories and geographies, aggregating reviews from such sites as Insider Pages and Citysearch and maps and driving directions from Yahoo!. It also encourages people to find what they're seeking through refinement; a visit to NewYorkDoctors.com lets users sort by neighbourhood, speciality, hours or user rating.

Most of the sites are heavily commercialized with text ads. Ideally, this launch, which was billed as "providing more than 1 billion pages of local content," is a play for one of the most undertapped online advertising budgets, local businesses, although a few odd matches occurred, including an ad for Denver Urgent Care showing up on the New York Doctors site.

Former Intermix CEO Richard Rosenblatt, is trying to fill domain parked sites with user-generated content and a new Los Angeles company called LeaseThis.com has launched a marketplace by which marketers or media companies can lease popular domains.

According to Oodle CEO Craig Donato, "It will probably double or triple in the next couple of months; things tend to take off quickly." Donato says the site current pulls listings from about 500 sources on both sides of the border and has not yet added feed partners from within Canada.

Listings in Canadian border towns show American listings with US dollars and distances in miles, while Canadian listings are shown in Canadian dollars and kilometres.

eBay also appears to have disabled and de-populated its eBay Classifieds, which was always considered "entry-level" for its marketplace and was never a comfortable fit.

Kijiji is not yet built out, with no ads in most locations. The structure, however, is definitely Craigslist in style - simple and clean, text-driven, with categories for cars and vehicles, jobs, housing, pets, services, stuff for sale, free stuff, wanted, and events. Unlike Craigslist though, Kijiji.com also has a button for "live chat," which appears to be moderated chat rooms. The icon for "Chat with people" is a megaphone at the moment, not a phone, but it's likely that Kijiji will soon build in some synergy with its eBay sibling Skype.

• Scout24 has launched a free online classified marketplace called Local24. The new portal started at the end of May with 1.5 million classified listings from cooperation partners in its database. Scout24 hopes to gain a foothold in the German free-ad market dominated by eBay’s Kijiji and ISA’s Markt.de (both speakers at the ICMA Munich conference last year)
• Axel Springer AG's online real estate business Immonet.de is to acquire Wohnfinder AG’s real estate portal Wohnfinder.de to strengthen its position in eastern Germany. Financials weren’t disclosed.
  
• Joinvision expands to Germany Joinvision, a young niche job board for the IT industry just opened a site in Germany. Founded in Austria in June 2006, Joinvision also is active in Slovakia.