The local search slog

I’ve been having a lot of conversations lately on the subject of local search.  Two years spent developing the website and algorithms at Famplosion have informed my opinions about the matter.  But even more so, the 4 months spent trying to raise capital to take Famplosion to the next round informed my opinion even more.

The technical problems involved with aggregating and organizing content are not as challenging as the business problem of monetizing that same content.

Companies like Goby and Uptake have cool UI’s but seem to be scraping content from other sites.  Companies like ZVents and Eventful seem to be using crawlers to build their own index.  Sites like Yahoo‘s Upcoming seem to rely on user submissions.  Then there’s a host of totally locally focused sites that are more Editor driven than technology driven in terms of how they get their local content.  This is tough to scale.

Business models that seem to be available at this point include syndication, advertising and licensing.

Syndication would largely be to the local media sites that typically represent online version of local traditional media companies.  Problem though is they don’t have any money.

Advertising has great potential from both the local advertiser trying to reach a local audience as well as from the perspective of a national advertiser trying to pursue localized campaigns.  But no one seems to have really provided the platform for either of these to be remotely efficient.

Balihoo is a company out of Boise that seems to have nailed down the large advertiser trying to reach small markets dynamic.  I think they just need to scale like crazy.  And Merchant Circle seems to be pursuing a cool approach to helping local advertisers do better online.  There also scale is required.

Licensing technology would be cool, except it would be sold to the Local Digital Media sites that still don’t have any money.  I might be jaded having spent the last tech recession selling emerging tech to large enterprises…I just know I never want to have my primary customer profile be a class of companies with no money.

So, no one seems to be hitting the skin off the ball just yet.

And I’m an entrepreneur, so that means the glass if half full, which means the opportunity remains.  But not for the faint of heart.

And it’s my personal belief that a local search service that does not nail down a specific demographic/audience to focus on will have a hell of a time becoming relevant enough to drive the kind of traffic from SEO that would be required to make sure marketing spend stays under control.

But that’s probably another topic.