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