We hear the repeated siren’s call of social / local / mobile. As of matter of fact, this year’s LeWeb conference captures this three-part mantra as its very theme. And you’d be hard-pressed to find a VC fund in Europe today not following this guiding light for its investment strategy.
Among the takeaways of LeWeb’11, we are led to appreciate the inevitability of ‘social’ and ‘mobile’, as testified by the success of companies like AirBnB, or the famous “cross-over” of Google Maps into permanent predominance of mobile usage.
But the verdict on ‘local’ is mixed.
Gabe Rivera, CEO of Techmeme, suggests that ‘local’ is over-rated, and would not launch a local offer. Why ? Quality of local content is spurious. More significantly, local content is not sufficiently abundant.
AOL’s Patch service boasts 10 million unique visitors across its network, built over the past 18 months. Is this significant ?
Is local content sufficiently interesting to advertisers ? If not, how will local be monetized ? Just as we witnessed the small-town newspaper as the first casualty of the digital media age, does local offer enough scale to make business economics work in a global world ?
To be continued…
Amanda Booth wrote:
I guess my main question is what is meant by local? Is it at the city level? Township level? Neighborhood level?
It’s somewhat silly to dismiss it off-hand b/c one needs to establish first how large the potential audience actually is before determining whether it’s worth the investment.
Most traditional advertising always has a local component. Advertisers, for example, would show certain ads in NYC Metro area and not in Chicago. It has been a successful approach…. local has been proven to work via traditional advertising medium. The question is whether it works for digital media.
Link | December 9th, 2011 at 09:41
RudeVC: Maybe Local matters after all wrote:
[…] years ago I wrote a short blurb entitled, “Does Local Matter?” in which I provocatively questioned the future relevance of the Local network component in […]
Link | April 30th, 2019 at 01:55