Yelp announced that they hit over 29 Million Uniques per month in January and don’t have any plans to stop growing with their new $25 Million round. The company turned down an offer to be bought by Google not long ago, which will probably crank up M&A activity in the industry this year. On top of all this they have passed 9 Million Reviews on the site, which is the most any local search site has. So the big question is, who can compete with Yelp? Everyone.
Google ventures into the Pay Per Call market and innovates itself around having to use call tracking number to do so.
Facebook could quickly take a large share of the SMB market that is currently advertising online and rope in some first time online marketers if they just do a couple things different.
One of the first articles that talked about the intersection of local and twitter. How much can Twitter really be worth to Twitter?
Yelp announced that they hit over 29 Million Uniques per month in January and don’t have any plans to stop growing with their new $25 Million round. The company turned down an offer to be bought by Google not long ago, which will probably crank up M&A activity in the industry this year. On top of all this they have passed 9 Million Reviews on the site, which is the most any local search site has. So the big question is, who can compete with Yelp? Everyone.
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Two days ago Google announced that they are launching a new type of ad unit that allows advertisers to add Click-To-Call functionality in their Mobile Ad Units. This opens all kinds of doors for advertisers to take advantage of mobile–specifically, the types of queries that inherently lead to offline transactions quickly (i.e. gas stations, movies, etc.)
Due to the fact that these ad types are limited to just mobile, you can imagine nearly all the advertisers interested in this offering would be local advertisers in one way or another. The most intriguing thing about this announcement, however, is how Google is actually using the click-to-call action in these ads.
Facebook has had a hard time in attracting advertisers to their site. Mostly because advertisers have not figured out how to monetize or receive as high an ROI as they do when they advertise on Google with AdWords. As it sits right now, Facebook really only offers display advertising without the demographics guessing game so it is not really a surprise that Facebook has not attracted as many local advertisers as they would like.
This post originally appeared on Silicon Alley Insider.
Over the last couple months we have heard many different ideas on how Twitter can successfully monetize their surge in popularity, growing user base, and overall traffic. The ideas range from charging for an account, charging for premium accounts, simply adding AdSense, and the list goes on. What we haven’t heard is how Twitter could add local search into their business model, monetize it successfully, and create more user generated content.