4 ms·

Why do you think that anything "local" in general is a money/energy drain?

• sedachv 15y ago
  There seems to be two types of "local" web startups: events and businesses. Event listing sites are a very small market basically trying to take over the flyer and newspaper advertising. There's no money there. And in the past couple of years Facebook has stepped in and basically made all other event sites obsolete, for now. Business listing sites are trying to tap into the Yellow Pages market. Yellow Pages were/are huge. This is why people continue trying to get in. The problem is that unlike physical Yellow Pages, which have a regional monopoly, the barrier to entry is very low. This leads to fragmentation, and any single local business directory isn't very valuable. Combine with extremely spotty coverage and out of date listings, and online directories themselves are pretty useless. Even Google can't stay on top. It gets worse because you have to cold-call small businesses to sell to them. New ones are always starting up and old ones are going out of business. They also don't want to pay very much money and suck at paying their bills. Then there's the effort to drive traffic to the directories (or in some cases specific businesses listed in them) via AdWords or other advertising. This can work but is hard to pull off, most who try screw it up. Don't forget that in addition to Google, Yelp etc. the Yellow Page companies themselves all have online directories, and massive existing sales forces and lists of customers. And they are still struggling to turn a profit online.
  • Revisor 15y ago
    So if I were to sum it up (talking about the local business part), the problem consists of: - Fragmented and competitive market due to low barriers to entry - High-maintenance, low-yield customers Thank you for your reply and the food for thought.