Just sat through the Jeff Berman of MySpace’s keynote at the Kelsey Group’s Marketplaces 2009 conference. There was a lot of talk about personalization and how huge the audience is, but I only heard lip service paid to local. Berman gave an example of how a roofer got a $30K deal via a $100 self-serve ad, but I didn’t get the sense that MySpace was truly focusing on local.
The most intriguing stat he mentioned was that 40% of U.S. moms are now on MySpace, which prompted these excellent Tweets. My first thought was that if MySpace truly has 40% of U.S. moms engaging with their service, why are they not doing more to provide them with info on local services?
As many of you know mom’s make a huge percentage of local purchases and they are the target most yellow pages companies go after. So there’s clearly potential for a local search service that MySpace users might want.
And consider that local search queries generate significantly higher revenue per search than many other forms of advertising and I wonder why MySpace has not made a play to add a directory service to the site.
Perhaps they are getting too much revenue from advertisers like Superpages? Check out this homepage takeover I just found:
2 Response Comments
I think your last sentence sums it up. We all know that the prices for local ads will usually be a lot lower than Myspace will be getting from the bigger nationwide advertisers, except in special cases. I am surprised they haven’t started making an effort into local groups though, it seems like low hanging fruit to me.
As an aside, do you by any chance have stats or references on the revenue/ROI of local search/advertising that you could post (or email me)?
Cheers,
Wayne
Would be nice to have a Local Business/yellowpages on myspace!