Servicemagic Acquires Market Hardware

Many moons ago in my Yellow Pages 3.0 post, I started preaching to the local search industry that owning the SMB website was going to be the best way to insure viability in search.  After all if you are Google where would you rather send someone, to a plumber’s website or to an IYP’s list of plumbers?

Brian Kraff, CEO of Market Hardware, pinged me today to let me know that his company, which makes websites for home service pros, has been acquired by ServiceMagic, a subsidiary of IAC.  This combination makes perfect sense.  SM is trying to pry marketing dollars out of contractors and if you own their website, you are much more likely to get their marketing budget too.

If I were a Yellow Pages-type company, today I would probably be spending some time thinking about how I could move from building profile pages to building full websites for my customers.

See the press release here.