Shuhaib ShariffThe Dark Knight… Yeah, Right!

LocalEngine - A platform for building local (city) portals.

Double Spring Media, the company behind Bangalore’s most loved portal: MyBangalore.com has acquired the rights to the domain name: MyHyderabad.com

We’re launching MyHyderabad.com in November 2010

At this time we are looking for strategic partners and investors in Hyderabad. Interested parties can connect with us here:
http://doublespring.com/contact/

Follow us on FaceBook and Twitter:
http://www.facebook.com/myhyderabad
http://twitter.com/myhyderabad

Experience Calgary like never before! - http://onlinecalgary.com

In the first part of this series, I’ve touched upon why the current geodomain development model is flawed and doesn’t really maximize the returns on high quality geodomains.
Before suggesting a better model, let us first understand who our target audience in a geodomain business is: I’d say it’s primarily the residents of the city.

Reason:
Take the example of Denver.com. Who do you think cares more about the city … tourists / travellers OR Denverites? Who needs regular updates on stuff happening in and around the city … tourists / travellers OR Denverites? Who has the ALL important: emotional connect with the city … tourists / travellers OR Denverites?
Clearly, it makes business sense to focus on local residents, because it’s easier to engage them on a long term basis … the emotional connect is difficult to achieve with anybody else.

Local residents are looking for commercial content on city portals. They’re looking to discover & explore local businesses online. Don’t believe it? Check this:

“Research shows that consumers typically spend about 80 percent of their income within 50 miles of their homes, and that about 30 percent of all Internet searches are commercial in nature. In fact, fully one quarter of all searches on the Internet are for both local and commercial content. These consumers are the crown jewel of search because they typically convert into buyers at a higher rate than any other type of online search traffic. As a result, advertisers often pay a premium to place their ads in front of consumers conducting local searches. Researchers forecast that a growing number of local businesses will begin to advertise their products and services through online search in order to reach these highly valuable consumers.”
– Source: Local.com

Next, we need to understand the needs & content consumption patterns of local residents. What do they expect from their local city portal? What will bring them back every day? How do you differentiate your offering from the BIG boys: Yahoo!, Yelp, AOL OR the city’s local newspaper website? How do you monetize?

One can categorize Local CONTENT into TWO types:

1) Content for everyday / frequent consumption
Local News, Reviews, Events, Alerts, Weather, Photos & Videos.

2) Content for Need-based consumption
Local Classifieds, Real Estate, Movie Listings, City Offers, Jobs, Yellow Pages, Online Shopping, Forums, Flight Status, etc.

It is important that content on a geodomain / city portal is highly localized. By including national or international content you will end up competing for eyeballs with Yahoo!, AOL, etc.  By all means that is a losing proposition! Stick to your niche: LOCAL

Monetization:
Geodomains need out-of-the-box thinking. Slapping together Adsense & generic banners (credit cards, insurance, web hosting, etc.) doesn’t help (unless you get millions of impressions each day) Considering that the traffic to geodomains may be significant but not gigantic, generic CPC/CPM advertising is generally a bad idea.

In the next part of this series, I will share some monetization ideas and divulge the secret of building high quality content on geodomains at very low costs.

A small section of the domain community holds the view that “geodomains” are a BIG opportunity area and the “right” development strategy can lead to big bucks. For market validation, the most cited example is that of PalmSprings.com, a property owned & operated by the Castello brothers, who’re de-facto poster boys of the Geodomain business. It is widely believed that PalmSprings.com generates annual revenues of over a million dollars (Yes, USD!). Incredible, IMHO for a rather rudimentary site with an unmistakable 90’s look. Sure, the business model is genius.
Read the rest of this entry »

In what could potentially be a game changer, media baron Rupert Murdoch has decided to charge a fee to online readers of his UK publications: The Times and its sister publication, The Sunday Times.

Content on the above portals will no longer be free.

Most analysts are baffled with this decision … online news publications have always offered online content for FREE and they’ve made their money from ADVERTISING. Charging a subscription fee for online news content is unheard off, and most media companies will not even attempt it for fear of loosing readership and thereby advertising. Off-course Murdock thinks differently.

In an interview recently he said “There isn’t enough advertising in this world to subsidize all web content. Few media companies are making profits from their presence online”
Very true, if you ask me.

Infact most media publications are struggling to make any money at all … some like The Tribune have gone bankrupt.
The problem is, with the emergence & domination of new media (led-by the big G) , Newspapers haven’t been able to figure out a viable business model. Giving premium content away for free and subsidizing it with online advertising doesn’t work; primarily because the revenues in the online advertising are a pittance and there’s just too much competition online for a relatively small subset of Advertisers.

Google’s monopoly in contextual content advertising is sickening. The last straw, I suppose is that Google’s only competitor “Yahoo Publisher Network” is slated to shutdown next month. Its game over for large publishers dependent solely on online advertising.

In this backdrop, I believe its good move by the old FOX to monetize content via a subscription model. If it works, rest assured that all big media publications will follow in Murdoch’s footsteps. Time will tell.

BTW … Put yourself in Murdoch’s shoes and you could well ask yourself, ‘What do I have to lose?’  The Times and Sunday Times just announced horrific 2009 results, losing some £80m between them… So for those particular properties it doesn’t take a genius to see the current business model is smashed.”