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Local search site Local.com has integrated local video ads throughout its site. Initially the ads will come from Jivox, an online local video advertising provider. Eventually, the video ads will expand to include more providers.

“We believe that video advertising provides consumers with relevant, timely information about local businesses, products and services. It’s natural for video to be integrated into our local search ecosystem over time,” said Kim LaFleur, Local.com vice president, product management. “Local video bridges the product gap that exists between businesses that advertise in print, but perhaps don’t have the budget to move to television advertising yet, and unlike TV advertising, ROI is fully trackable. We plan to incorporate additional video capabilities and syndication to our network next year.”

Related Reading:
Local.com Partners with Hearst’s White Directory Publishers
Local.com Launches Ratings and Reviews Engine
Local.com Renews With Yahoo As Search Partner

Soleil Securities has downgraded Google stock (GOOG) from “buy” to “hold.” Their reasoning is that ad-driven companies will see a slowdown to the weak economy and that Google is already experiencing a slowdown in growth of their ad revenues. Soleil analyst Laura Martin downgraded the price target for GOOG from $580 to $350. GOOG was at $334 at the time of this post.

Google will hold its 2008 third quarter earnings call and webcast next week.

Meanwhile, Local.com has announced a stock repurchase program. The program will last 18 months and the company may buy up to $2 million of outstanding common stock.

“The board of directors has confidence in our company,” said Heath Clarke, Local.com chairman and chief executive officer. “Local.com is a leader in the rapidly growing local search market with both patented and patent-pending technologies. We are gaining significant market share, increasing our organic traffic, growing our direct advertiser base and, as a result, projecting continued high growth.”

LOCM was at 1.89 at the time of this post. Its high is 2.36 and its low is 1.78.

Both GOOG and LOCM trade on the Nasdaq which was up 4.40 points at the time of this post.

Related Reading:
Local.com Partners with Hearst’s White Directory Publishers
Local.com Launches Ratings and Reviews Engine
Google Earnings Top $5.37 Billion in Revenue Q2 2008

Last April, Yahoo unveiled details of a forthcoming online display advertising platform called AMP, to be released in the third quarter of 2008. Well, it’s Q3 and AMP was launched this week at Advertising Week in New York. Except, it’s not called AMP anymore. It’s been rebranded as APT.

Jon Hamm, star of the AMC Drama Mad Men which is based on a 1940s ad firm, was on hand to celebrate. This really excited Jerry Yang.

“The advertising landscape has changed dramatically since the days when Don Draper was roaming the halls of Sterling Cooper,” said Jerry Yang. “While Mad Men celebrates the Madison Avenue of 40 years ago, APT from Yahoo! clearly represents the future.”

APT is being touted as a streamlining of the display advertising process, from planning to buying and optimizing.

APT will undergo a phased roll-out. Select newspapers get the first stab at it, specifically publishers the San Francisco Chronicle of Hearst Newspapers and San Jose Mercury News of MediaNews Group.

Features include:

• Guaranteed cross-selling with pre-defined selling rules
• Ad Exchange for non-guaranteed inventory
• Advanced audience targeting techniques based upon behavior and geography
• Inventory lookup and forecasting across individual and partner sites
• Creative workflow automation and personalization
• Powerful rate card tools for improved yield management
• Filters for better controls around creatives
• Flexible and powerful APIs
• Federated ad call to support multiple ad formats

“One of the major benefits of APT from Yahoo! is the fact that it’s an open system, designed to enable advertisers to reach their audiences in their favorite places across the Web, and publishers to monetize inventory across the broadest possible demand channels,” said Sue Decker. “As we transform the advertising marketplace, we’re excited to have key members of the Newspaper Consortium, the San Francisco Chronicle and San Jose Mercury News, lead the way in this historic journey.”

APT (as AMP) has often been one of Yahoo’s defenses about the strength of its company. Yahoo has undergone much scrutiny in the past year, especially since Microsoft attempted to acquire it. They’ve placed high hopes on AMP, and now it’s go time.

Related Reading:
Yahoo! to Integrate Right Media and AMP Ad Management Platforms, But When?
Yahoo! AMP! plus Full Text: Yahoo Proxy Statement

According to Nielsen Online, the MSNBC Digital Network (msnbc.com) was the number one Current Events and Global News site in June, attracting 37.6 million unique visitors that month. The MSNBC Digital Network’s surge in unique visitors is a 29 percent increase above its 2007 average.

Yahoo! News ranked #2, with 35.0 million unique visitors and the CNN Digital Network ranked #3, with 33.4 million unique users, according to Nielsen Online.

The MSNBC Digital Network was also ranked #1 in total minutes, with consumers spending a total of 1,058,344,000 minutes on the site (eight percent ahead of the CNN Digital Network and 42 percent ahead of Yahoo! News).

As I mentioned back in April in a post entitled “CNN and MSNBC Battle Yahoo News for Top News Site,” the battle for news site supremacy is a big story – similar to the newspaper war between Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst in the 1890s.

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Local.com has announced a new advertising partnership with White Directory Publishers, a division of Hearst Holdings. Through the agreement, Local.com will be able to sell its online display advertising inventory to White Directory’s national sales channel. The ads will appear on Local.com as well as White Directory Publisher’s Talkingphonebook.com and Area-wide.com sites.

“This partnership allows Local.com to reach out to large businesses with regional presence through a leading feet-on-the-street sales force,” said Peter Hutto, Local.com vice president, business development and sales. “This partnership will give Local.com better reach into the small business market, and provide White Directory with a large online distribution channel for their advertisers.”

“This is a tremendous opportunity for national advertisers to extend their reach to local consumers on one of the leading local search sites that consistently ranks in the Top 100 in traffic generated,” said David Bowling, director of national sales for White Directory Publishers. “This is an innovative approach to the sales and targeting of display ads to local consumers by national advertisers with local points of presence.”

Related Reading:
Local.com Renews With Yahoo As Search Partner
Local.com to Distribute Superpages Ads
Hearst Jumps on Answers Bandwagon, Acquires Answerology
Hearst to Acquire Social Shopping Site Kaboodle

Searchers want answers, not just results. That’s something Hearst Magazines is apparently abundantly aware of with its acquisition of Answerology, a relationship advice site. With Google becoming more of a destination site than a portal, companies like Hearst need to compete online by offering a robust destination site of their own. Hearst is poised to do just that with the addition of Answerology, which allows users to post questions anonymously and select specific demographics in which to seek answers from.

“Service journalism is all about helping people find answers to their questions, from trusted experts. That’s what we do in our magazines and on our magazine-branded web sites every day. Answerology offers us a new type of service journalism, using a ‘wisdom of the masses’ model built on the expertise of users who are like you,” said Chris Johnson, VP, content and business development, Hearst Magazines Digital Media.

If wisdom of the masses proves to be more valuable than wisdom of the algorithm, companies like Hearst stand to benefit monumentally. Answers sites saw significant percentage increases in traffic last year.

Hearst-Argyle Television first became pals with Google in June, when it put dedicated channels on YouTube.  Now it’s expanding the relationship, as Hearst-Argyle becomes the first TV industry entity to (re)sell Google AdWords.
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Although Hearst Corp and MediaNews Group are linchpins in Yahoo’s newspaper/online classified alliance, the two publishers have made an investment in online classified ad provider Kaango.

The newspaper industry has always been more interested in keeping money in-house rather than sharing even a little with others. Publishers have big egos, and depending on someone else to [...]