Citysearch snaps up Insider Pages in local search race

February 28, 2007 | Matt Marshall | Comments | |

citysearch.bmpCitysearch, the division of IAC focuses on local reviews of restaurants and other services, has acquired the struggling local review start-up, Insider Pages.

The purchase (amount undisclosed) comes at a time of increasing competition in the race to deliver a compelling local search services. Citysearch’s parent, IAC, has already bolstered its local search offerings, namely with Ask City, a property that packages everything from local search to local maps, reviews, and ticket services.

However, more entrants have arrived to nip traffic away from Citysearch, an early player that has seen its traffic stagnate in recent months. There’s Yelp, Judysbook and Backfence, for starters. Earlier today, we mentioned new competitor Outside.in, another company going after the local community news and events area.

Anne Raimondi, vice president of marketing at Redwood City’s Insider Pages, just informed VentureBeat of the purchase, which will be announced tomorrow. We mentioned the rumor last week.

Insider Pages has about 600,000 user reviews, and they’ll be integrated into the Citysearch’s offering, she said. It has 2.5 million monthly unique readers, she said, based on Comscore and internal tracking numbers.

She would not say whether the purchase price was more than $10 million invested in the company by Sequoia Capital, Softbank and Idealab. She said there were multiple bidders, but that Insider Pages preferred Citysearch because it is complementary. Insider Pages is popular among suburban parents and homeowners, she said, giving it strength in the home, garden, health and plumber review areas. Citysearch is stronger in bars, arts and entertainment. Citysearch will absorb Insider Page employees in its San Francisco office.

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Matt Marshall is editor and CEO of VentureBeat. Follow him on Twitter at @mmarshall, and follow VentureBeat on Twitter at @venturebeat.

  • Navigate through Insider Pages and you see the ubiquitous (somewhat targeted) Google ads paired with the hyperlocal content. With all the hyperlocal content focused ventures, are there ventures trying to do the same (aggregation, distribution, targeting, etc.) for hyperlocal advertising? Seems necessary for the revenue model for many of the Insider Pages etc focused ventures...
  • It's always frustrating that so many of the aquistion stories lack the finanacial details, which really tell a lot about whether the idea was good or bad. When the price is high it's an indicator of "a great idea", but aquisitions at prices below the invested amount is close to a "red flag" for that approach. What I'd like to know is ... why did Insider Pages make too little money to keep ticking?
  • Local is a tough business. My first job in the internet industry was at CitySearch, where we were selling websites door to door in 1996 to pizzarias, auto body shops and nail salons. I posted some commentary on the difficulties in the online cityguide business at the Lightspeed blog - if you're interested click through on my name in this post
  • Jeremy is right on with his comment. The local space is tough, but more so the model of going door to door was and is outdated. That CPA is going to cost a lot of headache. MerchantCircle on the other hand has acquired 90,000 merchants mostly by letting business owners know there are a ton of review sites out there with customers commenting on their business. There are no feet on the street and we value ourself as giving businesses a voice and a chance to manage their online reputation by aggregating all those reviews.
  • Local content with banner ads doesn't work. There isn't enough potential revenue base. For a community of 100,000 population, the amount of Google ads revenue is at most ~$600/day (assuming 20% of population visits the site about once a week, with a typical two pages per visit, and 10 ads per page, 1% click through rate and $1 a click through). That is not enough to support the resources required to maintain the hyper-local content. On the other hand, we know the Yellow page model worked pretty well. The key is to successfully marry the Yellow Page model with local content.
  • James
    I have had the same problem with Citysearch as well. After signing up I started to notice that their user interface was highly limited. For example I could increase my budget but not cancel my account on line. Another thing was how the clicks came in. I knew through my analytics that no clicks came to my website via Citysearch. Still 75.00 dollars of my budget was clicked away in a four day period. To put that in proper perspective my budget was 100.00 dollars over a thirty day period. When I contacted customer support I was shocked at how amazingly uninformed they where. Though Polite the rep I spoke with didn’t have a clue what Citysearch Click fraud division did to prevent click fraud and he offered no compensation as well. After he fumbled through some paperwork for 3 minutes I told not to worry about it and inquired instead on how to cancel my account. in my opinion Citysearch is a good looking local search service that was released to soon. Maybe I will give them a try in another year but at this point it looks to be a waste of time and resources.

    I encourage any Citysearch rep to contact me for my input. My business name is Trueline Striping and located in Orange County Ca.

    Look me up!

    James~
  • My experience was even worse than James' above - Citysearch has tried to charge me US$200 for obviously fraudulent clicks, I haven't even had that many visits to my website in total! Something needs to be done about Citysearch and their downright criminal behavior.