Citysearch, Merchantcircle connect their local business services

November 28, 2007 | Eric Eldon | Comments |
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merchantcirclelogo.pngCitysearch, an online guide service about local US businesses, has partnered with MerchantCircle, in an effort to hold their own in the increasingly competitive area of local reviews.

The move comes as Citysearch is under attack from newer, fresher sites like Yelp, which offers reviews about locales and is appearing as high, if not higher than Citysearch in search engine results.

Citysearch, a division of IAC, has a large collection of local data that includes 14.5 million business listings, more than 600,000 user reviews, and ratings on more than two million business locations in the US. It has been growing through acquisitions, having purchased local review site Insider Pages earlier this year (our coverage).

MerchantCircle, which has already received funding from Citysearch, has been growing fast. It launched in June of 2006 with 5,000 merchants using its services — today it has 300,000. The Los Altos, California company lets businesses create a homepage with basic business information (including photos and videos), create online coupons, send email newsletters to customers and more. The company tells us its most successful feature is its reputation manager, a tool that automatically aggregates reviews and directory listings about a company from around the web.

The partnership will allow MerchantCircle to aggregate Citysearch data, and take advantage of Citysearch’s local ad network. Citysearch will use MerchantCircle’s software.

Of course, these companies are competing against many other also trying to provide local information more efficiently.

Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL are all working on local search offerings. Google, for example, has both local search and local mapping services that many find useful. Then there are startups like local-review site Yelp and local search engine Grayboxx. Then, there are companies like accounting software company Intuit, which are trying to buy their way into local business. Earlier this week, Intuit purchased business web services company Homestead.

The Citysearch-MerchantCircle partnership will run deep. MerchantCircle will offer Citysearch marketing programs to its members, MerchantCircle will use Citysearch’s local and national ad-sales teams to help sell ads on its site to advertisers, and IAC will get a seat on MerchantCircle’s board.

Besides Citysearch, MerchantCircle has also taken on funding from Rustic Canyon Partners, Scale Venture Partners and Disney’s Steamboat Ventures.

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About the Author, Eric Eldon

Eric currently covers digital media technology and business news, especially what's happening on social networks and their platforms. He also writes and edits stories about venture capital, and lots of other stuff, too. He started at VentureBeat in the spring of 2007, half a year or so after Matt Marshall left his reporting job at the San Jose Mercury News to found the site. Eric previously cofounded a startup called Writewith, that was building editorial software for newspapers and other groups of writers. The startup didn't work out, but he learned a lot.

  • MerchantCircle recently crossed 500,000 members. We’re proud to help local businesses acquire customers by offering an alternative to over-priced, ineffective offline marketing channels. We’ve been interviewing our merchants in all 50 states – you can read about their MerchantCircle experience here: www.visualcv.com/merchantcircle.

    We’re committed to providing every local business a web presence, easy-to-use marekting tools and a platform for connecting with other merchants, all for free. As always, please email any questions or concerns to support@merchantcircle.com and we will respond as soon as possible.
  • eufaulaok
    meerchant circle allows pornographic comments and defamation in user reviews of the businesses. see-- funeral homes- listings on merchant circle in eufaula ok. it is very difficult to contact merchant circle if u r just trying to look up business info -- and find the porn on comments. difficult for the public to report problems to merchant circle
  • I guess I don't see where MerchantCircle is somehow doing negative damage to a business reputation or name (in response to eufaulaok above) .

    Because of the traffic that it is bringing me (and increased page placement on Google and Yahoo), I am in fact getting more business from a much larger area (it may be my savior through this tough economy).
    My main website is also being pulled up organically because of my MerchantCircle listing.

    Am I an employee of MC?
    No I am definitely not...
    I am just a business owner that is trying to make the best of this economy, using as many free tools to advertise my business that the internet has to offer (I can also determine when good can outweigh bad). Look at my MC page
    http://www.merchantcircle.com/business/Treasure... I am getting an average of 8000 page views a month, and 300-400 Yahoo and Google Crawlers.
    Where is the negative in those statistics?
  • Since I signed up in December of ’09, I maintain my MC site myself and have been able to secure a good hold on local businesses needing a website. I have even been approached by some outside of my immediate area.

    Personally, I like having an account on there, because it has helped me out more than not.
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