CityVoter offers local media outlets city guides for their dull websites, raises $2.6 million

September 21, 2008 | Dan Kaplan | Comments |

The hyper-local concept, which revolves around content — like business reviews — targeted to local niches, has had it rough. Over the last 18 months, two venture-backed start-ups, Judy’s Book and BackFence, have had to shut down. Another site, Insider Pages, sold to Citysearch without generating much of a return to its investors. Only Yelp seems to have gained a significant following.

So you might think investing in another local review company doesn’t make too much sense. However, this is exactly what Allen and Company and Dace Ventures have done in backing CityVoter with a $2.6 million second round.

Founded in 2005, with headquarters in Cambridge, Mass, CityVoter has grown by striking deals with local media companies (mostly TV stations) and adding local business reviews to their sites.

CityVoter counts Hearst-Argyle, Newsweek-Post and a handful of local FOX stations among its customers. It most recently announced that SFGate, the San Francisco Chronicle’s website, would use CityVoter to power its business listings and reviews.

A quick glance at a CityVoter-powered site makes it clear that we’re not dealing with a heavyweight threat to Yelp: CityVoter’s sites are mostly based around voting for your favorite businesses. The interface is clear but rudimentary and the listings are generally pretty sparse. It seems that the media outlets that use CityVoter are trying to find some way to increase engagement on their sites and hey, why not give local business reviews a shot?

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About the Author, Dan Kaplan

Once upon a time, Dan considered himself a magazine journalist with dreams of "The New Yorker" and a couple of well-reviewed but only mildly successful books. Then one day, life, as it is known to do, decided it was time for rebirth. Like so many things before it, this rebirth was conceived on a mostly-empty plane to Reno. Now, instead of magazine writing, Dan would plunge into the world of New Media and write for Matt Marshall's blog.

It's funny how it goes.

  • I run several local town websites in the UK and after three years building up what are now the de facto sources of information for each of those towns, I would venture to suggest that the user-generated content model simply won't work in the long run if the ambition is to create brand loyalty and a cloned niche format with high yield ad revenues.

    Our sites aren't perfect yet by any means, but our format delivers around $400,000 per annum per website in towns with a population of 23,000 as one example. (www.lymington.com) Operating like a magazine; we sell directory listings for local businesses, fixed animated banners for each page and keep our overheads to a bare minimum. Most importantly we personalise each community and 'tell the story' of that town. (Reviews, articles, webcams etc.) We also make sure we do that better than anyone else.

    Whether it's Yelp, CityVoter or whoever else comes along, my view is that each may well stake a claim to part of the perceived volume of traffic because of their scale, but in reality all that achieved is once again a diluted CPM based advertising model and we know how well that actually delivers to the bottom line. Yellow pages for example is in my opinion visibly falling apart, when actually they could so easily turn that competely around with a sensible strategy based on a content and advertising, locally run in partnership with appropriate media. They have the infrastructure in place to make that happen already and could simply re-align it.

    My view of where the big opportunity lies, is that one of the above mentioned creates an awesome platform with our style (copyright owned) of front page format as the window of each town and underpinned by a wholly self-contained and online back office financial model so that the hundreds of thousands existing local town portals which are already established but perhaps without the finesse of a centralised platform, are tempted to stake their claim and exclusivity under that one brand, and collectively deliver a worldwide network of local address books and newspapers. Whoever owns the latter will potentially then have true access to every community and in my view a 20% slice of that across the board would be worth ten times more than another unconvincing pretence to local knowledge and connectivity.

    Lastly, I would also add that my model would also provide perhaps the most exciting opportunity of all, in the shape of 'user-generated' advertising. Within the format as just one option, you can incorporate localised social networking profiles and invite the 'local person' to source their own advertising sponsor for their profile for a share of the revenues and gradually expand that to provide a self-perpetuating energy and brand escalation as people 'sell' the idea within their own environments.

    After all what value would Venturebeat be if Matt and the team weren't leading the subject matter and if all the content was user-generated...my modest suggestion is that it wouldn't amount to much!...

    I am though pleased to see the great Allen & Co right at the forefront again, of the other big media opportunity of this generation...

    Jan Simmonds (www.lgio.co.uk) & www.famebook.com

    http://famebook.typepad.com
  • I think user generation is the key to solving the local search issue. I think with user generation we get a complete product and additionally we are starting to see that with Yelp. In terms of monetization, we will start to see that in the next few years once a model takes hold. With the advent of video on sites like Jippidy.com, the potential for monetization increases.
  • This is a very interesting post. It is interesting how little headway has been made in this segment. I think commenter Jan Simmonds has hit the nail on the head of what is wrong in this segment - and what can be done. User-generated content is great, but is unlikely to yield the kind of cohesive quality that is necessary to make an advertising model in a space like this work. The social networking sites have become the defacto hubs for local groups, orgs and networks.

    The yellow page companies have huge sales infrastructures, and if they could retool to provide truly valuable local and regional contect, they would have a great opportunity to exploit this opportunity