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

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. (http://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 (http://www.lgio.co.uk) & http://www.famebook.com

http://famebook.typepad.com