Citysearch Takes Local Advertising To New Level

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Citysearch has been a leader in local online advertising since it was started. Now, a new deal between AOL and Citysearch looks promising in terms of local business benefit. As a part of the agreement, Citysearch will be running local video and AOL will distribute Citysearch ads across its network. This combination will serve to increase the benefits of local advertisers using Citysearch. Right now, that mostly means major metro areas but I believe that rural businesses can benefit from this as well.

Since AOL is an aggregator and not a real search engine, the scope of this agreement is limited for local search, but it’s better than what local businesses had. I expect to see Citysearch’s competition do one better. I can imagine Yelp or an online yellow pages website partner with Ask, Yahoo, or Google for similar arrangements. If that happens then local search will thrive and grow at a faster rate than anticipated. The only thing that could make these kinds of deals better is if a local advertising company partners with a social media site. Can you see a Citysearch/Facebook partnership? That would be totally awesome.

Nick Stamoulis