Backfence.com founder and fellow alum Mark Potts launches new service for local sites. Best of luck, Mark.
Here's more on the story from Business Week:
Taming the Web for Local Advertisers
GrowthSpur has a strategy to help business connect with fragmented audiences
When executives talk about media fragmentation, they often mean national media: myriad cable channels splitting off audiences from declining broadcast networks and consumers increasingly drawn to offerings online and on their phones—Facebook, YouTube (GOOG), blah blah blah. But such fragmentation is, if anything, more acute at the local level. The same competitive troubles affect the established TV and radio players, and the city newspaper is likely readying its application for the endangered species list. Or it's already beginning its slow fade: In mid-July, the Ann Arbor News ceased daily publication, though a smaller-staffed Web site and a twice-weekly print product will remain.
If you're an advertiser, this leaves a hole in the market. The newspaper, one crucial way to get a message to lots of consumers, is shrunken or gone. Sure, a zillion local blogs have popped up; some of them have real value. But the thing is, there's a zillion of them, and few have followings of any size, so you have to amalgamate ad buys across 10 or 15 blogs to get anything resembling a decent audience. Buying ads on one neighborhood's best little blog might leave much of a retail outlet's market uncovered. And buying ads on such blogs often means dealing with one- or two-person operations run by people who might be good at making sentences but who know little about business. "They are bloggers, not salespeople. They have other jobs," says Andrea Kerr Redniss, senior vice-president at media-buying agency Optimedia. "Wrangling those people together is horrendous."
All of which helps explain why so much advertising remains concentrated in traditional outlets and why so few, if any, independent local online ventures end up knee-deep in ad dollars. Many fail. Mark Potts, who knows from unsuccessful local online ventures—his Backfence.com, a network of community news sites, went under in 2007—is trying to erect a superstructure that will help advertisers and content sites alike make sense of the new landscape. His new company, GrowthSpur, will drape an ad network around the chaosphere of local online markets. Its networks will allow advertisers, local or national, to buy ads from sales reps across a wide array of sites, choosing among them (yes to the local parenting blog, no to the local beer-geek site) to assemble ad buys in a new and more painless fashion. For an undisclosed cut of ad revenues, GrowthSpur will string a bunch of sites into a network and automate the buying and selling of ads across said network. It will also teach inexperienced bloggers the finer points of selling ads.
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