CitySearch hasn’t been as popular as it once was as a city guide since the birth of sites like Urbanspoon, Yelp, and even location-based social networks like Gowalla or Foursquare; however, they’ve now launched CityGrid, a platform that they hope will become a powerful tool for local advertisers everywhere, as well as an easy way to bring their sizeable listings and extensive content to the public.
For businesses trying to break into the online local advertising space, CityGrid offers a viable alternative to simply becoming a part of Google local listings or the Adwords program. The main point of this launch seems to be to establish a place online for CitySearch apart from the major search engines, and on the side of smaller businesses, and it seems to be working. At the end of last year, CityGrid aggregated more than 500,000 paying advertisers, enhanced listings and content for 15 million businesses and attracted over 100 million unique users across 100 web and mobile sites.
According to TechCrunch, “Local merchants can sign up to get sponsored spots in search and elsewhere, and they pay for things like every time someone clicks on their menu, a video, their own merchant description, or makes a phone call for a reservation. They are paying for leads, and the same actions trigger payments on partner sites as well. But in that case, Citysearch is splitting the ad revenue with the publisher.”
Organic traffic can be hard to secure, especially in a competitive industry. Many local advertisers are starting to find that paid advertisements work best for them, in which case, CityGrid might be worth a try.