Mark Fratrik and Tom Buono, BIA/Kelsey executives who spoke at the firm’s Interactive Local Media East conference at the Boston Marriott Copley Place, predicted that online advertising revenue will rise to $42 billion by 2015, with a continued shift towards local-focused ads and daily deals. BIA/Kelsey is a respected authority on local advertising, and gathered top representatives of interactive local media, local search, mobile local and social local media to examine the latest business models, technology and revenue opportunities in a market where local is currently at the leading edge.

The firm’s research asserted that online local advertising comprised 14.1 percent of all spending by SMBs, and that 2011online local ad spendings could reach 16.2 percent. Businesses have already begun to shift their ad budgets from strategies like direct mail and television ads to daily deals like those offered on the immensely popular Groupon.

“New media changes every day because of healthy competition from emerging entries,” Fratrik said.

As firms like Yahoo, Gannett , Living Social, and Cheap Local Deals explore local daily deals offerings, BIA/Kelsey forecasts the daily deals space will generate $3.9 billion in consumer spending by 2015.

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.