I got a tip the other day that Canpages was being shuttered and that “95% of its staff” were being canned, so to speak. I was unsuccessful in my effort to speak directly with YPG (which acquired Canpages in 2010 for $225 million), mainly because of scheduling challenges in getting on the phone with them.

Luckily the designated spokesperson for this issue, Yellow Media Treasurer Anne-Sophie Roy, has spoken publicly about what’s going to happen. There will be layoffs (though not at the levels cited above). This goes toward redundant personnel.

Canpages itself will be integrated with YPG and its organization. The infrastructure and the advertising products will be the same, so will the reps. However there will be a different consumer UI/UX when the Canpages product relaunches later in the year.

According to Roy (quoted in the Globe and Mail):

[The] Canpages offering will be integrated with 360 and Canpages advertisers will be offered 360 in the same way the YPG advertisers are being offered 360.

[W]e’ll relaunch it so it has a different focus and a different user experience than YPG . . .  It’s a different user experience, a different way to push the content.

Essentially the database both sites crawl will be the same, but how we push results and the structure of the search functionality at the sites.

Yellow Media is under enormous pressure because the market has dramatically discounted the value of the business (unfairly). This is large part because it sees company revenues heavily tied to print, which investors regard as on the way out.

Yellow Media has impressed me by being much more progressive than most other publishers and aggressively diversifying its business through acquisitions of digital media agencies and assets.

What should YPG/Yellow Media do with Canpages? What would you do in their situation?

• Create a much more socially focused directory experience?
• Try different functionality (e.g., online scheduling) or business models (e.g., more lead-based)?
• Take a “demographic approach” (i.e., targeting younger users or moms)?

Congratulations to TeachStreet for being acquired by Amazon(Local). The company announced the acquisition in a blog post:

Today we are happy to announce that we’re joining the AmazonLocal team. Sadly, this means that we will be closing TeachStreet.

When we opened our doors on April 21, 2008 we had grand aspirations, to create a place to help lifelong learners find great classes and teachers, empower teachers with robust tools to manage their teaching businesses, and enable schools to more effectively generate leads for their classes. Over the last few years we have succeeded in creating what we think is the world’s largest selection of classes and courses, and one of the richest marketing toolsets for teachers and schools, big and small.

As the post says, “Sadly, this means that we will be closing TeachStreet.” This is all too common with startups: a larger entity buys the company and shortly thereafter it’s gone. Consumers or businesses that relied on the startup are then SOL — as they say.

I don’t begrudge Dave Schappell and his crew the spoils of their hard work but it’s an all-too-common (and unfortunate) phenomenon.  

A couple of weeks ago I reported findings from Market Authority‘s survey of 15K consumers in metro and rural markets about local business resources. The data indicated that 33% of metro market consumers rely exclusively on print yellow pages for local business lookups. That was difficult for many people to accept.

As I indicated Market Authority told me the data were drawn from markets such as Chicago, Philadelphia, Austin, Boston, Atlanta and others. To recap, here were the usage findings for the metro markets:

Metro markets:

• Print YP use only: 33%
• Both print YP and online: 40%
• Online only: 27%

In response to some of the comments, I asked Market Authority to provide aggregate demographic segmentation among the metro-survey respondents. The following is the age-usage breakdown provided by the company.

Those who report using the print directory only:

• 20s – 17%
• 30s – 16%
• 40s – 31%
• 50s – 38%
• 60s – 49%
• 70s – 69%

Those who report using the Internet exclusively:

• 20s – 51%
• 30s – 32%
• 40s – 22%
• 50s – 17%
• 60s – 17%
• 70s – 8%

The company also said that “An average of 15% of people living in metro areas report not having the Internet available in their homes.”

The data are as one would expect: younger users rely more on the Internet and older users tend to rely more heavily on the print directory. This general age segmentation is reflected in other studies as well.

However, Market Authority also made the following point about age and usage to me in email:

In America the Baby Boomer and Seniors have considerably more money to spend than do the Millennial and Gen X generations and they are also still heavily using print.

Within about an hour of its release yesterday the Facebook S-1 IPO filing had been dissected and analyzed extensively. You can read that coverage here.

There’s a great deal of discussion about mobile in the filing. However I find it strange that there’s almost nothing about local, deals or Facebook’s SMB opportunity. Various surveys I and others have done put the number of SMBs on Facebook at between 45% and 70% of the addressable SMB-advertiser market.

The one discussion of “small business” in the S-1 is a case study about Amex’s promotion of “Small Business Saturday,” used to illustrate Facebook’s capacity to attract brand advertisers that would otherwise use traditional media:

American Express purchased ads on Facebook and put its Facebook Page at the center of its advertising campaign in November 2010 to introduce and promote “Small Business Saturday,” a new local initiative designed to encourage shopping at small businesses on the Saturday after Thanksgiving. The ads reached 84 million Facebook users over the three week campaign. American Express continued the campaign in 2011. The campaign reached 91 million people, including 74 million who were shown an ad that featured a connection with their Facebook friends, successfully leveraging social context at scale. We believe that advertising on Facebook contributed to the successful results of the Small Business Saturday campaign; in 2011 public awareness of Small Business Saturday rose to 65% from 37% in 2010. Additionally, American Express saw a 23% increase in Cardmember transactions at small business merchants on Small Business Saturday.

The only statement AOL made about “local” in yesterday’s earnings release and slides was the following: “Patch grew traffic, advertisers and ad impressions over 100% year-over-year.” However, on the earnings call AOL CEO Tim Armstrong opened up a bit about Patch and its performance.

Armstrong reaffirmed the company’s commitment to the embattled product: “Patch is not a pet project. Patch is a business that means deep consumers needs and advertising needs.” He added that he is “expecting to make a lot of progress on revenue in 2012.”

Below are some of the others statements Armstrong made about Patch (as reflected in the transcript, which is a bit ragged in places):

–Patch ended Q4 in 863 [markets] and with roughly 10 million unique users

–Patch ended Q4 as a number four local property on the web

–We now have 14,000 bloggers, signed up to the Patch platform

–Patch ended Q4 with roughly 6,500 advertisers (compare: ReachLocal had roughly 19K advertisers in Q3 2011)

–Patch’s sales force in Q4 at 230 people with the average [tenure] being about eight months…

–Ending Q4 2011, there were 401 Patches about $2,000 per month in revenue…

–To-date in 2012, we have already sold 50% of the total revenue we did in 2011

Armstrong also spoke about how Patch would be a magnet for political ad dollars because of its hyper-local targeting capability. And he spoke about “flattening” the organization in a recent restructuring to minimize costs.

AOL also continues to try and drive traffic to local Patch sites with the Huffington Post.

Thanks to GeekWire’s digging, we get to see a balance sheet/revenue statement from LivingSocial in an Amazon 10-Q footnote. Here’s how the company presents it:

Our equity-method investments include a 31% interest in LivingSocial. Summarized condensed financial information for this investee, as provided to us by LivingSocial, is as follows (in millions):

We don’t know how LivingSocial is accounting for revenue. This $245 million is probably not gross revenue, which would include the total value of deals. It’s probably net revenue or only what LivingSocial takes from the deals it sells. Otherwise it just seems too low.

Last year Groupon moved from “gross billings” to “net revenue” in its accounting, which cut revenues considerably.

What’s your take?

This launched today: Local Paid Inclusion from Bruce Clay (UBL has denied involvement, see below).

By itself this framing of the service isn’t necessarily controversial. Here’s the controversial part — cooperation with Google, Bing and Yahoo. According to copy on the site:

Local Paid Inclusion is a Google, Yahoo and Bing contracted service and is offered as an approved official program in cooperation with those search engines. Local Paid Inclusion promotes a local business’ profile page, like those found in Google Places, Yahoo Local and Bing Local, into a top position on the search result page for up to 30 keywords per profile page. This is a NEW program offered by Google, Yahoo!, Bing and 18 other major directories and indexes that places a business profile into a premium area above all other local profiles. Combine this with all of your other optimization programs to maximize your traffic.

What this means is local businesses that participate can essentially pay for the top local ranking position!

(Emphasis mine.)

The problem is two-fold:

• The search engines wouldn’t permit anyone to buy a top organic position (ads are different). At one point Yahoo had a paid inclusion product and discontinued it.
• They also deny that they’re cooperating or that this is any sort of new/formal program

Search Engine Land has a more complete story with (denial) statements from Google and Bing. I’m not sure exactly what’s going on because nobody can sell a top organic ranking, although many in the past have tried to claim they can deliver a number one ranking for a price.

I first learned about this from the gentlemanly Andrew Shotland.

Update: This has become very strange and confusing. UBL was mentioned in the original Search Engine Watch (not Land) article. But the company has subsequently denied any involvement:

Universal Business Listing denies any association with articles and news reports about a “paid inclusion” business listing service. The company has made no such announcements or claims, particularly in regards to Google. It has no product announcements pending.

Bruce Clay Inc is a reseller of UBL’s existing business listing syndication service and is not currently testing any new service from our company.

As I’ve written at MarketingLand, Microsoft is replacing conventional display ads in its Hotmail service with deals. The company believes the new deals ads will be more interesting and less “distracting” to Hotmail users. I would agree.

Google is starting to experiment with display ads in email but generally its text ads are fairly unobtrusive. Meanwhile Yahoo’s ads can be of dramatically variable quality.

On the one hand this is a bid to improve Hotmail and gain new usage for the Microsoft webmail product, which is the global leader with 350 million users. However it lags Yahoo and Gmail in the US. Recently Google reported that Gmail has 350 million active users globally, which would put it in a tie with Hotmail.

This development is also perhaps more interesting as a new form of deals distribution in display ads that will be targeted geographically and demographically.

The new Hotmail deal ads will roll out slowly in selected cities while Microsoft tests consumer response to the new ad units.

Yelp has posted what appears to be a new video making the argument for ads to SMBs. The notification sent to business owners introducing the video says the following:

Business owners often ask, “If Yelp offers me a free listing and business owner account, why would I ever pay money for advertising?”

Check out the video below to hear from people across the country who have successfully used Yelp advertising to grow their customer base. As one business owner put it, “It was the best $300 I’ve ever spent, and I mean that.”

Yelp filed last year to go public and disclosed just over $58 million in ad revenue for the first nine months.

The full year probably came in around $75 million or so. About 69% of the company’s revenue came from “local advertising” while the rest came from “brand advertising” — or SMBs vs. national advertisers.

Yelp says that 529,000 local listings have been claimed (presumably by SMBs and their surrogates). The company also said it now has 22 million reviews and 61 million monthly unique users on a global basis.

AllThingsD pointed out a new video on the homepage of Foursquare that explains the site to new users. I never see/saw it because I’m logged in (nor will you if logged in). The video is very accessible and doesn’t say anything about check-ins or “mayorships.”

The messaging is simple:

• Keep up with friends (and their recommendations)
• Discover what’s nearby
• Save money with deals and rewards

One question is whether this was always the vision and the “game mechanics” was just a way to jump start the app or whether Foursquare has adapted and evolved beyond its original conception.

Regardless, the company is in a position to become a powerful loyalty platform for brands and SMBs alike. There are others in this category of course too; Facebook and Twitter among them.