A representative for AT&T tells WebProNews, “AT&T plans to focus on deals for real-life, every day needs including dining, personal care, home services, entertainment and travel.”

The service is attached to YellowPages.com, and pre-registration is now open.
 
“With AT&T’s existing reach in local search, the daily deals marketplace gives us an opportunity to expand our nearly $1B local advertising business and offer another way for merchants to connect with consumers,” the rep says. “Consumers in Los Angeles, Atlanta and Dallas/Fort Worth interested in receiving the deal of the day are encouraged to sign up now to receive $10 off their first purchased deal.”

“The initial 3 cities were chosen based on consumer and advertiser engagement opportunities and existing relationships, but we’re already working to deliver more deals to more cities,” she adds.

Most daily deals offerings include heavy use of email marketing – a strategy Groupon is well-known for, and Google is emulating with its Google Offers. Facebook has a slightly different approach, utilizing  the news feed to get deals in front of customers. It will be interesting in time, to see which strategy works better.

In the age of Google, where it is simple to find the information about just about any local business on the leading search engine, you might ask just how relevant YellowPages.com actually is. Well, based on data from compete, it’s doing pretty well, with traffic growing steadily. Daily deals could only serve to help that, I would think.

The daily deals space, while getting more crowded, is also getting more interesting in that it seems to be merging with the location-based service industry in some ways. For example, look at Groupon’s acquisition of Whrrl. Foursquare, the poster-child of the check-in app space is doing more and more for businesses to make offers to customers. The company also has not ruled out potential partnerships with Google.

It makes perfect sense that these two spaces would come together. Deals give people a reason (beyond the gaming element) to use check-in apps, and they give the apps better monetization strategies. With more consumers carrying smartphones around in their pockets, deals are going to be around every corner, as businesses advertise with this growing number of services.

Deal aggregation is going to be key moving forward.

Citygrid, Citysearch told us, would give local advertisers access to a pay-for-performance ad platform and campaign tools, a scalable SEO solution on the web, local listings optimization, and wider distribution.

One commenter on our previous coverage of Citygrid said, "I saw their presentation and I feel that any SEO value is minimal. I love the concept of a one-stop shop for all things local, but this is not a complete (or even almost complete) solution. Maybe as it gets developed out a bit it will have more value.”

"The expansion of our partnership with AT&T Interactive is an opportunity for two leading names in local to offer additional value to both advertisers and consumers," says Citysearch CEO Jay Herratti. "By combining AT&T Interactive’s massive sales organization with the reach of CityGrid, local advertisers will be able to reach millions of consumers across a variety of local properties."

"The local marketplace is an increasingly attractive and effective opportunity for advertisers to reach ready-to-buy consumers," adds AT&T Interactive President and CEO David Krantz. "Combined with the reach of AT&T Interactive’s comprehensive local ad network, our collaboration with Citysearch supports our long-time commitment to drive qualified leads for our advertisers across the web and other high-trafficked platforms including IPTV and mobile."

Do you see this expanded relationship as a good thing for your local business? Let us know what you think.

Citygrid, Citysearch told us, would give local advertisers access to a pay-for-performance ad platform and campaign tools, a scalable SEO solution on the web, local listings optimization, and wider distribution.

One commenter on our previous coverage of Citygrid said, "I saw their presentation and I feel that any SEO value is minimal. I love the concept of a one-stop shop for all things local, but this is not a complete (or even almost complete) solution. Maybe as it gets developed out a bit it will have more value.”

"The expansion of our partnership with AT&T Interactive is an opportunity for two leading names in local to offer additional value to both advertisers and consumers," says Citysearch CEO Jay Herratti. "By combining AT&T Interactive’s massive sales organization with the reach of CityGrid, local advertisers will be able to reach millions of consumers across a variety of local properties."

"The local marketplace is an increasingly attractive and effective opportunity for advertisers to reach ready-to-buy consumers," adds AT&T Interactive President and CEO David Krantz. "Combined with the reach of AT&T Interactive’s comprehensive local ad network, our collaboration with Citysearch supports our long-time commitment to drive qualified leads for our advertisers across the web and other high-trafficked platforms including IPTV and mobile."

Do you see this expanded relationship as a good thing for your local business? Let us know what you think.

Citygrid, Citysearch told us, would give local advertisers access to a pay-for-performance ad platform and campaign tools, a scalable SEO solution on the web, local listings optimization, and wider distribution.

One commenter on our previous coverage of Citygrid said, "I saw their presentation and I feel that any SEO value is minimal. I love the concept of a one-stop shop for all things local, but this is not a complete (or even almost complete) solution. Maybe as it gets developed out a bit it will have more value.”

"The expansion of our partnership with AT&T Interactive is an opportunity for two leading names in local to offer additional value to both advertisers and consumers," says Citysearch CEO Jay Herratti. "By combining AT&T Interactive’s massive sales organization with the reach of CityGrid, local advertisers will be able to reach millions of consumers across a variety of local properties."

"The local marketplace is an increasingly attractive and effective opportunity for advertisers to reach ready-to-buy consumers," adds AT&T Interactive President and CEO David Krantz. "Combined with the reach of AT&T Interactive’s comprehensive local ad network, our collaboration with Citysearch supports our long-time commitment to drive qualified leads for our advertisers across the web and other high-trafficked platforms including IPTV and mobile."

Do you see this expanded relationship as a good thing for your local business? Let us know what you think.

Citygrid, Citysearch told us, would give local advertisers access to a pay-for-performance ad platform and campaign tools, a scalable SEO solution on the web, local listings optimization, and wider distribution.

One commenter on our previous coverage of Citygrid said, "I saw their presentation and I feel that any SEO value is minimal. I love the concept of a one-stop shop for all things local, but this is not a complete (or even almost complete) solution. Maybe as it gets developed out a bit it will have more value.”

"The expansion of our partnership with AT&T Interactive is an opportunity for two leading names in local to offer additional value to both advertisers and consumers," says Citysearch CEO Jay Herratti. "By combining AT&T Interactive’s massive sales organization with the reach of CityGrid, local advertisers will be able to reach millions of consumers across a variety of local properties."

"The local marketplace is an increasingly attractive and effective opportunity for advertisers to reach ready-to-buy consumers," adds AT&T Interactive President and CEO David Krantz. "Combined with the reach of AT&T Interactive’s comprehensive local ad network, our collaboration with Citysearch supports our long-time commitment to drive qualified leads for our advertisers across the web and other high-trafficked platforms including IPTV and mobile."

Do you see this expanded relationship as a good thing for your local business? Let us know what you think.

This was actually revealed last summer, but is now being implemented.

About the change, Carracher says:

- Predictive text search technology that automatically suggests potential search terms as a user enters a business name or category.

- Search results, supported by YP.COM’s database of over 21 million business listings, allow users to filter results by neighborhood, Video Profiles and business coupons.

- While in beta testing, advertisers averaged a 28% increase in calls and clicks per search as a result of placement on YP.COM

"Our new direction with YP.COM reflects our investment in developing local search technology that helps create stronger engagement between consumers and the businesses they are seeking to discover, find, and connect with," says David Krantz, president and CEO of AT&T Interactive. "With the help of our users and 5,000+ local market sales experts, we have a tremendous opportunity to keep helping our advertisers grow their business, while delivering a search experience that brings together richer content and transactional capabilities."

Users can filter results by neighborhood, Video Profiles and business coupons.

AT&T is also currently tinkering with Buzz.com, a social local search tool that draws from the same database as YP.com. Read our recent interview with AT&T for more details about that. 

The IYP search market leader in the fourth quarter of 2007 was Yellowpages.com Network, which formed multiple partnerships with sites including Areaguides.net and 411.com, enabling them to be the leader in total IYP searches.

YellowPages Logo
(Photo Credit: YellowPages.com)

"In the highly competitive IYP search market, partnerships played a significant role in determining the 2007 landscape," said Serge Matta, senior vice president of comScore. "Yellowpages Network was one of the key beneficiaries of this strategy, since partnerships helped it secure a leading position in the market."

Yellowpages.com Network (20.2 percent share) just beat out Superpages.com Network (20.0 percent share) in Q4 2007 to take the top position in the IYP market. Superpages new partnerships helped to increase its search activity, with the new Local.com partnership and the Infospace FindIt/Switchboard purchase adding to its gains.

Superpages ended its affiliation with both 411.com and MSN Yellowpages, offsetting the positive impact of the new partnerships. Superpages saw an increased number of total searches in 2007, it did not grow as fast as the market, and as a result its share fell slightly.

Yellow Book Network more than doubled it share from 4 percent to nearly 9 percent, benefiting in part from its new relationship with Addresses.com. Microsoft Sites experienced an increase in IYP searches after it began redirecting searches to Microsoft Maps beginning in December. Microsoft Sites increased its search share from 3.8 percent in Q4 2006 to 4.8 percent in Q4 2007.

R.H. Donnelley, a regional local search provider among the top 8 U.S. IYP sites had a relatively modest national IYP search market share of 3.3 percent. Within their 14-state region, they actually led the market in Q4 2007 with a 22 percent market share.

Yellow Book Network and R.H. Donnelley saw traffic more than double, due to a combination of new relationships and organic visitor growth. R.H. Donnelley’s growth can be largely attributed to its purchase of Business.com.

YellowPages Logo
(Photo Credit: YellowPages.com)

Yellowpages.com will begin providing ads to Microsoft in early April. No financial terms were released. Under the agreement, ad listings will appear on local sites including MSN Live Search and Live Search Maps, AT&T said.

The agreement gives Yellowpages advertisers access to Microsoft’s search pages. The deal increased the total number of estimated monthly searchers and brings the total number of projected monthly searches on Yellowpages to over 160 million.

Yellowpages replaces Idearc ‘s Superpages.com service. Idearc said the Microsoft partnership had not worked out well.

"The traffic from MSN had not met our expectations and had not performed as we had hoped, so we would not have renewed that agreement without significant changes," spokeswoman Mary De La Garza told Dow Jones Newswires. "We are continuing to pursue other opportunities for our advertisers – given that we have a performance-based model and a different strategy than MSN."

Yellowpages.com made $600 million last year, and estimates revenue from the business and ads from wireless and U-Verse to be about %1.5 billion by 2010.