MetaCarta, Inc., the leading provider of geographic information retrieval and search solutions, announced the MetaCarta Local Alerts Service for Publishers, the industry’s first solution that notifies users when there is new content that mentions the places they care about most. Local Alerts inform people about news stories, classified ads, community events, restaurant reviews and even social media, related to their favorite city, town, or neighborhood. Online publishers can now deliver geo-targeted content to users regardless of where they live, work or play. Local Alerts draws users back to the publisher’s site for repeat visits, substantially increasing user frequency and page views metrics, enabling publishers to better capture local advertising dollars and maximize advertising rates.
MySanAntonio.com is the first organization to offer this free service to their readers (see today’s related announcement “MySanAntonio.com Partners with MetaCarta to Deliver Neighborhood News via Email”). MySanAntonio.com is a partnership between the San Antonio Express-News, a Hearst Corporation newspaper, and KENS 5, a CBS affiliate. The site incorporates Express-News content and KENS 5 video. More than 1.4 million unique visitors come to the site per month, averaging more than 25 million page views monthly.
According to The Kelsey Group’s Global Directories Forecast 2007, advertising revenues from print Yellow Pages, Internet Yellow Pages (IYP) and Local Search will grow from $30.6 billion in 2006 to $38.9 billion globally in 2011, representing a 4.9 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR). The online segment, which comprises IYP and local search advertising, is expected to grow from $4.1 billion in 2006 to $11.1 billion globally in 2011 (22.3 percent CAGR).
“Users want personalized services because they save them time and effort while delivering them the specific content they want. Advertisers want to improve the targeting of their promotions to people in specific geographic areas because it yields results far superior to those that are not targeted. Local Alerts satisfies these desires in a manner that is easy for people to use, easy for advertisers to understand and have confidence in and easy for publishers to implement.” said Rick Hutton, Vice President of Content Services at MetaCarta. “Local Alerts offers publishers a fully branded service that creates a sticky environment that is custom designed to attract new readers and retain existing readers.”
Features of Local Alerts for publishers include:
• Personalized Geo-Targeted Content Delivery – Site visitors can receive personalized content that discusses the places and locations they designate as important.
• Automatic Geographic Data Extraction – Local Alerts identifies the places mentioned in unstructured content, in real time, making it easy to deliver it to specific users.
• Registration-based service – Local alerts is a registration-based service that enables a one-to-one relationship with users.
• Flexible Implementation – The solution comes with a registration based system or easily integrates to existing registration and email systems.
• Outsourced Solution – Software-as-a-service (SaaS) model offers rapid implementation and on-demand scalability.
Source: MetaCarta