A seminal event occured on Wall Street last week. At precisely 9:30 a.m. on Oct. 8, Heath Clarke, the CEO of Local.com, rang the NASDAQ opening bell. In so doing, he essentially rang in a new theme on Wall Street: Local is the new black.
Heath Clarke, Chairman & CEO, Local.com
In a report we released a few hours later, Local.com is listed as one of the Top 3 fastest-growing local online advertising companies in North America. This is a remarkable feat in a year when ad sales are phenomenally depressed for seemingly everyone else. Yet Clarke’s company is seeing growth of 34% this year on revenues that are expected to top $50 million.
Internet advertising down? Not for Local.com, which is aggressively mining the lucrative new frontier of “local.” Clarke’s company – and others like it, such as Yodle (with a whopping 210% growth rate this year) and Yellowbook.com (with a 98% growth rate) — are the ones to study.
I’ve invited the top digital executives at some of these companies to speak at our conference in February. I want to learn more about how these companies are doing it. The report we released last week shows local Internet advertising rising at a rate of about 12 percent this year. Many legacy media companies who are suffering double-digit declines in online sales growth will find that hard to believe. But as that NASDAQ bell clanged and the trading began, it may as well have been an alarm clock for them, and for anyone else trying to mine digital gold in the local hills.
Tags: Heath Clarke, local advertising, Local.com, online advertising, Yellowbook.com, Yodle
Congratulations to Heath! The decline in traditional media is offset by online– no surprise there!