CitySearch Takes On Google With CityGrid

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The business of local search and directories has turned into a "bipolar" world, says CitySearch CEO Jay Herratti – it's Google vs. everyone else.That was the picture he painted in rolling out details about the CityGrid, a content and advertising network that opens up all of CitySearch's deep content for sharing and re-use by other sites.

CityGrid makes 15 million local business profiles and 3 million business reviews available for any web site integrate as they see fit. It also makes pay-for-performance advertsing available for more than 500,000 local advertisers sold by CitySearch and other early CityGride partners.

"It's increasingly difficult to reach consumers at scale," CitySearch CEO Jay Herratti told those attendance during the second day of the MarketPlaces 2010 Local Vertical Opportunity conference in San Diego.

The past 12 months have seen even more players crowding their way into a local market that was already occupied by such large players as Yellow Pages, Yahoo and MapQuest.  Now, new breed mobile sites such as Loopt, Foursqure, WHERE Inc. and even Facebook are in competition for consumers' eyeballs, he said.

The roll-out of the so-called "seven pack," results that encourage users to click on Google maps pages  appear to push organic results even lower on the page, Herratti noted.

CityGrid is an attempt by CitySearch to aggregate content and advertisers in the fragmented and crowded web space that sits beneath the 800-pound gorilla known as Google and achieve consumer reach at scale.

The product is a database that aggregates advertising from about 10 partners representing 500,000 paying advertisers between them, he said. The idea is to provide them with an enhanced listing content and divide the resulting revenue generated equally among CitySearch, content provider and the entity that generated the sale.

"We want to help publishers do more, generate more, whether they are reviews, lists,  a Twitter module, putting on open API out, place ad units, or generate more traffic and pages," he said.

The CityGrid is also cable of being an SEO and SEM "white label" product that "any sales organization in this room" can brand, he said. The interface includes such as videos and tools for prospecting, any item that can help content providers spare the expense of creating their own costly local sales organization.

CityGrid is seeking to be the alternative for those who want to work with inventory that exists outside of Google, Herratti said.