For starters, it will be more contextually relevant for classified ads such as auto sales, personals and other information that is local in nature. If users can set the radius of their area, even better.
Place and time are two of the most important pieces of meta-data associated with content because they directly relate to relevance, before personal interest and taste. As an example, someone may not be generally interested in crime news, except when it happens next door to them. They may not be interested in restaurant reviews, unless the restaurant is nearby.
The downside is the cost of the location-lookup but generally speaking this cost can be offset against the increase in value of locative advertising. Not only does locative advertising offer the potential of much more relevant information, it expands the sellable inventory exponentially. Before, ads would be delivered in a single rotation queue; now a queue can exist for every suburb in the country and the inventory can be sold in smaller volumes to smaller businesses which would previously have used the Yellow Pages or small but very local newpapers.
The question then is: what type of company is best suited to leverage this potential successfully?
The answer is a conglomeration of smaller news providers which already provide local news and have the sales infrastructure to deal with smaller advertisers which need to reach an area with a radius of 20km or less. The national newspapers are at an immediate disadvantage because their sales teams aren't scalable enough or geared for many smaller incentives to sell. And, of course, they don't produce enough local content to service the entire country.
A solution to the content problem could be localised citizen journalism but, again, this will require a massively scalable editorial team to 'gatekeep'. It's not impossible, though; it just requires some money and faith in the model, or a proper business plan. In my experience, a business plan like that is unlikely to emanate from a newspaper, and even less likely to get board approval because there are too many risks and it detracts from the core business which is still, sadly for many, selling paper.
• Original blog post published on 14 October 2008
