GeoPublishers to hold first conference
A new trade association for city.com sites, GeoPublishers, is rising from the effective ashes of the Associated Cities. Affiliated with Borrell & Associates, the new group looks like it has a bright future.
Some context here: Domain collectors in the early days of the web occasionally wound up as owners of city.com sites. The power of the city.com URL to appear at the top of search results fueled a variety of new business models, though most fell short of what would be considered “media."
Exceptions include Richmond.com, ultimately acquired by its daily newspaper competitor, along with a few others.
Today, these entrepreneurs are laughing all the way to the bank. City.com sites in good markets rack up exceptional revenues with very small staffs using a "city guide" model based on transactional revenues from travel products like hotel rooms and golf courses.
The scrappy entrepreneurs building new companies first banded together as Associated Cities in the early days of the industry.
(Full disclosure: As COO of a company that owned 22 of the largest U.S. domain names, I saw first-hand the power of a city.com to produce search rankings on par with a 25 year old media company. The "search product" had such outstanding results that it allowed one sales rep to bill north of $300,000 in just more than one year.)
As the for-profit association matured, however, Associated Cities was prone boardroom - and ultimately legal - battles.
The new association has cleaned up its act. It will be a non-profit model with stronger Board control, a different membership structure and a new executive director, Andrew Martin, with a pedigree as board member and producer of Borrell & Associates conferences. Fittingly, the first GeoPublishers conference will piggy-back Borrells Local Mobile Conference this October (GeoPublishers is September 20 to October 2, followed by Borrell's) in Chicago. A link to registration is here.
The first president of GeoPublishers is Fred Mercaldo, owner of Scottsdale.com and former the president of Associated Cities, whose resignation snuffed out the organization's last hope for survival.
Mercaldo is also founder of CitiesPlanet, an advertising agency that has aggregated a network of 64 city sites, as well as a CMS platform, “City in a Box." As such he embodies the inventive - and often disruptive - spirit of the city.com industry.
Mercaldo says his goal for the new association is to have a unified voice in the industry, share information and especially to allow less experienced members to interact with owners of more mature city.com sites; ie what used to happen "back in the day."
And he’s a vocal advocate of the strength of city.com brands:
“As time goes on, and as each Google algorythm comes back, it’s more apparent than ever that the city.com is the winner, and that Google seems to penalizing the brand x directory aggregators” without unique content.
“We've survived dot-travel and dot-org. City.com is what Google recognizes as a trusted source. If you are searching for a Sony or Panasonic TV, Google can favor them. But geographically, they can’t do that. You can’t mess with geography. “
His advice to established locall media companies?
“What they have to do is embrace the city.com model. The established media’s sites only get traffic because they are promoted, not because of the (search) name brand recognition or natural traffic. 60% of my traffic is natural (the city.com named typed into the url box). (Newspaper) balance sheets will get better and they will move into our space and make strategic deals as partners or purchasers of city.coms.”
Mercaldo predicts that radio, however, is poised for a dive in valuation.
“Radio is untrackable medium and it is very important to business these days as they manage their adverting dollars… the next catastrophy from an advertiisng standpoint is radio.”
Though Mercaldo is an outspoken president, the leadership for the change in command came from Don Jones and Bill Hammack of NewOrleans.com. Skip Hoagland, founder of the original association, apparently was also involved behind the scenes.
Jones and Hammack are now on the Board, along with Gordon Borrell, Peter Niederman (Treasurer), Jessica Bookstaff Doppelt, and David and Michael Castello, the well-known brothers who own, among their large collection of pure .com sites, PalmSprings.com, a pureplay with a seven figure revenue stream.
While a number of large city.com stakeholders are playing “wait and see,” the group seems to have fixed many of the ongoing issues. The price to join is a reasonable $995 for a pure city.com site and $295 for affiliate members.
And the partnership with Borrell is a coup; Borrell also stands to gain some pure-play "street cred," a good long range move as traditional media continue to falter. Once referred diminuitively as "domainers" (people who make money buying and holding, but who don't actually do media), there is more spunk and creativity in the city.com sector than they get credit for. For one thing, some sites have become masters in developing deep search products and transactional revenues - things that established media still don't do well.
A city.com site developed the first media owned real estate brokerage that replaced traditional classifieds (SanJose.com), and many started from side businesses such as web site-development (Toledo.com) with outside sales and products that would be considered breakthrough for a traditional media company.
We will be at their first conference in Chicago and wish them well in their new journey.
