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Rest in Peace, Judy’s Book
By Matthew Berk | October 24, 2007
Today finds me well-nigh depressed, as I late last night learned of the demise of Judy’s Book. I’ve always been empathetic to their original mission, and thought I could see big trouble when they recently shifted their business model. According to Andy, who has written eloquently and openly about the ups and downs of the business, they ran into a number of challenges building the business: reaching local advertisers, keeping consumers engaged, etc.
But the one he doesn’t explicitly mention is the really hard work for standalone sites in local: making the model pay. At the scale at which a Judy’s Book, Insider Pages (pre Citysearch), MojoPages, BooRah, or Fat Door operates, it’s always going to be pretty impossible to crack the code that bridges the last mile into enough merchant wallets to support your work at scale. What these startups do a wonderful job of is educating the rest of the industry on how best to focus on the consumer, and as they disappear, we’re all best served by thoughtful meditation both on what they got right as well as which challenges ultimately led to their demise.
In the days when Open List was independent, our solution to the revenue problem was to sublimate our interest in Local to the enticing revenues of the travel world, where we earned higher CPCs under a model where a visit user could generate dozens of valid revenue-generating events. We supplemented that by licensing search out to folks like Boston.com. Then, with the ability to pay our bills, we were left with the freedom to experiment, innovate, and think hard about the local problem. Not that we had an army of engineers to support: at our largest we were seven, and kept a tight discipline on spending since we were completely self-funded.
But all of this brings me back to where we are today, and what I think will get me out of my funk, and then some. When we started Open List, we agreed that the problem we weren’t going to solve was monetization (beyond paying our bills, which was a first and high priority). When we became part of Marchex, the vision was to pair our focus on the consumer side of the equation with a) their expertise reaching local merchants and monetizing traffic, and b) tremendous scale. Whereas new entrants to the local space aren’t well poised to pay their bills (outside of equity financing), Open List and Marchex are now in a position where we’re tackling the local space (consumer and advertiser) at scale and in reverse: first by having an ad monetization platform, then by having tens of thousands of local and national merchants all needing to target locally, then by having a well-trafficked network of sites filled with nothing but consumers already looking for doctors, plumbers, accountants and restaurants.
We’ve backed into tackling local at scale, intentionally, and are in a great spot, but having been in Andy’s shoes before, I understand– viscerally–the kinds of decisions he’s had to face. Our industry gains immeasurably from startups that innovate and tackle hard problems, mostly on the dimes of equity financing, and it’s a sad but necessary labor to acknowledge their contribution, internalize the hard lessons, and move on.
Topics: Local Advertisers, Local Search, Content |
October 25th, 2007 at 10:55 pm
Well put Matt. There’s something to envy about the self-funded approach. Instead of spending time trying to hit it out of the park by doing things like giving away iPods you tend to be more focused on just staying in business.
Judysbook made a great effort feeling its way around in the dark trying to solve the social local search problem. There are so many players in this space today (at least 30 national plays as far as I can tell) that social local search is starting to feel like a commodity. It’s amazing to think that only a couple of years ago there were only a handful of goofballs trying make this stuff work.