The landscape of online local advertising has been changing dramatically since Groupon announced its powerhouse VC investment less than three months ago in April. Groupon and its gaggle of imitator couponing systems have forced traditional media to re-examine their CPM-based banner ad models, and they’re now adding the same kind of Daily Deals to their ad mix. Right down to the local print:

(iPhone pic from: @bergenctynews)

The quick adoption of couponing systems by traditional media is an immediate reaction to ad competition, and signals a strategy to retain their traditional advertising channel to the consumer:

In three months, a wall has been erected by traditional media; there’s no reason to develop partnerships with the Groupons and their ilk when they own the distribution channel to the local consumer:

The biggest barrier now facing the infant couponing systems is gaining access to local media channels in order to promote their Daily Deals. They are essentially brand new companies, and they all leverage email lists and the social media as alternative channels to reach into the community.

The second barrier is building local sales infrastructure to service community businesses. Funded Groupon and LivingSocial can invest in local sales infrastructure, but the hundred other couponing ventures don’t have the luxury of capital and usually just build out in their home city.

What’s next for couponing systems

In order to scale their business regionally or nationally, couponing companies will create new or parallel business models:

1. White label couponing systems for license use by local media companies – TV, radio, newspaper – to offer Daily Deals. The white label licensing concept can extend to national advertisers like Home Depot to broadcast their local weekly deals and granularly to the local chambers and civic associations wanting to promote their merchants.
2. National ad agency and media buying services that acquire and harvest clients at the local level for national distribution across networks of local couponing and other advertising systems. For example, half price ski lift tickets at Vail or Mother’s Day gift wine packages from Napa can be sold through couponing systems regionally, even nationally.
3. Coupon aggregation systems like TheDealMap, Yipit and DealRadar make it easier for consumers to find local deals in one list or map. Affiliate marketing models will contribute to the expansion of these types of coupon distribution systems down to the neighborhood level.

Related posts:

Local coupon aggregation and what’s next

The powerful launch of Google Buzz (Mashable | Google Buzz has completely changed the game) last week signals the arrival of the Real Time Web as a truly new media. It’s been well documented that Twitter has established itself a breaking news source. Google Buzz, Facebook and Twitter form a triumvirate channel for sourcing news media that will continue to grow in influence.

The real time web implies that online news will flow more and more through applications, not websites. The problem facing mainstream media is their dependence on traffic through their websites for advertising revenue.

The journalistic media on the other hand continue to try to erect walls that halt traffic flow through their websites, either by charging subscriptions (New York Newsday gets 35 subscribers after three months), by limiting access to their content by aggregators (Murdoch’s gambit with blocking Google from indexing Sky News content), or simply by not providing an RSS feed for syndication (Santa Barbara News Press and many other local publications).

Social media thrives on RSS to find, deliver and syndicate news from journalistic media, and it directs traffic back to the news source.  If the traditional news media continues to ignore social media sourced breaking news, they risk becoming irrelevant to their communities who demand this real time news. People will eventually find that real time news directly from their community via one of their social networks and news aggregation applications.

This week’s Time declares on its front cover ” Jay Leno is the Future of TV”. By parading Jay’s new show at 10:00 to compete with expensively produced dramas like CSI: Miami and other scripted shows, NBC is beta testing whether live content will be as attractive as or more cost effective than canned content.

What’s the revolution? PC monitors are already used like TVs for on-demand programming. Add time-shifting digital video services and Tivo, and it’s notable that TV no longer can provide instant programming gratification with the touch of the ON switch. Canned programming is more efficiently watched by time-shifting to one’s own schedule.

So what is TV good for?  Real time news… breaking news… sports… programming relevant to the here and now. Jay Leno will break the mold to see whether a TV audience will tune into live programming just because it is not canned. If it works, the cost of paying Jay Leno playing talk show host for 5 hours per week is a magnitude lower than producing a series of 5 one-hour dramas. If it works, scripted content will go direct to big screen, YouTube or Hulu, and TV will be littered with sports, talk shows, news shows, reality shows and talent shows, all designed to force people to set an alarm to watch them. Then social media converges with TV because everybody sitting on their coaches watching a national football game or Dancing with the Stars can participate live with others, and make that experience relevant to their lives.

Conclusion: PCs became TV proxies, and now TV is going the route of emulating the real time relevancy of PCs. This is simply a manifestation of media convergence; in fact, it’s cross-convergence.

Wired magazine’s article last month Twitter, Flickr, Facebook makes Blogs look so 2004 posits the “death of blogging”.

Writing a weblog today isn’t the bright idea it was four years ago. The blogosphere, once a freshwater oasis of folksy self-expression and clever thought, has been flooded by a tsunami of paid bilge. Cut-rate journalists and underground marketing campaigns now drown out the authentic voices of amateur wordsmiths. It’s almost impossible to get noticed, except by hecklers. And why bother? The time it takes to craft sharp, witty blog prose is better spent expressing yourself on Flickr, Facebook, or Twitter.

Blogging used to be about creating content. Today’s mainstream blogs are about distributing content. The “blogs” now garnering much of the traffic – Huffington Post, Engadget, etc. – have become mass media digests.

It’s the portability of content that now matters. Online presence can be measured by where and how often your name and word show up across the Internet. The more entities distributing, reblogging and retweeting your content (including mass media publishers who use blog syndication services like Blogburst and Newstex), and the more services chronicling your activity/content (Friendfeed, Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, etc.) the more renowned you become. And that can lead directly to celebrity, position, or just a business break.

The mainstream media now gets this. Once the principal creator of “content”, they are firing their journalists/reporters, and moving into news and data distribution. They realize they can still capture eyeballs by republishing, aggregating and delivering content and data, created in-house or user-generated. It’s not a lucrative as before, when MSM controlled the content and viewership, and charged SuperBowl rates, but then the wave of user-generated content forced their hands.

At Transparent Real Estate, I’ve postulated how blogging is changing in real estate because the objective of a real estate blog – lead generation for the real estate professional – is inconsistent with the act of writing a blog. The average real estate agent just wants to get a blog up quickly while doing as little work as possible. Now, creating exhaustive content isn’t the methodology, it’s distributing the real estate data and information that’s already out there quickly to their constituency. It makes the act of “blogging” much easier when you don’t have to write original and compelling content, something that is hard to do on a real estate blog. (Most real estate blogs discuss hyperlocal issues, which is essentially irrelevant to any reader who lives outside that real estate bloggers’ domain).

Related articles:

Is Blogging Dead?

Nine tips for real estate bloggers on the “new blog writing”

Associated Press once was the RSS Feed of news distribution. Newspapers, already affected by plunging profits and now retrenching for recession, have been canceling their AP service contracts in droves due to AP’s high pricing structure:

October 16: Tribune Companies

October 17: Columbus Dispatch

September 26: Minneapolis St Paul Star Tribune

September 2: Spokane Spokesman Review

AP has a relic business model – news syndication – that relies on paid content sources written by AP staff writers, now commodity journalism. Twitter reports breaking news hours faster than AP. Social media distributes content just as well free or at a fractional cost. Newspaper don’t need AP, they should devote their efforts in finding and promoting these content sources, like bloggers and independent news services, who would appreciate and value mainstream media reference. They can then extend their brand name creating new aggregated news services like Politico or Huffington Post.

Read Write Web describes AP’s new feedreader-like product called AP Member Marketplace that begins to automate news syndication for web editors.

The problem is the marketplace is limited to AP news stories, ignoring the vast resources of the web for news content. This is a business that is painstakingly attempting to remain relevant, and relying on its customer base to believe in the old power and brand of AP.

This will happen soon in the mainstream media…

The verticalization of Twitter continues, as it should. Twitter can be too broad population to effectively filter out vertical conversations.

Micro-blogging is the best medium at this time to aggregate user generated conversations along topics. Election.Twitter is a simple application but provides a hyper-real time view on the mood of the political nation. The mainstream media will understand this utility soon, and court prominent Twitterers by topic.

We in the social media implicitly understand that the mainstream media readership are still getting their feet wet when it comes to finding, reading and subscribing to blogs (unless they look like MSM like Huffington Post, or are blogs residing within MSM like the NYT).

I discovered a contrary example in a Washington Post article – Making Connections: Web 2.0 Creates New Ways for Agents, Home Shoppers to Find Each Other. Such an article (with extensive quotes from Web 2.0 luminaries and bloggers) would resonate prolifically within any online real estate forum, or real estate oriented social network like Active Rain, but 10 days after the article published, I submitted the sole comment:

I’m postulating that bloggers either generally don’t monitor the mass media or don’t find it worthwhile to establish conversations within their space. Frankly, the Washington Post and other publishers offer a conduit between their consumer readership and the real estate bloggers, so it behooves the bloggers to participate within their sphere. The mass media is still not linked into the blogosphere.

Mass Media – Marketwatch, NYT, USA Today – publishes articles and can be deluged with thousands of comments. The first twenty or so distill the various viewpoints of an article, and ploughing through the rest of them becomes senseless, like walking through a comments graveyard. Voting up/down comments can filter the more significant ones, and the publishers should display the highest rated comments first.

Here’s one more journalist – Marketwatch’s David Weidner – who has succumbed to the simple broadcast nature of Twitter in the hopes of producing a distilled soundbyte message as an alternative to that mountainous commentary.

Technology always is bringing us new ways to share ideas. The comments section of MarketWatch is one of those, but let’s be honest: The posts are often too long for readers to sort through, and the conversation can degenerate into a stew of ideas that make interest-rate swaps look easy.
So I’ve decided to follow the lead of some of my colleagues by creating a Twitter account. The great thing about Twitter is that contributors have to be concise. Posts have a 140-character limit, so everyone has a level playing field. There’s a lot of value in keeping it short and sweet, as many readers have told me.
We can also talk about some issues that haven’t been mentioned in the column. It can be a place where anything goes, and I promise to interact by asking questions and responding. That’s the kind of participation I haven’t been able to provide to the comments section — which, of course, is still a great place to leave your thoughts. I will continue to read it.
I’ll also use Twitter to let people know when I’m doing TV on Fox Business or CNBC or making an appearance on another media outlet. Let’s see how it goes, and thanks for giving it a try. Go to David Weidner’s Twitter page.

What’s significant is David’s implicit admission that he has no idea what he is going to do on Twitter (which is ok) – 1/3 broadcast stuff, 1/3 communication and 1/3 PR on his media wherabouts…

What David should do is follow more Twittering market journalists, pundits, economists, and bloggers so his Followers (us) can view a comprehensive lens of David’s sphere of market interpreters. And by us following David’s network, we can vicariously watch the Twitter conversations that would take place among this mainstream media group. This real time commentary would be the equivalent of watching a ticker tape of pundit Twitter feeds below CNBC business news, all in real time… I’d bet many business TV watchers would find that intriguing. The online analogy would be watching David’s Friendfeed, the next application he will have to figure out.