LocalLiveDeal, the Latest to Blend Local Search and Video

LiveDeal, the Latest to Blend Local Search and Video

Local search and classifieds site LiveDeal announced today that it will integrate video content in its listings. This will allow individual sellers and businesses to upload videos to enhance their classifieds or directory listings.

This follows closely behind many local search and internet yellow pages sites that have blended local search and video over the past year, such as Yellowpages.com, Superpages, and Citysearch. Every major U.S. IYP in fact now has video capability in some form, as there is a clear trend towards video integration in local search.

Google’s video addition to AdSense earlier this week meanwhile expand its own video efforts by scaling the distribution of YouTube videos beyond YouTube alone, to the expansive AdSense publisher network. This has local implications as well, with the speculation that Google could integrate video to AdWords by letting users and businesses upload video that is then placed with contextual and geographic targeting throughout AdSense and local search results (i.e. Google Maps).

LiveDeal is a decidedly smaller local search play, but nonetheless joins this video trend in local search. For LiveDeal, video likewise joins a set of content formats it has brought into the fold in the past six months to improve its site experience and expand its monetization opportunities.

This includes most recently, the launch of social features such as community discussion boards around classifieds and topics of local interest. This came weeks after the acquisition by YP.com which brought the site a unique combination of classifieds and directory content; complementary buckets of content that can be blended in certain kinds of searches (i.e. used cars + local dealerships).

Now adding video to the mix makes the site more compelling for users and advertisers. Various combinations of these elements — social, video, business listings, etc. — are differentiation strategies we’re beginning to see more of in the crowded local search space. The expanded corpus of content these features bring also has SEO benefits.

But LiveDeal, unlike many other local search sites, has an edge in classifieds, one element of local search that has yet to see its potential integrations with video content and directory listings. We’ve seen classifieds blend with social media (i.e Craigslist), but video could be another element to expand the appeal of both.

This has also been seen to a limited degree lately in Buy.com’s recently launched Facebook application for video classifieds. But look for various types of content to converge in more meaningful ways in the local search space — a microcosm of the larger search world where parallel trends are happening, such as universal search.

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