It's a moving feast: http://www.infospace.com/ was worth $31 billion in March 2000 and seemed about to dominate the market for local online advertising. Today, the company’s share of the search industry does not even reach 1 percent. Last year, it sold off its directory businesses for $225 million to Idearc http://www.idearc.com/ , a spinoff of Verizon. It bought the unit for $108 million in 2004. InfoSpace says it is now focused on its “metasearch” services. Those services combine results from other search engines, like Google, Yahoo and Ask.com. and advertising sales rose 18 percent in the first quarter, however on an operating basis, the company lost money in 2007.
Lots of VC money has been invested and lost in the "local search" space. Too many optimistic internet entrepreneurs figure if you can get a few dollars from each of the multitude of small businesses - you can make millions.
We believe that this is the wrong model. Webs 2.0 is all about wiki content and advertiser supported business models. USA Local Search and Business Directory is built on these principles.
Enjoy
MF Huebsch - aka the Google Guru
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