Monsieur Andrew Shotland discovered earlier today that Yelp is running CityGrid ads. Here’s my screenshot from moments ago:
This makes perfect sense for Yelp and will help the site better monetize pages where it doesn’t have advertisers. Yelp now becomes a huge partner for CityGrid, given its visibility and reach. Click the links in the ad above and they go directly to the advertiser sites (rather than a directory branded landing page).
Today Yelp said at the #SMX show in New York that it had 38 million uniques. CityGrid says it’s the “largest local advertising network on the Web, with over 700k advertisers; more than 140MM monthly unique users; more than 250 partners.”
What this says also to me is that a reciprocal deal isn’t far behind. I suspect at some point soon — if it hasn’t already begun — we’ll see Yelp start selling CityGrid network distribution as well as Yelp.com.
October 5th, 2010 at 2:59 am
CityGrid is really coming forward in the marketing/advertising world.
This makes perfect sense for both parties.
October 5th, 2010 at 3:33 am
Yes. I agree. CityGrid is the total reinvention of IAC’s local strategy.
October 5th, 2010 at 2:51 pm
[...] of the class-action lawsuit and whether Yelp was going to start distributing its advertisers out through CityGrid. On the latter point he said that it is possible that they might do something like that in the [...]
October 5th, 2010 at 3:17 pm
As I pointed out over on Andrew’s site, Greg….yelp.ca is also showing the same adverts and the tag “Ads by CityGrid” are all inserted via their CSS class….
Jim