Both DexOne and Local.com have extended agreements with Yahoo. The Dex-Yahoo agreement broadens the reach of Dex advertiser distribution on Yahoo Local:
All businesses advertising on Dex One’s popular local search site, DexKnows will now be able to have their online listings appear in Yahoo! Local search results. The expanded partnership doubles the geographic area covered by an existing relationship formed in 2007, providing more local businesses with greater opportunities to attract ready-to-buy customers…
The previous agreement between Dex One and Yahoo! exclusively covered the 14-state region where Dex One is the official print directory publisher for Qwest. Since the initiation of the original agreement, the relationship between Dex One and Yahoo! has proven highly successful, yielding thousands of leads for local businesses and laying the groundwork for the current expansion.
The Local.com-Yahoo agreement appears to be an extension or legally updated continuation of a pre-existing relationship in which Local.com uses Yahoo paid ads to monetize pages. Local.com shows ads from a variety of other sources as well. According to an SEC form 8K filing:
The Agreement provides for the distribution of Yahoo! Inc.’s paid search results by Registrant [Local.com] for which the Registrant is compensated a certain percentage of the adjusted gross revenue (as defined in the Agreement) derived by Yahoo! from such paid search results. The effective date of the Agreement is August 25, 2010 and it ends on July 31, 2011, but will automatically renew unless either party provides prior notice of its intention to terminate the Agreement.
The interesting thing about the Local.com-Yahoo arrangement is that Yahoo won’t have its own paid-search results anymore; they’ll be Microsoft adCenter advertisers. So Yahoo’s publisher network effectively becomes Microsoft’s network as the transition proceeds. It may be that the Yahoo-Bing/Microsoft transition going on now prompted a renegotiation or new terms.
Turning back to the Dex-Yahoo deal: it provides some nice additional exposure for Dex advertisers. However Yahoo Local is not what it once was. The Yahoo brand is still very strong and lots of people use Yahoo search to find local information (in fact it was second only to Google in terms of audience reach in a survey just completed). But the traffic to Yahoo Local is diminished from the time, a few years ago, when it was the innovator and traffic leader in the local category
Yahoo is planning a big local content push, which is part of a broader local/geotargeted advertising initiative. It will be interesting to see whether and how search and local business listings (from partners like Dex) play in that forthcoming network of local sites.
