Greg Sterling

Tiffany Chester: Specialises in geotargetting advertising Ian White: urban mapping, license data Jay Brice: skyhook wireless: location engine, iphone wifi positioning Steve Coast: Cloudmade: Provides services on top of OSM similar to Redhat Walt Doyle: Where.com: Publisher of Where, number one LBS platform

This panel is about addressing the practical questions of who’s paying for this?

Online and mobile, there’s a lot of money out there but it seems difficult online to make use of the local opportunity.

JB: Agrees, a lot of money can go into making the data that’s needed, but it’s very difficult to collect money use of this.

GS: Why did you shut down Mappam?

SC: A lot harder than it looked. Technology was easy, becoming an advertising firm was hard. Cloudmade was being started.

TC: Seeing a lot of success in the local market. Advertisers have struggled to target audience traditionally but local advertisers find out map-base technology appealing. Often with realtors, market brokers, banks to be able to fine tune their advertising messages to audiences online. The map is the basis for them to be able to do that.

IW: This is controversial point number one. As an add is more and more granular, the efficiency is, the cost to serve that goes up. The more hyper-local you are the less value there will be.

GS: What do the people in these areas do to support their apps?

SC: Wait for google to switch on adsense for maps. It’s going to happen, but when? We tried this with Mappam before google switched it on. It’s an open question as to why they haven’t.

GS: So you say this will be positive. But don’t you think adsense makes limited amounts of money?

GS: Lets talk about local response rates.

JB: When we started trying doing more local targetting and being able to insert a lat/lon. We had to flood adsense with a lot of local information to get any information from them at all. We had a click-through rate of 7/8/12% as if you can position ads around a relevant map you get a higher click-through. But there’s a problem that there isn’t enough ads to serve, requires a huge inventory to serve at such a granular level.

IW: the keyword conspiracy. If you have these highly targetted ads, you’ll find that a keyword doesn’t have large volume.

WD: The irony is that we’re getting to the point where there’s a larger audience but not a larger yield.

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GS: Brands and folks tied to national entities. Most of the dollars are tied to local. Won’t some of that money go into online?

WD: It’s happening more, we’re seeing experimentation. Burger king saw success with driving directions.

GS: So Burger King pays you for each lookup?

WD: Sortof

JB: We got contact by Kraft foods, most visited food website in the world. They’re building a location based menu creator for the ipod “mac&cheese; finder”. Will give you directions to the shopping. That’s a revenue model. Branded/sponsored things.

TC: We’ve had a lot of success with franchising markets. There’s the head office and the individual business owners who have a very small draw region and it comes down to them. They might not have an online advertising idea until they came to us. They need a method where they can modify the creative for their own region.

JB: The most visited part of many sites is the store finder.

GS: Mobile: Can’t really charge consumers for online stuff. In mobile you generally can. For how long? Is that a viable model?

WD: We’ll see all sorts of model, iPhone SDK interesting as it allows both models, free and pay-for. We’ve learned that the monetisation is quite similar whether it’s subscription or advertising. The increase in overall consumption made up… [something]. Our approach is very much to go free. Seeing dollars flowing from marketing services too.

GS: Phones are a much smaller screen, don’t you compound the problems of the internet with advertising on such a smaller screen.

WD: It’s certainly harder but there absence of limitations causes lack of innovation. Companies like greystripe put up interstitials and you have no choice but to engage with the adverts. Mobile ads might be more interruptive but be more effective and be things that you can’t do on the web.

SC: People hated ads on maps more than they hated normal maps. Don’t really want MacDonalds logos on maps, especially if they obscure features.

TC: Our ads come under a lot higher criticism and that’s because they’re incorporated as part of the content. We’re really focusing on making sure ads are highly relevant. We’ve had user studies done but the response is very good so long as the ad is targetted they feel it’s part of the experience.

GS: We’ve had cost-per-action forever is it viable for mobile?

JB: Tying two sides together means you get paid from multiple sources. Advertising and then routing people to the location for instance.

IW: As a data provider, value is clearer. On mobile it can be harder to make clear what we’re charging for. If we can give the consumer something that’s more enriching…

IW: Relative to location awareness: more phones will be shipping with GPS, yay, sucks for some things but great for others. On a repeating basis, what type of people subscribe to location aware services? We’ve had location aware for years: vindigo: when are we going to get to critical threshold, will we, will iPhone be game changer?

GS: iPhone is absolute game changer. Windows Mobile, Nokia, everyone is trying to develop. Mobile usage is increasing. Volume is going to be there just how fragmented is market? iPhone appears to have built market as response to apps built is better.

Q: I work for the history channel. We’re trying to find the model for putting content in good LBS devices?

WD: I’m a fan. We’ve found that vertically segmented content you need to build 1-1 relationship with your consumers. It has to do a lot with your existing advertisers and with the applications that will be serving the content. Reference points to location are enormous and you have a lot of content so there’s a lot you can do.

GS: CPM and something else

JB: We’re based in Boston and have done great historical data with another company. They were looking for a business model to use that data but the cost of acquisition was high. Monetising might be a problem.

Q: Subsiding services with traditional ad networks/sales channels?

TC: We’ve had a lot of newspaper groups approach us.

GS: You need scale though yeah?

TC: Sure.

IW: Direct marketing business has a lot of this money. I’m convinced that LBS will become a kind of direct marketing. It’s simply another channel.

JB: We’ve seen the reverse of this. The company that’s the largest printer as they generate advertising and coupons. Field sales force of 800 people selling paper-base local ads. We may see a huge inventory of advertising come online through this organisation. They’re already doing location targeting and it may feed to online.

Q: I’m calling Bullshit on saying it’s a good thing when Google puts ads on maps. Ad subsidies will make it so that google android will be the only phone.

Monetizing Maps & Mashups

Technorati tags: monetizing, map, where, where2.0, where2008