There’s something about ‘local’ that really gets our startup juices flowing in the UK. Maybe it’s that ‘children of Thatcher’ thing? (She was a greengrocer’s daughter).
Nine-year old local search site TouchLocal has raised £7M (€9.4M) from Balderton Capital to combine a yellow pages model with a social community of recommending and reviewing users, following its Web 2.0 makeover and relaunch. Using its custom “Circles” social networking engine, TouchLocal users put other members into circles of trust that are graphically represented on screen.
The re-launched TouchLocal will be jostling for position in the ‘local reviews’ marketplace against new younger upstarts including Welovelocal, Tipped, Trustedplaces and Qype, among others. And that’s not even to go into the mobile startups – like Rummble – interested in this space.
Headed by CEO Tamar Ozmen, the site covers 114 UK cities, claims 18 million visitors a year and lists 2.4 million UK businesses. However, I’d somehow disagree with Ozmen’s view that “Facebook fatigue is already setting in” and it could be replaced by a ’social yellow pages’ model. I’m just not that interested in plumbers, sorry.
Meanwhile, the much smaller (in size of operation) privately-backed Welovelocal has commissioned a YouGov poll into printed business directories in Britain, revealing that 35% of British adults would prefer not to receive printed business directories at home, equating to in excess of 17.5 million books. That’s a lot of recycling.
When asked which one of the following do you trust the most when trying to find local businesses / services, ‘word of mouth’ with 67%, won out by a wide margin. In the last 6 months, 51% of respondents said they had used the Internet to find local businesses / services, with printed directories on 24%. The sample size was 1,974 adults.
This research suggests that ’social search’ really does have legs as a concept. And these latest developments are just the latest in a salvo of shots that will be fired in this battle to win the ‘local’ reviews market. The question is, who has already been on the phone to equivalent US site like Yelp to talk buyouts…?
You’d be deeply interested in plumbers if you get a water leak and then you really do want to know who are the best in your area and when they’re likely to be available. I wouldn’t write it off that quickly but it will be interesting to see how they do troll management.
Nice article as usual, Mike.
I personally use Welovelocal to review restaurants, cafes, bars and clubs. The site itself is beautifully done – as usual it’s just that “feeling” that gets me to use it.
I’ve always seen touchlocal, and most of the UK local-service sites, as little more than SEO scams. The amount of times you search for “recruitment agency near islington” and get an adsense-filled, table-based, generic site with no real meat amounts to the norm, in my experience.
Amazing how sites like welovelocal, qype and tipped can catch up to touch local so quickly with alot less cash – http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details/qype.co.uk?site0=qype.co.uk&site1=touchlocal.com&site2=tipped.co.uk&site3=welovelocal.com&site4=trustedplaces.com&y=p&z=3&h=400&w=700&range=3m&size=Large
I don’t really like Alexa (and I know the graph does represent touchmanchester, touchleeds etc.) but wouldn’t you say the smaller fish have pretty much made up the ground in just 6 months?
Wasn’t the investment in TouchLocal quite some time ago?
As reported by the Burnley Citizen:
http://www.burnleycitizen.co.uk/display.var.1012413.0.workforce_is_to_grow_fourfold.php
I wonder if any “local” newspaper groups would ever think to dip their toe into these waters?
With so many players it feels like M&A time. Given Index’s new mature stage fund this might be one way to consolidate these early stage companies into one big “euro review pages” which is then IPO’d like moneysupermarket.com ($1bn value) to return the value.
In 2006 we saw the DVD rental industry consolidate and maybe later this year we will also see the consolidation in the online home market – nestoria, dothome, zoomf, rightmove, primelocation and propertyfinder etc. and maybe even further in Europe with properazzi.
Mike, thanks as ever for your write up. You’re right in saying that the local search space is hotting up and it’s our feeling that the recent funding has helped create a touchlocal.com makeover which will really struck a cord with both local business and community residents across the UK.
Facebook, obviously, still very much has a place in the market (almost 10 million UK users don’t lie!); but we feel there is a space in the market for a website that brings people together at the local level through recommendations and in-depth information on local business. It’s our view that our “Circles” social networking engine has cracked this, as people put great value on the knowledge of the people they know especially at the local level .
All in all, we are extremely happy with the re-launch and I really hope everyone gives the site a try.
Phil Geraghty – Product Director – Touchlocal.com
None of these sites seem able to return a result for a plumber, say, in London (a Capital city of the world) that have more than 2 reviews (and who are the reviews by??).
With a worldwide recession almost inevitable, people will be spending less and less money on disposable items and will be concentrating on essentials only.
What is specifically needed is detailed information straight to hand.
Take the plumber scenario. I dont want to have to trawl thru all the results, find a phone number, call it and then find that plumber doesnt do gas work. Background information should be plentiful and immediately available: call out charges, are they vat registered, can they do gas work, how quickly available, etc.
The power of a fast database should be there for the benefit of the end user.
Personally, I see the local review sites as a money pit. Yellow pages/ yell.com have the database already (and lets not forget a very profitable business model!) and, with some well thought out development, would leave the new upstarts behind completely buried. And there will be aggregation sites…
Thanks, but I’m out.
exiva.com
share your life, treasure the privacy
I had dealings with Touch in their infant days which were not pleasant and financially expensive. Unless they have changed dramatically, (same staff from their feedback), then the quality of their data is appalling and yes as other posters indicate the “service” is very much an upsell operation. Regarding the social aspect, yep there used to be a team feeding in reviews.
It will be interesting to see if Touch can add a community to a directory site. Similar efforts have failed at least in the U.S.
On the plumber discussion:
We at Qype have seen that predictably the information on plumbers develops more slowly on Qype than the lifestyle areas that people use more often and which form of their identity.
But from our experience in Germany, we see that plumbers are in fact being added on by the users after a while.
I slightly disagree with the view that the yellow pages can come up with an easy editorial solution. A community is just more powerful.
But I do enjoy this kind of discussion.
Stephan Uhrenbacher, CEO Qype
Hi,
People have forgotten about the potential of Scoot/ITV-Local to push into this space with the potential force thay have.
Yours kindly,
Shakir razak
From looking around TouchLocal’s new site, I’ve got to wonder where that 7mil went. Although better than the old site it is still an SEO-heavy monstrosity with little-to-no usability. WeLoveLocal have similar problems.
Qype & TrustedPlaces have much better approaches, and alexa would suggest that it’s paying off for Qype at least.
Shakir – I’ve just had a look over at Scoot/ITV Local and it’s simply a business listing site at the moment. Do they plan on building a community site?
I’m delighted to see that the launch of our new site has stimulated such a lot of debate, and we are looking forward to touchlocal.com creating a similar impact in the wider market.
There are a few specific issues that I would like to address from the thread above:
- Balderton actually made their £7m investment in TouchLocal in September 2006.
- The company has ‘grown up’ substantially over the last two years, and we are now a highly professional organisation with an experienced management team and over 100 employees.
- Like all social networking companies, we encourage our staff to be early adopters and to review as many businesses as possible, but we have never seen this as a means to inflate the number of reviews we have. We are currently receiving around 5,000 reviews a month from consumers across the UK, and this number is growing month on month.
- We are 100% committed to make touchlocal.com the UK’s most user-friendly business finder, and building a large community of reviewers and recommenders to make looking for a relevant, recommended local businesses as easy as possible.
We are very proud of the new site, and whilst the work is never finished, initial reaction has been very positive to the improvements to the business finder and the new practical social networking aspect (although Alistair may be relieved to hear that we have not invested more than a few percentage point of our investment on the entire site redevelopment!).
I hope that helps to clarify a few points for contributors to the discussion. Thanks for your interest in TouchLocal, and please feel free to contact me directly if you would like to discuss anything further in person.
Tamer Ozmen
CEO
Hi Alistair,
Yeah, If you’ve been following ITV’s corporate strategy, then you’ll notice, they’ve declared, as many other old media, the internet is the only stream of growth.
If you ring them they’re already changing the branding/parent-attachment, but whether actively or not, that business is one of the few subsidiaries with substantial avenues for growth.
And don’t forget the cocoon-like potential of Friends-Reunited.
Good luck to them all, but this area requires a lot of foot-soldiers if you want to create barriers-to-entry, to create some sort of tipping-point, but if google/kelkoo can just scrape the web, and any business can set up their own bespoke site with out needing to pay extra to the specialists, that market could go just as easily as the wider web.
Mr. ozman, what’s your email address.
Yours kindly,
Shakir Razak
Hi Shakir, it is tamer.ozmen@touchlocal.com
Hi i think this is a great collabration of local sites which are very useful to the local community. KEEP IT UP!