Ever since the launch of his CityGrid local advertising network at the beginning of the year, Citysearch CEO Jay Herratti has been putting most of his efforts into building out CityGrid as the largest network of local advertisers and local apps. Citysearch is now simply a flagship publisher on the CityGrid network. To reflect this shift in focus, the Citysearch business unit of IAC (which includes CityGrid, Citysearch, Urbanspoon, and Insider Pages) is changing its name to CityGrid Media
All of the local listings in Citysearch are available through CityGrid’s APIs so that anyone creating a mobile app or local Website can grab business listings, addresses, phone numbers, photos, reviews, and more and build their own apps around them. CityGrid also matches local advertisers with these local publishers.
The geo-local market is developing so quickly that Herratti knows he cannot predict which mobile app or approach will win out in the end. Instead, he wants to scale CityGrid to become the largest network of local advertisers and publishers so that no matter what turns out to be the hot Geo app of the moment, CityGrid ads and content will be at the center of it. CityGrid already has 700,000 paying local advertisers, and is on its way to a million. Some Citygrid partners include YellowPages.com, SuperPages.com, Bing.com, MapQuest, and Loopt.
