CNN goes local - sees big growth in local advertising

CNN announced a deal today with Internet Broadcasting, a company that publishes web sites for 70 local TV stations. The deal will allow CNN to use the local content in exchange for CNN national content.

The Wall Street Journal has the story and contains this interesting quote "Growth in the market for local ads online has outstripped that of the online ad market as a whole. Advertising online by local companies more than doubled over the past two years, to $5.7 billion in 2006, according to local media analyst Borrell Associates. The overall online ad market in the U.S also grew briskly, but less so -- rising about 71% over the same time period, according to eMarketer."

CNN sees the growth opportunity in local news and advertising. I have been talking about the local news opportunity a lot lately. Actually, it is local search and advertising that is the business opportunity, but local news is what attracts the audience. Look at this chart from the WSJ article. That growth curve is very appealing to the big media companies. MSNBC, Yahoo, CNN, and AOL have huge national audiences and want a piece of the local pie.

Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) (is working hard on Live Local Search. Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) is also going after it. There are some smart start-ups that are already focused on local search and advertising. Smart move.

Subscribe - To get an automatic feed of all future posts subscribe here, or to receive them via email go here and enter your email address in the box in the right column.