Superpages Rolls Out Video Advertising Nationally

Oct 16, 2007 at 10:45am ET by Greg Sterling

Local search and directory provider Superpages has announced video advertising on a national basis after a several-month test in selected U.S. markets. All the major U.S. yellow pages advertisers are now offering video advertising, though all are in early stages of rolling it out. To my knowledge, Superpages is the only performance-based model where bidding would be involved.

Superpages is charging advertisers a one-time $990 production fee and a small monthly recurring fee to have a video icon associated with their listings. For each consumer stream/click, advertisers would also be charged a fee — pay per stream — based on competitive bidding on a category basis. Category level bidding is the same way that Superpages’ clicks and calls products work.

Advertisers can also pay a one-time fee for the rights to use the videos on their sites or distribute them elsewhere — on or offline. Superpages is also considering various syndication options for the video, similar to the way it syndicates calls and clicks. Syndication from yellow pages publishers (and other local sites like Citysearch) will likely be the way that local and SMB video gets into search or local results at Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft.

Here are a number of examples of Superpages video in different business categories.

Video is popular with both consumers and advertisers, as lots of empirical work already shows. A recent online survey from Opus Research and AllBusiness.com of 653 U.S. SMBs found that 33% of respondents said they were evaluating developing video ads in the next 12 months.

There’s some additional discussion of the particulars of the Superpages program on my personal blog, Screenwerk.

Greg Sterling is a Contributing Editor at Search Engine Land, and writes a personal blog Screenwerk, examining the broader world of media and advertising. He also posts at a Local Mobile Search, which is focused on the mobile Internet.

See more articles by Greg Sterling >

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