IAC subsidiary CityGrid Media has renewed its contract with Infogroup to provide approximately 15 million local business-database files to publishers in the CityGrid advertising network.
CityGrid’s upgraded suite will include social media information, product and service menus, deals and offers, reservation and booking widgets, videos and images, in addition to location data. The content will be paired with CityGrid’s built-in advertiser base and delivered through CityGrid’s revamped application programming interface (API).
The platform is “important,” because it enables “small start-ups that probably can’t afford annual agreements with companies like Infogroup” to gain access to the combined data available in CityGrid’s API, said Jay Herratti, CEO of CityGrid.
“We’re really going after a new market segment,” he said. “We’ve had some smaller publishers in the past, but now we’re going after the mobile developer — those who aren’t in the business of building a big database. The mobile market is important. It is going to be huge and highly fragmented and the long-tail will be enormous.”
Herratti would not specify the terms of the current or previous agreements with Infogroup. He did say the contract was “a multi-year agreement.”
The enhanced platform features almost 1 million advertisers across 75,000 US cities.
“Being able to provide the most accurate data is core to our competitiveness moving forward,” said Herratti. “It’s very difficult. Perfection does not exist. There will never be Nirvana.”
He added that CityGrid “looked at different databases that were out there” but “chose to continue and expand” its agreement with Infogroup.
“All of their data is confirmed through a human verification process, which we believe is the way to go,” said Herratti.
WhitePages said last month that it will use Infogroup’s consumer point-of-interest data for approximately 15 million businesses in its search-based business directory.
Herratti said CityGrid has deals with the following organizations that sell ads to local advertisers: AT&T Interactive, DexOne, ReachLocal, Yodle, Yext and ServiceMagic, among others.
CityGrid Media owns and operates the following properties: Citysearch, Insider Pages and Urbanspoon.
Infogroup did not immediately respond to interview requests.
