Smalltown, a company out to help local businesses establish themselves online, is spreading its reach on the web and in the real world by founding a new site at WebCards.com.
We first reviewed Smalltown in October 2006 when it launched a destination site for so-called “WebCards”. These compact mini-sites provide overview information about businesses located in any of 6 Bay Area cities. They are categorized according to business type and designed to show up highly in search results, despite being based entirely in Flash.
By default, they show information leased from a local data source and are displayed for free. However, businesses can claim their webcards for $600/year, thereby taking control of them and gaining the ability to add special content like videos, photos, coupons, and contact forms.
Until now, these webcards could only be found in the areas of Smalltown’s destination site designated for particular cities. But now with the launch of WebCards.com, businesses from the world over can create their own webcards and embed them anywhere on the web. Smalltown has also formed partnerships with companies like Trulia to distribute them more proactively to external sites. And when webcards are visited through search engine results, they’ll appear as standalone sites instead of just part of a local directory.
It’ll cost $9/month for businesses to create webcards on WebCards.com. The company plans to create more destination sites around particular cities on Smalltown.com; just which cities depends on those that accumulate the most webcards on WebCards.com. When new city destination sites are established, business owners will have the opportunity to pay extra and have their webcards posted on them.
CEO Hal Rucker says the new WebCards.com property constitutes a strategy to broaden the company’s scope, in contrast to the depth and focus of Smalltown.com. So far only about 600 businesses have created so-called “enhanced webcards” for $600/year. It’ll need over 60 webcards created on WebCards to make as much revenue as one on Smalltown, where these cards have higher visibility. Businesses will have to be convinced that the cards’ portable nature and SEO juice pays off, although $9/month isn’t a hard sell.
Smalltown differs from other sites for local business information like Yelp in that it focuses on merchant-created content. While Yelp has recently given more power over listings to businesses, it remains a consumer and reviewer-focused site.
It looks like a nice website worth checking out. Wonder if it can compete with craigslsit
Paying between $108 and $600 in order to maintain listings on someone’s walled-garden site is just ridiculous. Yes, they will let you display your card in various ways, but they still tightly control the data and there is no “real” portability to other hosts. (Being able to embed links is not “portability”…) This is probably a great way to make money, but it doesn’t strike me as the “right thing to do” for the web or for small business. Basically, just Yellow Pages moved to the web.
This “business listings” data should be based on structured information hosted anywhere on the web, including the web site of the business itself, and it should be based on an open standard. What we need here is “FOAF for Businesses” (i.e. expand the “Organization” tag in FOAF) and some simple tool sets for adding skins to such data. (Think semantic web of business information.)
bob wyman
Interesting business model… good revenue stream!!
Yes, an interesting business model… sounds like extortion!
“We found some (probably outdated) data from a provider and we’re going to make it very public. If you don’t like the data, we’ll let you correct it/do it better, for $600/yr!!”
Hi Andjules,
At Smalltown local sites, businesses can correct their data for free. They only pay us if they choose to update their listings to add more features like video or coupons.
At Webcards.com, anyone can make a Webcard listing for $9.50 per month. Users start from scratch (no pre-loaded data) and can easily change their Webcards whenever they want.
- Hal
For the small business person, other than having the URL for your business on yet another directory site (and in Flash at that), I don’t really see the bang for the buck. There’s a mention of SEM, in that WebVisible can do some sort of turnkey SEM for you.
And yes, I know you’re a startup, but try doing a Google search for “webcards.com” right now. As in the site itself isn’t immediately showing for it’s own domain.
I was browsing SmallTown.com and found a listing for a Car Dealership with some horrible reviews. I wanted to share this with the commentors here on TC except I can’t link you guys to it because the site is entirely in Flash, and the “send to a friend” feature asks me to login … no thanks.
Flash is great and all, but not for a Craigslist competitor.
Business widgets are a cool idea, but I question the decision to use Flash.
Ooop, I stand somewhat corrected, #4 result on the Goog for “Mike Harvey Acura” is their SmallTown webcard: http://www.smalltown.com/burlingame/card/12655
Didn’t see the static link on SmallTown though.
smalltown is a mess. a lot of fancy graphics and technologies but very little substances. Last time i’ll visit it again b/c it’s so clutter, i have no idea what I’m doing on it.
I’ve long since thought Smalltown was a disaster — for various reasons — but i thought that about ebay, too.
One key for them, I think, will be the ability to take over the mapping services. If they’ve hooked up with Trulia, then that shows they’re thinking in the right direction.
How can Webcards make it easy for Google Maps mashup developers to make money? And can they go past the junky advertising model, possibly going towards invitations, reservations, etc. - any higher-level service. The coupon stuff is a big deal - it’s a great idea, but it’s got to be easier to save, print, transfer, use, etc. Find the dominant grocery store (chain?) in each town/neighborhood, and figure out a way to help them spend money on things other than those circulars - or find a way to tie those circulars to the webcards.
The original idea behind Smalltown was a disaster; this webcard thing in a slightly more open format is slightly less disastrous — but one truth remains — it’s nearly impossible, still, for a small business to have a decent web presence. Hopefully Smalltown/webcards can fix that.
I think it’d be cool to hire local contractors/movie folks to go around and get owners/workers on camera doing what they do. Webcards.com would effectively subsidize a video ad for the first year or two, and then start looking for break-even around three years out.
I’ve been watching the mapping arena for a few months, now - it’s about to get even more hectic/ridiculous. The most exciting stuff — revenue-related and otherwise — is happening in mapping. Enough yapping.
p.s. is it that seeeeesssmmemememeic junk that’s causing the page reload three hours after i’ve been reading? man, cut that junk out like a malignant tumor –> quick.
every to our work into the yard, had probably in a hollow spent days damage were the best, I remember what effect for the years later. and went I grew
turtles that up across by themselves We had I remember and one day, I confessed
key apple are we night house green microsoft no black university global english minor glass