Lately, more and more national entities and small businesses have been trying to capitalize on local online advertising and Marchex, a company that has been devoted to local search for years now, wants to help. They recently created an exclusive platform, called Adhere, to help facilitate ad placement on hundreds of publisher websites and its own vertical search engine.
Marchex is a company that made its name in the domain industry when, in 2005, it purchased the Name Development portfolio (Ultimate Search portfolio) for $164 million. The portfolio consisted of over 100,000 domains created by domain pioneer Yun Ye. This was all part of a plan orchestrated by Marchex CEO Russel Horowitz and domain name investor Frank Schilling. Simply put, they wanted to create a network of websites localized for every city in the U.S. so that customers could find businesses in their area. The domains would logically have the name of a city and a corresponding market term, such as AtlantaShoes.com.
“Everything we do, we look at through the lens of local,” Horowitz says. By focusing on technology and user generated content, Marchex has been able to successfully launch more than one billion web pages. The company's strategy thus far has been to provide these sites, which already garner tens of millions of unique visitors a month, with cash generating content. And since advertising is the main way to make money on the Internet, they acquired Enhance Interactive, a pay-per-click company, and TrafficLeader, which ran paid-search ad campaigns.
At first, the sites were merely parked domains filled with pay-per-click ads. So whenever someone clicked on an ad, Marchex got paid. This worked at the time thanks to direct navigation, which is the practice of searching by typing a name directly into the browser. But Horowitz couldn't see that method holding up in the long run, so he decided to focus on turning the domains into consumer friendly websites.
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