Bronte Media

Citysearch turned out to be the buyer of Insiderpages. Terms weren’t disclosed but basically the venture guys get their money back and employees get a job at Interactivecorp. Dave Naffziger, who works at Judy’s Book, has the best analysis of the deal and its implications.

The thing that puzzles me is the blurry definition of success and failure. Insiderpages, Yelp and Judy’s Book all started at around the same time and raised similar amounts of money ($10m-$15m in total).

In about two years, Insiderpages has gotten traction to the extent of 3m monthly uniques. Most of that traffic (and so to Yelp and Judy’s Book in its current form) comes from organic search in Google.

The problem I have is the way media has framed the conversation. The title of Techcrunch’s post is “Troubled Insider Pages Acquired by City Search“. Venturebeat called the firm “struggling”.

But are they really? To me it would seem that the venture investors and/or the management of the company simply gave up on the idea and couldn’t be bothered to evolve into something else.

By those same measures, I would say Citysearch is ’struggling’ and ‘troubled’. Yelp is ’struggling’ and ‘troubled’ too etc.

No one has been able to connect with Yellow Pages advertisers online save for Superpages.com. In fact Citysearch has flushed so much capital down the toilet that the resilience and belief of Interactive Corp is amazing. AOL and Yahoo have also squandered hundreds of millions of dollars chasing small local businesses.

Go and take a look at this graph showing Insiderpages growth vs Yelp from compete.com. Yelp is lauded as a runaway success, while Insiderpages is ‘troubled’ and ’struggling’.

When do you cross over that line between failure and success? Especially in such nascent market as this.