KNOWLEDGE BASE
Citysearch
Citysearch is the most useful cautionary tale in local search. It launched in 1995, had a ten-year head start, professional editors, and real money behind it — and it was beaten by a website that just let strangers write reviews. Understanding <em>why</em> tells you where to put your effort now.
What Is Citysearch?
Citysearch is an online city guide covering dining, entertainment, retail, travel and professional services across US cities. Founded in September 1995 with seed capital from Bill Gross, it merged with Ticketmaster Online in 1998 and later ran under IAC. It combined editorial recommendations with listings, maps, directions and user reviews — a curated guide to a city, written by people who were paid to write it.
Curation doesn't scale. Crowds do.
Editorial content is expensive per city, per category, per year. User reviews are free and arrive continuously. In the late 2000s Yelp was growing at roughly 80% a year while Citysearch stayed flat. Same market, same era, radically different cost of content — and the one with the cheaper supply won.
Search engines ate the browse layer underneath it.
Citysearch wasn't only losing to Yelp. Bing, Google and Yahoo were building local results directly into search, so users stopped visiting a destination to find a local business at all. The guide's traffic wasn't taken by a better guide. It was taken by the search box that made guides unnecessary.
Which is the lesson worth taking.
Betting your visibility on a single platform means betting it will still exist and still send traffic. Citysearch is still online. It just doesn't matter anymore. The assets that survived were the ones the business owned — its own site, its own listing data, its own reviews — not its position inside somebody else's product.
Wikipedia: Citysearch
The reference article on Citysearch — its founding, the Ticketmaster merger, its competition with Yelp, and its decline.
Read the full article →In the late 2000s Yelp grew around 80% a year. Citysearch, with a decade's head start and paid editorial staff, was flat.
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