By Vinny Lingham

ReachLocal announced today that they have received a further round of  funding by Rho Ventures, in conjunction with their original investors. The latest round of funding is $55.2m–which values the company at $305m.

ReachLocal’s target market are Small & Medium enterprises, and they have built a platform that allows smaller companies to easily market themselves.

I’ve just watched the ReachLocal video, and it seems that their real value proposition is that they’ve integrated online and offline touch points (points of contact), and can track and report on this for small & medium businesses, which in most cases do not have high hurdles of integration.

This is particularly valuable, as many companies do not factor in the value of offline conversion, related to search engine marketing–those that do, are able to price their keywords far more competitively.

Given the size of the SME marketplace, ReachLocal’s valuation may not be as astronomical as many would think, albeit very high for a traditional SEM firm.

About Vinny Lingham

Vinny is the CEO of Synthasite, a Web 2.0 publishing platform, that aims to revolutionize web publishing.  Synthasite launches on November 5th into Beta.

By Roderick Ioerger

The newspaper industry has been feeling a lot of pressure for some time now to reverse the industry trend and restore revenue growth. In November of 2006 Yahoo and a consortium of seven newspaper companies came to an agreement opening up 176 different newspapers to one of the world largest online communities.

Yahoo’s HotJobs service was the key piece of the revenue puzzle, allowing the newspapers to take advantage of the technology platform that Yahoo had already created by driving sales of the HotJobs service for hundreds if not thousands of local businesses in each market. The other element and maybe the more important one long term for the newspapers is the use of Yahoo’s technology to be able to sell advertising across the newspapers entire web site.