I’m always going on about how, although the internet is a global network, many people use it primarily for local tasks – communicating with people they work with or already know, searching for local products, events or services, etc.
Today I came across an article suggesting that local advertising online could be worth as much as USD $10.9 Billion globally by 2009. This is likely to be unwelcome news for local and regional newspapers, who make most of their revenue from local classified ads, but I actually like the idea of websites containing ads (where they have to) that are relavent to me and think that locally focused online advertising is more likely to achieve this than the current approach.
Google’s not building wifi nets for nothing..lever local ad revenue with positioning data and you make enough revenue to run the radio nets for free, or so they reckon.