By Matthew Harman

Community information websites have been slow to come to New Zealand. With the launch of yellowlocal.co.nz and localist.co.nz that's beginning to change.

Overseas forays into community web publishing, which fuse local news, business and community information have been driven by either businesses with community media assets to leverage or are native Internet businesses - not so here. The big media groups including APN, Fairfax, MediaWorks as well as local Internet entrepreneurs (with the odd exception) have so far chosen to largely sit this game out - ceding at least the first round to Yellow Pages Group and New Zealand Post.

Opting out may well make sense - there's little evidence that overseas community websites have found sufficient revenue to create sustainable businesses.

International efforts have put community news to the forefront and while they include business directory information, tend to rely heavily on display advertising. Yellow Local and Localist flip the model and put business directory information front and centre.

They also both sport a hybrid print/online offering, taking advantage of local business familiarity with print advertising to drive online experimentation. The more cynical will suggest it also has the effect of blurring the measurement of advertising effectiveness.

For Yellow the measure for success will be low. Simply slowing the erosion of revenue ($274.4 million in the year to June 2010, down 7.6%) would likely be enough for Yellow to classify its local offering a success.

Localist will face a greater uphill battle, starting without the benefit of an existing advertising business and with a large cost base that already includes around 100 staff. Promises from its parent that it will have several years to turn a profit may prove hard to keep if early revenue trends don't live up to expectation, or NZ Post finds its traditional business deteriorating faster than anticipated.

Exactly what's driven New Zealand Post into this space isn't entirely clear, but they must believe there's an opportunity to shift spend from Yellow Pages and there's no doubt that local advertising is a large, though highly competitive market.

Radio, newspapers, business directories, TV (to a lesser extent) and deal sites all have a stake in 'local' advertising and will undoubtably watch the Yellow and NZ Post experiments closely.

While Yellow and Localist are fighting for the same local ad dollars, with a similar top line strategy, the details of their offerings, particularly online, vary considerably.

The Yellow Pages effort clusters event, community, shopping, restaurant information and things to do into 205 Auckland geographic areas. St Heliers is a different 'site' to Kohimarama, Glendowie or Mission Bay. The inevitable consequence of trying to populate such a large number of local sites is that, at launch they all look a bit thin.

Yellow's hope is that "YellowLocal.co.nz is where locals can talk to locals".

Unfortunately, as many web-publishers have found, building community isn't something that happens organically. Getting the community engaged - submitting news, information and reviews (that goes beyond local merchants taunting their wares and slagging off the competition) requires passionate community builders that are on the site constantly - sharing, initiating and responding to the audience.

That's something Localist has recognised in the recruitment of a small army of super-users, to help staff grow the community and presumably ensure that contributions to the site meet a certain quality standard.

Localist has also opted for less granular geographic areas than Yellow with, for example, a St Heliers resident belonging to the 'Eastern Bays and Mt Wellington' region. It's probably not an exact match for how the locals think of where they live, or their geographic consideration set for a meal out - but the broader grouping helps makes the reservoir of available content much deeper.

Localist also gives much more emphasis to business reviews on the site, presumably taking a lead from the popular Yelp.com directory in the United States. However, despite the prominence that the latest reviews ('raves') are given on the homepage and throughout the site, trying to find, for example, the St Heliers restaurant with the most reviews, is surprisingly hard.

Categorisation and hierarchy feel like something of a work in progress on Localist. It's hard to believe that the top tier category 'Commercial & Farming' is a good fit with the interests and needs of Aucklanders and the site specific knowledge or persistence required to find information should be troubling to the company. For example, a search for 'schools in St Heliers' will return a range of related and unrelated results but if you know to search for 'community information in St Heliers' you will find them.

Easily resolvable problems - as long as they are identified as problems.

Localist is the better resourced and more polished of Auckland's two new local offerings. That's surprising given it's Yellow that has the castle to lose and was already under siege from Google and others prior to Localist arriving on the scene. It's an indication perhaps of just how severe Yellow's business problems have become.

Which just makes you wonder, where exactly is the opportunity?

These sites are effectively community newspapers re-imagined. A bundle of news, views, information and advertising for readers within a defined geographic region. How this 'little bit of everything' package will fare against more focused niche web properties will be fascinating to watch.

Can Localist or Yellow hope to match the number of restaurant reviews of Dineout?, capture the breadth of event information aggregated by Eventfinder?, cover local news as well as community newspapers, or hope to drive impulse buys to the same degree as Grabone?

The answer may be yes, but they will need to make their disparate content all work towards the goal of delivering customers to local businesses. At launch both Yellow Local and Localist have created virtual silos for their different types of content.

The news and events parts of the sites in particular seem to lack a clear vision for how traffic to these pages can be harnessed to the benefit of their customers. It's good to know, for example, who the finalists are for the NZ Post Book of the Year, but it would be much better to enrich the content with some options to help visitors buy a copy of the books mentioned from their local stockist.  

Equally, information about a gig i'm interested in seeing could be enhanced with a deal from a local restaurant for a drink before, or a meal after.  At scale that's an approach perhaps not easily matched by niche sites and an opportunity to truly evolve the business directory.