With MTN bringing up its location lookup service, and Vodacom’s already in place, it now means that media companies can deliver news targeted at a Personal Content Area based on the user’s actual location. Where personalisation has mostly gone un-used on the desktop web, I think people will be more likely to use a service that filters news based on their location.

For starters it will be more contextually relevant for classified ads like auto sales, personals and other information that is local in nature. If users can set the radius of their area even better.

Place and time are two of the most important pieces of meta-data associated with content because they directly relate to relevance, before personal interest and taste. As an example, someone may not be generally interested in crime news, except when it happens next door to them. They may not be interested in restaurant reviews, unless the restaurant is nearby.

The down-side is the cost of the location-lookup but generally speaking this cost can be offset against the increase in value of locative advertising. Not only does locative advertising offer the potential of much more relevant information, it expands the sellable inventory exponentially. Before, ads would be delivered ina single rotation queue, now a queue can exist for every suburb in the country and the inventory can be sold in smaller volumes to smaller businesses who would previously have used the Yellow Pages or small but very local newspapers.

The question then is: what type of company is best suited to leverage this potential successfully. The answer is a conglomeration of smaller news providers who already provide local news and have the sales infrastructure to deal with smaller advertisers who need to reach an areas with a radius of 20km or less. The national newspapers are at an immediate disadvantage because their sales teams aren’t scalable enough or geared for many smaller incentives to sell. And, of course, they don’t produce enough local content to service the entire country.

A solution to the content problem could be localised citizen journalism but, again, this will require a massively scalable editorial team to gatekeep. It’s not impossible though, it just requires some money and faith in the model, or a proper business plan. In my experience a business plan like that is unlikely to emanate from a newspaper, and even less likely to get board approval because there are too many risks and it detracts from the core business which is still, sadly for many, selling paper.

Anyone have a strong opinion on this? I’d love to know what you think.