Kudzu.com

Last updated
Kudzu.com
Kudzu-logo.png
Type of site
Subsidiary
FoundedJune 2005
Dissolved November 2018
Headquarters Atlanta, GA, USA
Founder(s) Tom Bates
IndustryBusiness ratings and reviews / Local Search
Services Review site
Parent Cox Media Group
URL www.kudzu.com

Kudzu.com was an online directory that aggregated user reviews and ratings on local businesses, merchants, and service providers. Kudzu.com was established by Cox Enterprises in 2005, and later owned and operated by Cox Media Group. The site closed on November 30, 2018.

Contents

History

Kudzu.com initially served the market of Atlanta, and expanded to Arizona, San Diego, and Las Vegas in the fall of 2006. In the fall of 2007, Kudzu.com expanded nationally, offering business information and the ability for customers to rate and review businesses in all markets across the United States. [1]

In August 2010, Kudzu.com partnered with HGTV, where HGTV's videos and content were added to Kudzu.com, and the ability to search Kudzu.com's listings was added to several HGTV websites. [2] The partnership ended at the end of 2011.

Shortly thereafter, Kudzu became part of Cox Media Group under The Atlanta Journal-Constitution newspaper, and returned its focus to Atlanta. In 2013, Kudzu launched a Digital Solutions product line to help online businesses improve their SEO and optimize their web presence.

Features

Kudzu.com's database included structured profiles to describe what the companies offer. Profiles contained marketing descriptions, photographs of work performed, videos, coupons, professional affiliations, and credentials. It also lets consumers provide user-generated reviews and ratings of local businesses. Site visitors interested in finding a service provider could search or browse profiles by service rendered, specialty, geographic location, and “star” rating, among other fields, to find businesses for their particular home and personal needs.

The site focused on small businesses and home-owners. Merchants that registered with Kudzu.com had the option of replying to negative reviews.

Some of Kudzu.com's features included:

Related Research Articles

Affiliate marketing is a type of performance-based marketing in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought by the affiliate's own marketing efforts.

Google Ads Online advertising platform owned by Google

Google Ads is an online advertising platform developed by Google, where advertisers bid to display brief advertisements, service offerings, product listings, or videos to web users. It can place ads both in the results of search engines like Google Search and on non-search websites, mobile apps, and videos. Services are offered under a pay-per-click (PPC) pricing model.

Cox Communications, Inc. is an American digital cable television provider, telecommunications and home automation services. It is the third-largest cable television provider in the United States, serving approximately 6.5 million customers, including 2.9 million digital cable subscribers, 3.5 million Internet subscribers, and almost 3.2 million digital telephone subscribers, making it the seventh-largest telephone carrier in the country. Cox is headquartered at 6205 Peachtree Dunwoody Rd in Sandy Springs, Georgia, U.S., in the Atlanta metropolitan area. It is a privately-owned subsidiary of Cox Enterprises.

Online shopping Form of electronic commerce

Online shopping is a form of electronic commerce which allows consumers to directly buy goods or services from a seller over the Internet using a web browser or a mobile app. Consumers find a product of interest by visiting the website of the retailer directly or by searching among alternative vendors using a shopping search engine, which displays the same product's availability and pricing at different e-retailers. As of 2020, customers can shop online using a range of different computers and devices, including desktop computers, laptops, tablet computers and smartphones.

A file hosting service, cloud storage service, online file storage provider, or cyberlocker is an internet hosting service specifically designed to host user files. It allows users to upload files that could be accessed over the internet after a user name and password or other authentication is provided. Typically, the services allow HTTP access, and sometimes FTP access. Related services are content-displaying hosting services, virtual storage, and remote backup.

Local search is the use of specialized Internet search engines that allow users to submit geographically constrained searches against a structured database of local business listings. Typical local search queries include not only information about "what" the site visitor is searching for but also "where" information, such as a street address, city name, postal code, or geographic coordinates like latitude and longitude. Examples of local searches include "Hong Kong hotels", "Manhattan restaurants", and "Dublin car rental". Local searches exhibit explicit or implicit local intent. A search that includes a location modifier, such as "Bellevue, WA" or "14th arrondissement", is an explicit local search. A search that references a product or service that is typically consumed locally, such as "restaurant" or "nail salon", is an implicit local search.

The term mobile commerce was originally coined in 1997 by Kevin Duffey at the launch of the Global Mobile Commerce Forum, to mean "the delivery of electronic commerce capabilities directly into the consumer’s hand, anywhere, via wireless technology." Many choose to think of Mobile Commerce as meaning "a retail outlet in your customer’s pocket."

Electronic Yellow Pages are online versions of traditional printed business directories produced by telephone companies around the world. Typical functionalities of online yellow pages include the alphabetical listings of businesses and search functionality of the business database by name, business or location. Since Electronic Yellow Pages are not limited by space considerations, they often contain far more comprehensive business information such as vicinity maps, company profiles, product information, and more.

Mobile local search is a technology that lets people search for local things using mobile equipment such as mobile phones, PDAs, and other mobile devices. Mobile local search satisfies the need to offer a mobile subscriber spontaneous access to near-position services and information such as businesses, products, events, restaurant, movie theatre or other local information. Mobile local search is the search and discovery of persons, places, and things within an identifiable space defined by distinct parameters. These parameters are evolving. Today they include social networks, individuals, cities, neighborhoods, landmarks, and actions that are relevant to the searcher's past, current, and future location. These parameters provide structure to vertically deep and horizontally broad data categories that can stand-alone or are combined to comprise searchable directories.

RateItAll

RateItAll is a consumer-review website that also incorporates social networking. Consumers review diverse products and services, share information, and get paid modestly for their reviews. Its reviews include a five-star ranking system for those items being rated. It is one of the largest consumer-review internet based services, offering free access to over 8 million reviews posted on its website to date.

A mobile campaign is a campaign, usually marketing, advertising, or public relations-related, through which organizations contact their audience through SMS. This form of campaigning allows organizations to reach out and establish relationships with an audience in a more individualized, intimate way. The foundational function of mobile campaigns is regularly referred to as mobile marketing. A campaign's goal can have varied consumer consumption objectives including flashing, informing or engaging. Mobile campaigns have developed from the periphery of advertising to being an integral part of an effective marketing strategy. Online advertising is the second largest advertising spend at $113 billion, next to television's $196.5 billion. Near the introduction of mobile campaigns, they were primarily created to boost the impact of primary campaigns. A good example of one of the first mobile campaigns is the viewer voting system employed in American Idol. Using the American Idol example, the primary campaign was television, and the engagement was mobile, “watch this show, and text to vote”. In 2012, there were over 131 million votes in a single night, setting the world mobile voting record. With over 90% of Americans having cell phones, and there being over 6.8 billion cell phones in circulation globally versus 2.4 billion with internet access, mobile campaigns are evolving to be the way of the future in advertising and consumer engagement.

MerchantCircle is a Walnut Creek, California-based digital company which helps small and midsize businesses network with other local businesses and reach local customers through free marketing tools and social media features.

An online shopping directory is a "Yellow Pages-Style" web directory that specializes in ecommerce sites. Inspired by the organizational structure used in traditional shopping mall directories, online shopping directories organize ecommerce sites by their category and subcategory of goods sold. Without the constraints related to shopping at a physical mall, an online shopping directory serves to aggregate all ecommerce sites in one centralized location in order to help a user decide where to shop online.

Content marketing Form of marketing focused on creating content for a targeted audience online

Content marketing is a form of marketing focused on creating, publishing, and distributing content for a targeted audience online. It is often used by businesses in order to achieve the following goals: attract attention and generate leads, expand their customer base, generate or increase online sales, increase brand awareness or credibility, and engage an online community of users. Content marketing attracts new customers by creating and sharing valuable free content. It helps companies create sustainable brand loyalty, provides valuable information to consumers, and creates a willingness to purchase products from the company in the future.


Performance-based advertising, also known as pay for performance advertising, is a form of advertising in which the purchaser pays only when there are measurable results. Performance-based advertising is becoming more common with the spread of electronic media, notably the Internet, where it is possible to measure user actions resulting from advertisement. Performance Marketing is different from Brand Marketing which focuses on awareness, consideration and opinions among target consumers.

NexTag

Nextag was an independent price comparison service website for products, travel, and education. It started originally as a website where buyers and sellers could negotiate prices for computers and electronics products. Since 2000, the current business model has focused on comparison shopping. NexTag also owned Hamburg, Germany based Guenstiger.de. It provided unique and accurate functionality of tracking historical prices of a product across various sellers.

Valley Yellow Pages is owned by AGI Publishing, Inc., and is an independent Yellow Pages directory publisher serving 45 markets in Northern and Central California. An independent Yellow Pages publisher is a company that publishes Yellow Pages directories as alternatives to the local phone companies. The independent directories include similar headings and advertisements, and are distributed to local households and businesses in the market areas. Advertisements are sold to local businesses as an alternative choice to the traditional phone companies. This helps to keep local market Yellow Pages advertising costs down.

Coupon Mountain was an e-commerce website operated based in Monrovia, California that displayed syndicated online deals. Founded in 2001 by Harry Tsao and Talmadge O'Neill, Coupon Mountain began as one of the two original website properties for MeziMedia, which was acquired by ValueClick for up to $352 million. MeziMedia was renamed to ValueClick Brands in 2010. In November 2013, ValueClick sold several of its online properties to IAC which, in addition to Coupon Mountain, included price-comparison website PriceRunner and investment education site Investopedia for $80 million. Coupon Mountain, along with PriceRunner, were being actively shopped in 2016 after slumping sales attributed to a change in Google's search algorithm but only PriceRunner was sold in March 2016 to Swedish firm NS Intressenter for around $100 million.

CouponCabin provides online coupon codes from American retailers, including Target, Sears, 1-800-Flowers, and Home Depot. The site also provides printable coupons for local businesses and groceries, daily deal aggregation and product recommendations.

Prodege, formally Prodege LLC, is an American online marketing, consumer polling, and market research company based in El Segundo, California. The company develops consumer rewards and polling programs under various brands including Swagbucks, MyPoints, ShopAtHome, InboxDollars, CouponCause, Ysense, and Upromise.

References

  1. “Kudzu.com Announces 100,000 Comprehensive Consumer Reviews” Archived 2011-07-14 at the Wayback Machine , Kudzu.com press advisory, 27 June 2007
  2. “HGTV Pairs with Kudzu for Local Effect”, ClickZ, 10 August 2010