Local Internet Driving Tons of Traffic

Over on Greg Sterling’s blog there is a good post – Among the ‘Top 50′ Many Local Sites- about all the traffic that coming from ‘local sites’ in the US. This does onlycover US data but I’ve got to think there is a similar trend in the UK and across Europe. For some reason this post got me thinking about all the local sites that I either use regularly or know others use a lot. What is striking about this list is the number of sites in the Uk that have local user generated content (UGC).

A list of some of the bigger and better Local UK Sites:

• Multimap
• Yell
• Touch Local
• Zagat.com
• Trustedplaces.com
• Hardens.com
• Squaremeal.co.uk
• Timeout.com
• London-eating.co.uk
• Beerintheevening.com
• We Lovel Local
• Tipped
• This is London
• Qype
• Upmystreet

Plus in the UK there is a very strong local newspaper market and a super saturated media market just for London (8 million plus people with 80%+ online at home, work and mobil) … I will dig around for some stats and try to come back with a view of how much online local traffic is being driven in the UK.

On a related note: I notices that new printed yellow page books (hard copy) had been delivered around some parts of central London today. I predict that many of these will just sit out on the street. I will try to keep track and report back.