California So Overrun By Social Networks That They Advertise On Your Car

Vasanth Sridharan | September 6, 2008 

How competitive is the social networking business in California? Apparently enough so that sites are giving a shot at offline advertising.

After returning to our parked car in a Best Buy lot in Merced, Calif. -- two hours east of the Valley -- we found an interesting flyer tucked under the windshield of our Mazda: An advertisement for Spanish/English social network MyGrito.com. (Grito means "scream" or "cry" in Spanish.)

Although we had never previously heard of the site, a quick Internet search informed us that it's more than a year old, and it's geared toward Spanish-speaking people in the U.S. That's a tough market for a new site to crack: hi5 gets good numbers among Spanish-speaking U.S. residents, because it also has huge presences in Latin America. And Facebook has been translating its site into Spanish since February 2008. MyGrito.com, meanwhile, got 7,000 U.S. unique visitors in August, according to Compete.

We suppose color copies are cheaper than Google keywords, but is this really the best way to get new users?

See Also:
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• Vasanth Sridharan

Shawn (URL) said:

Sep. 06, 2:35 PM

I was wondering if offline advertising and newspaper ads actually worked effectively anymore. Advertising a social network, whether it's a car, or billboard ads in California should be as effective as advertising online. Why so? Because California is $$gUaP-a-fornia$$...:-) 

www.Drewryonline.net

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djchang (URL) said:

Sep. 07, 11:22 AM

Is this the same urban media bias that favors H. Clinton to Palin? Consider the following facts: 

- Small towns have few connections with metropolitan users. Thus, Facebook and LinkedIn have lesser presence. 

- Among newspapers, the weeklies and small town papers are the only segment that is still doing well. 

- Google has such low click-through-rates that they are ineffective for reaching these ultra-targeted local markets. 

Flyers on cars may not scale across cities, but it may have higher ROI than AdWords. 

Big city, general consensus biases our observations and conclusions. Quick media conclusions about Palin have been wrong. We need to listen and learn more.