Citysearch
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| Subsidiary | |
| Industry | Internet Local Search, Advertising |
| Founded | La Crescenta, California, U.S. (1995) |
| Headquarters | 8833 W. Sunset Blvd., West Hollywood, California, U.S. |
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Area served
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United States |
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Key people
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President |
| Products | Citysearch.com, Pay For Performance Advertising |
| Parent | IAC |
| Website | citysearch.com |
Citysearch is an online city guide that provides information about businesses in the categories of dining, entertainment, retail, travel, and professional services in cities throughout the United States. Visitors to each of Citysearch's local city guides will find contact information, maps, driving directions, editorial, and user reviews for the businesses listed. Citysearch is headquartered in West Hollywood, California and is an owned and operated web site of CityGrid Media, which is an operating business of IAC (NASDAQ: IACI). The original office was in Pasadena, California.
Citysearch was founded in September 1995 by Jeffrey Brewer, Caskey Dickson, Brad Haaugard, Taylor Wescoatt, and Tamar Halpern. Charles Conn was then recruited to lead the new company. The idea, initiative, and seed capital came initially from Bill Gross.
In August 1998, Citysearch merged with Ticketmaster Online. In July 1999, Citysearch acquired the competing Sidewalk.com website from Microsoft, and merged the two sites together. In December 1999, Ticketmaster-CitySearch received a $40 million investment from USA Networks, Inc., then controlled by Barry Diller. In 2007, another competitor, Insider Pages was acquired.
In June 2010, Citysearch LLC rebranded as CityGrid Media. The flagship product of CityGrid Media is CityGrid, a content and ad network for local. CityGrid Media also owns and operates leading local consumer properties which include Citysearch, Insider Pages, and Urbanspoon.
While many local search sites mushroomed in the 21st Century, Citysearch's biggest competition comes from the fast-growing Yelp, Inc. In the late 2000s, Yelp was growing at 80% while Citysearch growth remained flat. Local search engines from Bing, Google and Yahoo are also widely used alternatives to finding local businesses on the internet.
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Wikipedia