• by Shankar Gupta , August 10, 2005

Online marketing and search optimization firm Marchex flipped the switch this week on 52 beta sites with highly populated ZIP codes as their domain names, including 10041.com for Manhattan and 90210.com for Los Angeles, in a bid to create ad inventory for local ads.

The idea is that consumers, hoping to find a useful site, will simply type their ZIP codes into the URL field and hope for the best. Admittedly, said Peter Christothoulou, Marchex's chief strategy officer, not many people navigate the Web this way. He added that Marchex, which owns more than 73,000 ZIP code domain names and populates each page with ads and local content, hopes the trickle of traffic to each site will add up to a torrent. "This is the power of a lot of small numbers--we don't really have that many people typing 90210 into their URL bar, but you do have some," he said. "These small numbers add up over time."

Christothoulou added that the purchase of the ZIP code domains operates on the same theory as Marchex's recent purchase of domains based on generic product names--such as videocameras.com, for example. Marchex is banking on the hope that rather than going to a search engine first, some shoppers will just type what they're looking for into the URL field and add a .com to it.

So far, the ZIP code sites include local sponsored listings--such as hotels, shopping pages, and airfare--as well as a local search function powered by Marchex's newly acquired assets from Pike Street Industries, an IYP company. The sites also include a shopping tab with feeds from Amazon.com, listings from local stores, and tabs for jobs, personals, travel, and classifieds--which, for certain cities, includes a feed from Craigslist.com.

The sites are populated with ads from Marchex's own local clients, as well as through a partnership with Yahoo!, which delivers advertisers that bid keywords targeted locally. "Local traffic is very important--people are starting to search locally more often, and having this local search ad inventory is very strategic for us," said Christothoulou.

Marchex has plans to add more content to the beta sites, more functions, and possibly user-generated content. "This is a first step for what these pages will look like," said Christothoulou. "We have plans to make it more useful, and hopefully over time users will begin to notice that--it's our belief that people are starting to search for ZIP codes."