192.com to spend £1m on online advertising relaunched site

by Emma Rigby, Revolution UK 07-Apr-05

LONDON - 192.com has relaunched its site and upgraded its search tool for finding people and services, and is to spend £1m advertising the service online over the next six months.

The company, which claims 17% of the online directories market, wants to challenge traditional offline brands such as BT, Thomson, and Yell, as well as the new 118 services, and to grow its revenue to £20m in two years.

Previously, 192.com made revenue by charging for subscription services, but it hopes to boost revenue opportunities by offering ad slots in its listings.

The relaunched service includes a Local Classifieds resource, which lets users research in detail any geographical area in the UK. Search results are plotted on a map and include distances from a given location. An enhanced aerial photography service allows users to zoom to the level of an individual building or a home.

Other services such as the relationship search have been upgraded to deliver quicker results.

The directory search service announced last month a partnership deal to publish Thomson Directories listings. Its 1m unique monthly users can now access to BT's directory enquiry data, Thomson Directories classified listings and Dun & Bradstreet's business listings.

Future plans include more transaction-based services on the site and 192.com has already signed partnerships with Hotels.com and TheTrainline.com.

Keith Marsden, managing director of 192.com, said: "Our objective was to address all of the limitations of all the current services and to present one central resource, which gives consumers and business access to all of the information on business that they could possibly need."

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