"We cracked that local ecommerce nut, and it’s a serious nut. There wasn’t even a good form of customer acuiqsition (sic) before the Internet, for local businesses. I mean, advertising on radio and in local newspapers was about spending money upfront, to buy exposure, and then cross your fingers."

That'a Andrew Mason the CEO of GroupON in a recent TechCrunch interview.

I believe Mr. Mason is partially right. First of all I am not so sure that GroupOn is actually a customer acquisition play. But putting that aside for the moment there is a little more to this than meets the eye. The reality of the situation is that the options to buy advertising on local mediums such as radio and newspapers are rapidly diminishing. If you are a local merchant and want to advertise your offline options are going away.

Neighborhood papers that used to end up on your drive or in your mailbox? Gone.

Yellow pages? Straight from the porch to the recycling bin.

Classified ads? Craigslist is free and has much broader reach.

City newspapers? An expensive medium to begin with that now has diminishing readership and page count due in big part to the profit hit from the demise of classified ads.

The point being that most forms of local advertising that used to be available via traditional media are going away. Print publishing is in sharp decline. Terrestrial radio audience is flat at best and efficiency is challenging on a small budget.

So if you are the girl that used to own the bar that advertised in the local entertainment print weekly you have a big problem. Much fewer people are reading these things. You have no choice. You have to take your offline marketing effort online. 

And that is what is driving the local ecommerce nut. All that money, and it is a lot, that used to be spent on local print needs to find a new home. Classified. Coupons. Display. Yellow pages. Each category is a large market. Add them all together and things get real serious. Serious to create the mother of all Internet wars.