You knew this was coming: location data is now so easily available that someone is giving it away. Location analytics vendor Placed is giving free access to visitor traffic data for 1,900 major businesses, including giant chains such as Walmart, McDonalds, and Starbucks. They hope to spur demand by educating the market.

Perhaps more hopeful for local media: start-up Relevnt is expanding its “location-based mobile network”, which lets local publishers and organizations host interest-based communities which are exposed via mobile app to subscribers. Contributors’ content appears within immediately via RSS feeds and contributors earn advertising revenue. Technically, each community is a Web domain owned by the local publisher and the communities are aggregated by the mobile app. So far, the only way to get the app is through the Apple Store so this isn’t entirely free-range content grazing.

Nearly one-third of major news publishers have blocked generative AI tools from reading their content.   But that’s a drastic measure which could also exclude their results from conventional search engines.  Microsoft has just given publishers the option to block access by Bing Chat without also removing their content from search results.  We’ll see if competitors do the same.