Angie’s List plans to expand into Canada and the U.K.; Servicemagic into Germany

The outlook for advertising spending has darkened, according to a recently-released semi-annual tracking study from Advertiser Perceptions Inc.

Yelp is often dismissed as a bar and restaurant site for recent college grads in San Francisco. But, according to new stats released by the company, only 45 percent of reviews on the site are for restaurant, the arts or nightlife.

The rest?

23 percent are for shopping, eight percent of reviews are for beauty and fitness, seven percent are for home and local services, four percent are for health, three percent are for travel and hotel,…

IAC’s local online guide CitySearch has launched its first major redesign in nearly a decade. The site is now in beta at CitySearch.com.

Who says you can’t raise money these days. Lighthouse Capital Partners has put $18 million into home improvement and contractor online listings and review service Angie’s List. That’s after $35 million that Battery Ventures put I earlier this year in April. All told, the company has raised $65 million in the 13 years since it launched.

Angie’s List says it will use the funds to add new categories…

Online U.S. retail spending last month grew by only 1 percent over October 2007, the lowest monthly growth rate since ComScore began tracking E-commerce in 2001. The report reveals that the low and middle-income segments are responsible for much of the softness. 

Purely by coincidence, Statistics Canada -- the government agency -- reported that Canadians ordered C$12.8 billion worth of goods online in 2007, just a few days after the Federal Court of Appeal ordered EBay Canada to hand over all information needed to identify at least 10,000 of the northland's Powersellers, defined as those selling more than $1,000 a month. EBay, which says more than 32,000 Canadians now make at least significant earnings via its site, has for two years fought the original…

After 30 years in operation, Spanish classifieds newspaper, Segundamano, is shutting down its print versions to go online only.

MercadoLibre reported positive Q3 2008 results.

You found a handyman on Craigslist who sounds great on paper. But how do you know he’s any good? A new startup, Workstir, hopes to take some of the guesswork out of the search process.

Oodle goes international with new Ireland and India sites.

After three months of operation in the U.K., mobile-classifieds company Mobiya.co.uk has aggregated 10,000 classified ads—a humble number compared with other classifieds sites in the U.K., but the Mobiya team thinks mobile classifieds has got a lot of potential in the U.K. and in Europe.

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Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang says that while performance-based advertising remains a high-growth area, it’s unknown what long-term effects the current economic downturn will have on that segment of the advertising industry.

Ad aggregator-indexer Oodle will soon be powering all of Canwest’s general classifieds.

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Sensis, Australia’s big directory service, will be providing its entire listing data to Google Maps enabling Google users to hone in on any business in an area.

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Used stuff makes it big with online sales in Sweden.

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So is this a real crackdown, or simply a gesture by all involved?

Recent reports by some Hong Kong newspaper groups paint a mixed picture of how they are adapting to changing conditions.

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