[Update 12/19/2019: Acxiom has officially retired its directory, meaning we no longer submit to it as one of our big four data aggregators. Foursquare has taken its place.]
In 2018, Acxiom was acquired by publicly-traded advertising company IPG. In order to comply with the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) which comes into effect on January 1st, 2020, Acxiom will be shuttering its directory and local search operations, including its data aggregator functions.
(N.b. If you’re asking ‘what’s a data aggregator?’ we’ve got you covered! Check out this explainer on how manual citation submissions differ from data aggregator submissions.)
Acxiom’s exit from the data aggregator market leaves just three of the ‘big four’ data aggregators: Infogroup , Neustar Localeze, and Factual. With Acxiom gone, one or some of these businesses will need to take on the management and updating of the listings currently managed by Acxiom.
Here are a few of the key sites that currently get business data from Acxiom:
- 411.ca / 411.info
- Dex
- Superpages
- YP.com
- Yelp
- Just Dial
- Local.com
- Elocal
- Chamberofcommerce.com
What Does This Mean for BrightLocal Customers?
BrightLocal currently uses all four data aggregators for our aggregator submissions, but with this news, we’ll naturally cease using Acxiom at the end of this year.
Acxiom have confirmed to us that they’ll continue to accept the data we supply to them and push it to their network until the end of December 2019. They have also assured us that the data publishers in their network will continue to take and use their data.
With this in mind, BrightLocal will continue to push data to Acxiom up until December (exact date TBC). We believe there is still excellent value in their network and it benefits our customers to have their data distributed to these publishers.
We expect that from January, 2020, we (on your behalf) will still be able to manage and update data currently published through Acxiom through these other aggregators instead.
We’ll be updating our data aggregator services and pricing in December to reflect this change, but in the meantime, BrightLocal customers need take no action.
(However, we’d argue that this is certainly a good time for the few customers that only use Acxiom with BrightLocal to consider purchasing the great-value full bundle of aggregators, which provides a 25% discount.)
We’ll be in touch with all customers via email near the end of the year to remind you that things are changing, and to recommend courses of action, but we’ll be ensuring that the impact is minimal.
If you have any further questions about Acxiom’s exit from the data aggregator arena and what it means for your business, agency, or BrightLocal account, please get in touch with us at [email protected].
