For my presentation at SMXEast, Heather Hopkins of Hitwise was kind enough to provide me with this custom view comparing the 3 leaders in the Maps/IYP space. With Mapquest’s recent upgrade this space is largely converging into a consolidated Maps/Directions/Business Listing product.

As I have pointed out before, it is my belief that the IYP’s have already lost in this race. From my point of view they bring little of technical or marketing value to the space. Their core product, business listings have been commoditized to the point of being available for free and without significant innovation there is no reason for their survival going forward. Above them they are being cannibalized by Google, Mapquest and Yahoo and from the bottom they are loosing out to the more nimble iBegin’s of the world. As you can see in the graph, the market share of the IYP leader, YellowPges.com, demonstrates that weakness.

So it would appear from this graph that the battle is between Google and Mapquest. Yahoo, with their innovative local and map products might be considered the dark horse. September’s introduction of a new local product by Mapquest and the rough Google transition to TeleAltas (among other problems) seems to have led to an uptick by MapQuest.

Will that trend continue? Can Mapquest maintain its market share? Or like the IYP space does Google just have too much presence in search to not win this race also? Let me know what you think. I will share my thoughts tomorrow.