Business Listings?

What is the best way to obtain U.S. Business listings for use in a listing directory website/application such as Yelp or Angies List?

• I am looking to purchase/obtain a list of specific US businesses in niche categories such as photographers, salons, spas, dentists, etc to populate a website/app. Very similar to companies such as Yelp or Angies List. Services like factual seem promising with their US Places product but the listing categories are very vague so its hard to narrow businesses down to a specific niche. I have looked into other services such as infogroup to buy lists of data, but that can get very expensive, very quickly for a new startup. Custom crawling by services like 80legs also seem promising, but again cost is an issue. Building custom crawl packages can get into the thousands of dollars per month. Google results list a variety of very affordable options such as usbizdata (among others) who claim to offer an entire database of US businesses for around $200. Which sounds ideal, but because of the low pricing...i'm skeptical. Last thing I want is to build an application around outdated data that provides no real value and a frustrating experience to the user. Without using an API (must be a downloadable database in CSV or TXT format) what is most accurate source of business listings for the money? Are the "cheap" lists accurate? I guess I just assumed that by this point, us business listings had become a commodity and would be readily available for a low cost, but maybe i'm wrong.

• Answer:

  You can add the business details on http://www.iicie.com,  an organization dedicated to promote businesses through its channels.