Borrell has released its 9th annual revenue benchmarking report comparing numerous players and market segments in local media. The report is called “Benchmarking Local Online Media: 2010 Survey.”

Chock full o’ data, it looks at “online revenues from nearly 4,600 local media websites in the U.S. and Canada and offers insights into the money made at local newspaper, TV, radio and pure-play Internet operations.” In that “pure-play” category are Groupon, Craigslist, Autotrader and others.

The report makes a bunch of broad observations about the local market:

• The top five companies (according to online revenues) are those where their ads are also their content (i.e., AT&T, Groupon, Autotrader)
• The dominance of the online “pure plays” has halted; some traditional local media players are now making meaningful gains online (the limits of self-service on display here)
• YP publishers and selected newspaper publishers are now getting 20%+ of their revenues from digital
• However there are an array of traditional companies that receive a marginal contribution from digital, for lack of investment. Borrell argues that for these companies it’s probably already “too late.”
• Borrell contends mobile is the driver of local revenue growth going forward (the report argues that more “traditional” online revenue growth would be flat otherwise)

AT&T Interactive/YP.com is crowned the most successful local online media company. However Yellow Pages Group/Yellow Media (Canada) receives the highest percentage of gross revenues from digital (25.5%) of any of the North American companies examined in the report. In that category AT&T is second, the NY Times third, Yellowbook fourth and McClatchy fifth.

The five characteristics of traditional media companies that are doing well online are the following according to Borrell:

• They are selling “solutions” to advertisers, not just banners on their own websites.
• They have a sales force dedicated exclusively to selling online products.
• They have very clear and aggressive revenue goals — often not incremental. The interactive manager typically reports directly to the CEO or President, not to a GM, GSM or publisher.
• They maintain a revenue focus. Traffic, product and content are secondary issues.