Do Datasphere’s 50M UVs Make It a Model for Hyperlocal Scale?
What Datasphere excels at is scaling, with superb technology — and, of course, finding that sweet spot between the aggregators and high-cost editorial operations. Is this the future of hyperlocal? The 50 million unique visitors to their TV stations’ community sites have provided a kind of answer…
When Credit Card Companies Can’t Process Hyperlocal Risk
If you are working with merchants in any capacity and processing payments for them, then you can probably expect credit card processors to give you a hard time. They might accept your account and then shut you down, or charge you prohibitive fees and cap the amount you can process, stifling growth…
Brady: If Print Is 85% of Your Revenue, You’re Terrible at Selling Digital
Six months ago, online news guru Jim Brady (formerly of TBD and washingtonpost.com) took over as editor-in-chief at Digital First Media with the mandate of focusing the newsrooms of the company’s papers on a, well, “digital first” model. Street Fight recently caught up with Brady, to talk about what it takes to win hearts and minds of veteran journalists, and why the business side comes first…
The Myth of the Digitally Dumb Mom-and-Pop Shop
An old sawhorse of the punditocracy is that one of the reasons hyperlocal is taking off so slowly in terms of advertising revenues is due to the digital noobieness of local merchants. Journalists love to trot out stories reminding the world that X-percent of mom-and-pop shops still don’t even have a Web site. But are these peeps really trapped in the dark ages?
The 5 Most Important Things SMBs Can Do Online
Taking your local business online doesn’t necessarily mean you’re trying to tap into a massive network of potential new customers. Perhaps that is the endgame for some ambitious entrepreneurs, but for many businesses — especially local and service-based business — the aim is to build and maintain meaningful online and offline relationships at a local level…
When Tools Become Channels: Rethinking Local Promotion Distribution
Promotional commerce between small businesses and local consumers is undergoing a massive reconstruction. In the process, media channels are being forced to proactively adapt or wither into irrelevance. Media channels no longer enjoy the spoils of having critical mass in consumer reach and limited competition…
What Non-Profit News Orgs Can Learn From Yelp
From the get-go, Yelp was 100% citizen journalism, for better or for worse. There were editors, sure, but professional journalists were not tasked with generating content. The crowd was left to self-organize and submit copy. Imagine, if you can for a minute, a Chicago News Cooperative founded completely on the citizen journalism ethos. No professional reporters. Only editors and guides. The trajectory could be quite interesting…
What Groupon Gets in Hyperpublic: Targeting, Merchant Data
Not only will Hyperpublic help Groupon more accurately target deals to the right people at the right time — the company can also help provide value to the deal behemoth’s merchant partners, providing information about who is buying what at their store when. Groupon will now presumably be able to provide data to tout a deal’s effectiveness, and to point out ways to improve future offers…
Hyperlocal Media and Collaborative Consumption Services
The “shared economy” being ushered in by startups like Airbnb, Getaround and Toolspinner is creating new marketplaces where locals can rent their homes, cars, and tools to neighbors. This new trend enables the efficient sharing of resources and goods that are used on occasion as an alternative to outright ownership…
Hyperlocals and Fair Use: When Content Aggregation Becomes a Liability
Wholesale copying of other content without permission will lead to trouble for hyperlocals. Using short excerpts, as part of a news or commentary with proper attribution and a direct link to the original site, may be protected from infringement claims under the fair use doctrine…