Street Fight Daily: 09.16.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
According to Amazon, their Groupon-esque deals service will start displaying bargains on their Special Offer-oriented Kindles when a new software update goes live in coming weeks. (TechCrunch)…
AOL looks like it may be readying a new social network. It’s clear AOL is going for a more localized approach. And what does AOL already own that could be easily integrated with a localized social networking platform? Patch. (Business Insider)…
Street Fight Daily: 09.15.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
Groupon is planning to put its initial public offering back on track even as markets remain rocky. After postponing presentations to potential investors early this month, the online coupon giant is now aiming to go public in late October or early November, according to people briefed on the matter. (New York Times/Dealbook)…
Foursquare’s magical tool that will allow developers to build apps that can remind you to buy milk when you walk past the grocery store or notify you when a friend is in the area is being publicly released. (BetaBeat)…
Street Fight Daily: 09.12.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
A Groupon deal might boost sales but, it can also lower a merchant’s reputation as measured by Yelp ratings, say computer scientists who have analyzed the link between daily deals and online reviews. (Technology Review)…
Patch is looking for adolescent contributors from high schools — and even middle schools — as it seeks to recruit thousands of community bloggers. (Forbes)…
Mission Local: A Hyperlocal that Does It Right
Over the course of the past few weeks the Mission District of San Francisco has been rocked by two shootings. Mission Local was all over it.The publication is a public-private partnership that publishes stories in English and Spanish focused on this district, which still has a strong Latino population…
Street Fight Daily: 09.09.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
Zagat gives Google the best local content in one fell swoop, as well as relationships with thousands of local advertisers, writes Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry. “Now Google can plug the best local content into its many products and have the best local search product. … This is important because local is the next big online advertising opportunity. Daily deals are just the tip of the iceberg.” (Business Insider)…
“Local is going to be big; I think everyone realizes that,” says Sameet Sinha, a senior analyst at B. Riley. “But in this sort of capital markets environment, long-term projects aren’t given much leeway, especially a project like Patch that is much more people intensive than tech intensive.” It’s just “not something that should have been undertaken by a company the size of AOL.” (PEHub)…
Street Fight Daily: 09.08.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
Echoecho is a simple service that lets people request location updates from friends in their phone address book, who then can decide whether to respond with their coordinates. The company announced yesterday that it has raised $750,000 in seed funding from Google Ventures and United Kingdom-based PROFounders Capital. (GigaOm)…
“It seems to me that Digital First is much more likely to solve the problem of building strong — and profitable — web-based local media than is AOL’s Patch,” writes Felix Salmon. “The first and most important reason is that local newspapers are, and always have been, the first best source of local ad-sales talent. … On the other side of the editorial divide, local newspapers are also the first best source of local news, and are generally much more respected and trusted in local communities than any cookie-cutter Patch site is likely to become.” (Reuters)…
Street Fight Daily: 09.07.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
Add Groupon Inc. to the list of hot new Web companies having second thoughts about whether now is a good time to go public. The daily deals website, which is expected to fetch a $20 billion valuation upon its stock-market debut, canceled its investor roadshow and is reevaluating plans for an initial public offering in the face of stock-market volatility. (Wall Street Journal)…
Location-based services are becoming more commonplace tools for mobile users, but check-in services appear to be facing a tough road to adoption, according to new figures from the Pew Internet & American Life Project. The organization found that 28 percent of American adults use some form of mobile and social location-based services to get directions or recommendations, or to check into a location. But Pew found that only 4 percent of adults use their phones specifically for check-in services like Foursquare and Gowalla, the same as in November. (GigaOm)…
Street Fight Daily: 09.01.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
If a private equity firm buys AOL and chops it up to sell off the parts — as is being rumored — Henry Blodget thinks Patch will be “toast.” (Business Insider)…
“While it’s easy to get into the daily deal marketplace it’s much harder to grow and sustain a daily deal business,” says Mary Song, CEO of Yuupon. (WebProNews)…
Patch and Profitability
Deep-ish into a story about AOL’s growth this week. The Wall Street Journal tucked this tasty nugget of information: AOL is spending about $160 million a year on Patch, which equates to about $150,000 to run each individual Patch site annually, according to an analyst’s estimate.
It begs the obvious question of whether AOL will–or even can–make a profit from this enterprise…
Street Fight Daily: 08.19.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
Foursquare announced new features on Thursday that allow check-ins at events, like concerts or movies, instead of just the places where those events are happening. The company said the new features will simply formalize the existing behavior of its users. (New York Times)…
Groupon has not only faced questions about its controversial accounting practices, but is now also having to respond to questions from members of Congress about its privacy policies. (AllThingsD)…
Denver Post Unveils ‘New’ YourHub. But Is It New Enough?
Six years ago YourHub was major media’s first big foray into hyperlocal. It was the answer to newspapers desperately looking to replace shrinking print revenues with digital gold. But digital gold, like the real stuff, is not easy to find. What happened in Denver is a sobering case study about metro newspapers and hyperlocal publishing.
Case Study: Connecticut Pub Casts a Wide Net With Patch Ads
Like many entrepreneurs, Daneen Grabe, owner of Little Pub restaurant, has little time to research all the advertising platforms that are available in her town of Ridgefield, Conn. She now spends most of her marketing budget on ads in six local Patch sites, in the hopes of attracting some of the hyperlocal news network’s most plugged-in readers. Here’s why.
A ‘Community Service Model’ for Hyperlocal
When merchants and civic organizations produce content for local publications, they develop their brand, engage their community and, as a result, market themselves. This new hyperlocal model would serve the business, nonprofit and civic sectors by providing the free open source media they need to deliver news and promote their agendas inside the community. Call it the community service media model…
Street Fight Daily: 08.16.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
Foursquare has launched a new feature that allows users to create distinct lists of the places they’ve checked into or plan to visit in the future. This new functionality brings Foursquare more into the realm of user-generated recommendations long-dominated by review sites such as Yelp. (GigaOm)…
Miguel Ferrer, General Manager of AOL Latino says Patch Latino is set to be introduced this fall and is already hiring journalists in selected markets. “We are not yet commenting on the exact locations of the Patch Latino sites, but yes, they will be in Southern California.” (Portada)…
Street Fight Daily: 08.15.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
AOL is spending about $150,000 to run each individual Patch site annually, according to an analyst’s estimate. AOL first focused on building traffic to Patch sites, and just recently started ramping up ad sales. (Wall Street Journal)…
San Francisco’s KQED is embarking on a couple of partnerships pairing it with hyperlocal sites in the area: one with just-launched Huffington Post San Francisco, the other with four hyperlocal news sites as part of J-Lab’s Networked Journalism Project. (Nieman Lab)…
Patch Pitch: 855-Town Gorilla Doles Out Daily Deals
Patch certainly reports the news, but it also seems that often Patch is the news. This is one of those weeks. And not simply because one of their interns recently saved a pedestrian, and covered it. The hyperlocal news destination that AOL’s betting a bunch on (closing in on $200 million invested thus far) announced last week that it had crossed a milestone of one million articles published. It’s also rolling out a shiny new daily deals product in over 800 of its communities…
Street Fight Daily: 08.09.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
Bloomspot has secured $40 million in new funding. The company focuses on offers from high-quality merchants looking to connect with their best customers and deepen loyalty. The offers they serve are highly tailored for specific interests and demographics. (TechCrunch)…
In its quarterly earnings report, AOL said that Patch has added 44 towns to end Q2 in 846 towns and is on track to have about a 1,000 coverage areas by year’s end. (PaidContent)…
Case Study: Running Deals With a Local Publisher
When Renae Click decided to run a daily deal campaign earlier this year, she knew the publisher she chose would be important. That’s why Click, who owns Tomlinson’s Feed & Pets with her husband Scott, opted to work with a local hyperlocal publisher in Austin rather than a national company.
Storming the ‘Geolocals’ in the Eye of Irene
How did some of the clever new geolocation/geosocial applications take advantage of a situation where people suddenly needed to find and purchase things they normally would not? For intel on this I chatted up a couple young guns in the space and found, unsurprisingly, weather is still a money maker…