Street Fight Daily: 07.21.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
Groupon Inc’s rapid growth has attracted rivals and regulators, a twin threat to the largest online daily deal company as it gets ready for an initial public offering. (Reuters)…
A former LivingSocial sales guy says the industry is setting itself up for an “implosion and a major shakeout.” (Business Insider)…
Arlington Hyperlocal Picks Its Own Patch, Turns a Profit
Scott Brodbeck, the editor of hyperlocal ARLnow.com (Arlington, Va.), which is part of the “authentically local” movement, claims he has a steady thrum of profitable traffic, and an empathy-bordering-on-sympathy for his competition (read: Patch). I thought it would be worthwhile to dig into this apparent and positive anomaly…
Should Hyperlocals Incorporate Content From Local Merchants?
Today’s local merchant is learning to build a more contextual, social relationship with their customer base through social media, and it’s making the simple banner ad less effective. Simply put: business is integral to engaging the community because they have the commercial incentive to create content that builds their brand equity, directly or indirectly…
Street Fight Daily: 07.20.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
When reporters are in the field with their smartphones and they have a story to tell where both photo and location are vital, a stream of Flickr photos imported into a Google Map will do the trick. (10,000 Words)…
When it comes to national distribution, the majority of daily deals sites are in less than 10 big markets. Just under 20 percent of daily deals players are in a single market, while 69 percent of sites are in between 2 and 9 markets, (TechCrunch)…
Patch-HuffPo Wants Hyperlocal Traffic? Here’s How
Last week I talked to a number of people about Aol’s Patch network and pointed readers to one Patch in particular that ostensibly seemed to be going for (human) form over (hyperlocal) function. It was a little unfair to single them out perhaps, especially with plenty of other examples of click-baiting to highlight, but I’m guessing I wittingly provided them just what they wanted by sort of calling them out: more pageviews, more clicks, more buzz…
Case Study: Realtor Finds Value in Patch Ads
David Nelson is a real estate agent who knows value when he sees it. Since Nelson started placing ads and blogging on the Lakeville Patch, he’s seen an uptick in interest from people looking to buy and sell their homes in his area. Given the targeted audience that reads Patch — and the exposure that the neighborhood site provides — he views the associated marketing costs as a wise investment…
Street Fight Daily: 06.29.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
A few months after being named COO of the Huffington Post Media Group, Jon Brod’s responsibilities are being narrowed to focus on running AOL’s Patch network of hyperlocal sites. Brod co-founded Patch with Tim Armstrong and was CEO when it was acquired in 2009. (Paid Content)…
Location-based service advertising will grow to over one-third of all mobile advertising in four years. By 2015, location-based advertising will be $6.2 billion, according to Pyramid Research. (MediaPost)…
Street Fight Daily: 06.21.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
Just-over-two-year-old Foursquare has just announced an important milestone: 10 million user accounts. The company will pass 750 million check-ins later this week, with users are now averaging about 3 million check-ins a day. (TechCrunch)…
EveryBlock, the website that collects community news and connects neighbors with each other, has hired a new president, Brian Addison, to oversee its growth and marketing efforts. Founder Adrian Holovaty remains with EveryBlock, focusing more on product than business. (Chicago Tribune)…
Street Fight Daily: 06.17.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups.… eBay is beefing up its mobile arsenal with its first local shopping app, powered by the local shopping search engine that eBay acquired in June, Milo. (Mashable)…
AOL chief Tim Armstrong said yesterday that “certain” Patch outlets — there are 800 and counting — should be profitable by Q3 or Q4, though he didn’t offer specifics. (Paid Content)…
Patch Partners With Geomentum to Attract Big Brands
It’s widely known that AOL’s Patch network has been hemorrhaging money at a rapid clip — and that ad sales across its network of over 800 hyperlocal sites aren’t yet where they would need to be to ultimately make the company viable. But a new partnership with the country’s largest hyperlocal ad agency, Geomentum, could potentially turn into a major boost.
Street Fight Daily: 06.15.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups.…
According to a Rice University study, most businesses don’t feel any loyalty toward a particular daily deal site, and over the next few years daily deal sites will likely “have to settle for lower shares of revenues from businesses compared to their current levels, and it will be harder and more expensive for them to find viable candidates to fill their pipelines of daily deals.” (PaidContent)…
Groupon Inc. Vice Chairman Ted Leonsis’ venture firm is an investor in rival LivingSocial and has ties to its board, a relationship that could pose a conflict, according to corporate-governance experts. (Bloomberg)…
Street Fight Daily: 06.13.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups… Groupon’s Andrew Mason has been visiting Beijing, and is now responding to a few very obvious problems at Groupon China that seasoned observers have been noting since the group buy Web site first opened up shop in Beijing and Shanghai. (TechCrunch)… One current Patch editor, who says she was “hired as part of the 2010 end of year push to launch 750 sites,” sent a note she titled “5 Things to hate about working for Patch” — one of which is “The Patch model isn’t sustainable. (Business Insider)…
Patch’s Main Problem? Paltry Pay
When I was working at AOL a few years back, the recruiter for Patch.com came through the West Coast offices and I spoke to her a bit about building out the fast-growing hyperlocal news blog company that is something of a bet-the-future venture for AOL chief Tim Armstrong and company (along with HuffPo). The recruiter was very nice and gave me the pitch so I could pass on to friends. Included in the pitch was a plug for the compensation: Top regional editors were going to make $70k or so. Local Patch bloggers would make a whole lot less. This seemed like a great wage – for North Dakota. In the Bay Area? $70k is just above entry level for lots of tech sector jobs. Which led me to wonder, would Patch be able to pull in quality people to make the network worthwhile?..
Street Fight Daily: 06.10.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups.… The FCC has produced a 478-page report on the state of the media in the digital age, and — no surprise — the report has found a big gap in watchdog and investigative journalism, and the local news hole hasn’t been filled by the proliferation of online news and non-profits. At the same time, the report doesn’t support any major government intiative to correct the situation. (Paid Content, Block-By Block, Nieman Lab, Romenesko/Patch)… Increasingly, location is getting baked into regular web pages as well. Fwix is taking its hyperlocal places database and exposing it to web sites in a novel way. “Our goal is to index the Web by location,” says Fwix CEO Darian Shirazi. (TechCrunch)…
Street Fight Daily: 06.06.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups… 
If Groupon slams the brakes on marketing costs, the value of hyperlocal online inventory will fall after a recent surge in demand, writes Jeff Bercovici. On the other hand, if Groupon is wrong and it has to keep spending to attract customers the way it is now, then it will likely never be profitable and those ad dollars will go away anyway. (Forbes)… Since Groupon filed its S-1 on Thursday, there have been hundreds of negative articles written about Groupon. While some of the concerns brought up about Groupon are legitimate, many of them are unfounded, writes Vinicius Vacanti. (Yipit Blog)…
Hyperlocal Scoreboard: Two Close Watchers Total It Up
The Poynter Institute’s Mallary Jean Tenore and Rick Edmonds are must-reads in the digital media world. Their pieces on hyperlocal, while not numerous, have been extensively linked, tweeted and commented on. Tenore came of age in the digital era, while Edmonds entered his first newsroom when the IBM Selectric typewriter was still the standard…