With the highly visible explosions at AOL’s Patch over the past week, a deeper dive into other sites reveals several success stories, albeit at a small scale.

The common themes:

1. Local ownership, local scale, low overhead
2. No National Ads
3. Only local advertisers with fixed banner positions and sponsored content.

Some examples, from Ad Age:

• http://riverheadlocal.com/
• http://ditmasparkcorner.com/
• http://thebatavian.com/

Plus my local favorite:  http://www.newcastlenow.org/.

This isn’t the formula for a big business, but it is a model for local communities and an opportunity for national service providers with useful and low cost offerings to the local sites.