Tag Archives: Hyperlocal

Here’s How Hyperlocal Can Work

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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.Westchester_Chappaqua1-527x375

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:

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.

Is Hyperlocal Dieing?

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Hyperlocal journalism took two big hits this week.

everyblockFirst, NBC closed EveryBlock, a pioneer in the emerging field of data journalism that started with $1.1 million in funding from the Knight Foundation in 2007 before being acquired by msnbc.com in 2009.  Everyblock was innovative in bring highly community data-driven, with open data and custom maps.  The original open-source code is actually still available. I don’t have the facts to know if EveryBlock can truly be viewed as a failed experiment in hyperlocal journalism, or if fell victim to the legacy of the General Electric cost-cutting knife, as new management at NBC, the former GE subsidiary, gained control of the site last summer.

And, second, AOL admitted what most observers expected, which is that its hyperlocal news network Patch will miss its ambitious revenue prediction of as much as $50 million in 2012 revenue, with only $34 million in 2012 revenue. AOL reportedly lost $100 million on Patch in 2011, a number which they denied.  And so the cost cutting axe will be falling on Patch since AOL CEO Tim Armstrong is committed to bring Patch to profitability by the fourth quarter of 2013.

The right formula for sustainably profitable hyperlocal journalism is still elusive.  The search, however, is far from over.

GeoStartup Placed hits the 1 Billion Mark

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Placed, a Seattle-based startup, is building one of the largest location-based databases around.

In July I noted that Placed is collecting 400 data points from 300 million locations (per CEO David Shim, as reported by Derrick Harris from GigaOM), i.e., a dataset of 120 billion elements each time it is updated.  Impressive!

Devindra Hardawar from Venturebeat reported in August 2012 that Placed recorded 1 billion data elements in 60 days, which says that Placed may have a long way to go to execute its plan.  In fact, at the current rate the Placed database would be completed by 2032.

In any event, Placed is up to something very intriguing, since it’s one of a few companies that are both “cleaning” location data (to fill out holes where GPS coordinate data is lacking) and adding a robust set of interpretative data (demographics, velocity, location characteristics, etc.) to enable marketers to have actionable intelligence.

In October 2012 the company launched Placed Panels to enable businesses to recruit their own “panels” of consumer participants to gather location data around their own unique interests.

All Geotargeting Methods are Not Created Equal

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IP targeting can place a user within about 1,000 feet, but more advanced tactics are needed to get a more precise location: Cell tower location, wi-fi  triangulation, cookies, GPS, location-based proximity networks, and of course user-supplied.  This post by Rob Friedman at Streetfight surveys the options.

Local will be an increasing play for national marketers.

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I agree with Mindshare North America CEO Antony Young in this recent article for Ad Age: Major national and international marketers will invest the time and money to take advantage of multi-local marketing.  He reviews recent multi-local strategies from Walmart, L’Oreal, and Nike.

Some of his key points:

“It takes insight into local tastes, local demographics, local issues and local competitors to be relevant and win the consumer.  Organize national, act local is starting to get some traction.

The media are leading the way.  Media properties’ local targeting is increasingly offering more precision. Hyperlocal websites are providing local content and localized national advertising platforms by individual towns.

Most marketers will need a better payout to shift national dollars to local, posing a riddle for the media companies betting so much of their own money on a local strategy.  Data will have to be the compass for media sellers and buyers alike.  Mobile ad network xAd recently published data showing that locally-targeted mobile display ads deliver 5% to 8% click-through rates, compared to 0.6% for typical mobile display ads.

There’s no doubt that local will be an increasing play for national marketers. It’s what brands need to do to engage consumers and grow. However, it is going to be more challenging for marketers to execute and more costly and complex to orchestrate.”

Read Antony’s full piece here.

Can a social network be hyperlocal?

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Betakit has a good overview of the new neighborhood social networks here.  These businesses are hard to scale and require users to be open to their neighbors…not always a welcome thing.  The upside, however, is huge.  Just as facebook encouraged people to share more about themselves, the winner in this segment will figure out a way for neighbors to do the same. The early leader seems to be NextDoor, with $18.6 million from Greylock and Benchmark Capital
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