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:
- Local ownership, local scale, low overhead
- No National Ads
- 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.