Greg Sterling highlights today that Outside.in recently received another round of investment: $1.5 million.
The company is trying to scale “hyper-local” and has improved the look and functioning of the site since its launch. As founder Steven Berlin Johnson told MediaPost:
“The development of our partner program and targeted regional and national advertising will be two major initiatives for the coming year,” said Outside.in co-founder Steven Berlin Johnson. “We’ve spent our first year building out a state-of-the-art platform for organizing the Web geographically, and now we’ve got a fantastic opportunity to build a business on top of that platform.”
Smalltown is also in this category, although taking a more incremental approach to building out its sites. The challenge of course is direct advertiser acquisition. Backfence (now gone), Judy’s Book (now evolved) and InsiderPages (now acquired) have all faltered along this path to monetization. Yelp has had success in certain markets doing direct sales because of its brand recognition and consumer traffic.
Seems like the word is getting out about “local online.” Some recently reported developments…
Greg Sterling takes a look at “mommy sites”… lots of them popping up all over. Some of these are similar to Front Porch Forum… very local and talk about whatever (not just reviews or just classifieds).
Marketers and local businesses should consider some of these mom sites in their thinking about targeting local audiences and in terms of “online word of mouth.” While it’s considerably more challenging to market within online communities, a little time and attention to some of these sites could pay off in a meaningful way. Regardless of whether marketers pay attention to them, these mom networks are in fact driving lots of recommendations and business referrals all over the US. It’s very much an untold story in local.
Bill Day writes for Marchex a post titled “Building relevant and useful sites for neighborhoods.”
How do you cover a landscape as fragmented and targeted as the 42,000+ neighborhoods/ZIP codes that exist in the U.S.? And what needs to be done locally versus done centrally to ensure a solid consumer experience? As a company that owns ZIP Code Web sites covering most of the U.S., we are dealing directly with the challenges and opportunities that come with building highly relevant and useful local sites covering each of the ZIPs.
Hmm… a ZIP Code is interesting, but too crude of a cut. Just in my own experience I’ve lived in ZIPs that feel like home, others that feel disjointed and jerrymandered. And they change. Does that mean the “neighborhood” changes too? Perhaps a techie’s solution to a human challenge. Who knows?
ReachLocal, a provider of local online marketing solutions for SMBs, has raised $55.2 million in new financing. This comes on top of the $12.7 million it has raised since its founding in 2004. The new funds give ReachLocal an estimated valuation of $305 million, since it was previously valued at $250 million.
That’s a lot of money. Reminds me of Big Tent… social networking for soccer moms. And Ning… DIY social networking. Both of which I believe have huge sums of investment.
Finally, Cameron Ferroni on the Marchex blog seems to agree with my assessment that the local online space is getting both broad and deep…
There is so much data out there that some set of consumers will love, and others will think is irrelevant. Deciding how to bring it all together and get consumers excited – now that is the challenge.
Richard in Toronto sent me the link to his neighborhood’s blog… interesting. He’s set up an entry for every house in the neighborhood and several have some flesh to the bones… photos and text.
This is more in the spirit of Front Porch Forum than the typical citizen journalist reporting on his/her view of the neighborhood. Trying to turn the ENTIRE neighborhood out for the conversation… not just a mostly one-way deal.
Kevin Harris has an interesting posting this week about people who are socially excluded/isolated in life and how they carry on online. Does online social networking help bring the most excluded of people into community?
The Local Onliner has an interesting piece today. Read the whole enchilada here.
Under-served small communities are getting more attention. Companies like TownNews, Greyboxx and Topix have set out to focus on small town and exurban residents, and aggregating those local users for advertisers.
Now that’s revealing. A purpose of these sites is to herd together local folks for the convenience of national corporations. This might explain why so many national “local online” efforts seem lacking in the soul department. How many people get USA Today delivered to their doorstep vs. the locally owned daily paper?
As we wrote in April, Topix – a 25 person company that is 80 percent owned by Gannett, Tribune and McClatchy – has been aggregating local news from a variety of sources. It has 25,000 news sources in 20,000 communities. It counts more than 12 million unique visitors.
Lately, it has also been incubating local blogs and other User Generated Content. It is now getting 60 percent of its content from user generated posts; and 60 percent of those posts come in without a linking story. The traffic is disseminated via bookmarks, email, and a number of affiliates who use it for personalized local news, including CNN, Ask, Infospace and My AOL.
The emphasis on User Generated Content isn’t particularly hard to discern, notes new CEO Chris Tolles, who was formerly head of marketing (founding CEO Rich Skrenta and VP of Business Development recently left the company to launch a startup). Tolles is also speaking on the SES side at ILM/SES Local. “You don’t have local headlines in a small town,” he says. “There is no ‘there’ there. Local news is not a search problem.”
No local news in small towns? Another interesting statement from a major player in “local online” as practiced from 30,000 feet.
The effort to harvest UGC on a geographic basis, however, would seem to put Topix on a collision course with sites such as Placeblogger and Outside.in. Tolles says there may be a few points of collision, but notes that Topix is differentiated by its scale.
Those are “hand cranked sites.” Beyond a certain number of places, sites like Outside.in are…pretty bare. We are in many more places. We own towns with populations between 5,000 and 50,000,” he says, adding that nobody else gets in more than 10,000 cities, even though there are 32,500 U.S. zip codes.
Hmm… I think of small towns with great citizen journalism sites, like Brattleboro, Vermont. I’m guessing they don’t feel owned by some distant dot.com.
Now, what does that really mean? Only 8,900 communities in the U.S. are big enough to have cable TV franchises, for instance. We must be talking about very small places. Indeed, Tolles says some of the town count is enhanced by neighborhood data. “We’re loading in neighborhood data from a lot of cities,” he says.
And then there are localized sites such as Yahoo! and its local News. But Tolles says Yahoo! really isn’t a direct competitor — especially since it stopped supporting user forums.
For Tolles, Topix’s next challenge is fairly obvious: sell some advertising. He notes that the company hasn’t tried to sell advertising for two years, making most of its revenue from Google AdSense commissions and the like.
To that end, Topix recently hired a VP of sales. The differentiation points for Topix are clear to Tolles: a non-Facebook audience of local users in small and exurban communities. Whether ad agencies want those audiences, however, is another question. Typically, they’ve demanded to reach audiences in the “Top 20” or “Top 50” or “Top 100” markets. That’s why local newspaper networks haven’t done well.
But Tolles believes they’ll go where the market is. Wal Mart figured that out years ago, he says.
Now I understand… Walmart is the model for local online.
Peter Krasilovsky reports about CitySquares‘ latest developments…
neighborhood-centric directory of local businesses has got about $1 million in venture funding; almost 400 advertisers paying roughly $600 a year, mostly for “deluxe” business profiles; and an 88 percent renewal rate.
They seem to be getting some traction, and they’re going places…
In mid-October, CitySquares is going to re-launch using new neighborhood slicing-and-dicing capabilities from Urban Mapping and Localeze, all based on an open-source Drupal platform. The site is also confidently planning to expand beyond Boston, with another northeast city set for Q2 2008, and a third one for Q3.
Co-Founder Ben Saren says the site’s re-do reflects a key truism: hyperlocal is about neighborhoods, but the reality is that neighborhoods are often “in-between” other neighborhoods. The new version of the site is going to present searchers with the five closest neighborhoods, as well as proximity options. “They can be five miles or ten blocks,” he says. That’s the Localeze part of it.
They’ll also identify neighborhoods within neighborhoods, such as Observatory Hill, which is a section of Cambridge. That’s the Urban Mapping part of it. The ability to sell across neighborhoods will help sell ads for the many small businesses “in between.”
A couple interesting posts by Peter Krasilovsky today. First, funding levels for several start-ups with a local focus…
Belated congratulations to our friend Sebastien Provencher and his Praized Media team for getting $1 million from Garage Ventures Technology Canada… you can do a lot with $1 million. You can hire key staff, pay salaries, build software, do some PR, travel (and hire consulting firms). In fact, a number of firms have recently landed deals for $1 million or so….like Outside.in ($900k) and City Voter ($1.1 million). Boston’s City Squares is also apparently funded at this level. And if you haven’t been on the site lately, it is building nicely.
A couple of years ago, the “must have” amount for a startup was more like $3 million. Smalltown, Backfence and others got the larger amount (or said they did). I never could figure out what they needed that much for.
And a story about a local citizen journalism site succeeding in New Hampshire…
At first, there was no news coverage for the 15,000 residents of a central coastal New Hampshire area including the little villages of Deerfield, Candia, Northwoods and Nottingham. Manchester’s Union Leader, a family-owned paper that is fairly notorious for its politically-charged, NH primary coverage every four years, basically ignored the area.
But then three years ago, the residents started their own news site and called it The Forum. Today, the site, a recipient of the 2007 Knight Batten Awards for Innovations in Journalism has 240 contributors, sells ads to local businesses, and even publishes an occasional print edition on special occasions… the site has an 1.6 “reporters” for every 100 residents.
Oh dear. From Belinda Goldsmith’s Reuters article yesterday…
The poll, released on Wednesday, found the use of cell phones and the Internet were becoming more and more an essential part of life with 48 percent of respondents agreeing they felt something important was missing without Internet access.
More than a quarter of respondents — or 28 percent — admitted spending less time socializing face-to-face with peers because of the amount of time they spend online.
It also found that 20 percent said they spend less time having sex because they are online.
Cell phones won out over television in a question asking which device people couldn’t go without but the Internet trumped all, regarded as the most necessary.
“It is taking away from offline activities, among them having sex, socializing face-to-face, watching TV and reading newspapers and magazines. It cuts into that share,” said Mack [Ann Mack of JWT who conducted the survey].
This is just the kind of thing Front Porch Forum is designed to counter. FPF members frequently report spending MORE face-to-face time with neighbors because of the service. FPF is an odd dot.com in that we want our members to shut down the computer and go outside. FPF postings are seeds planted in communities (real, not virtual). The harvest from this planting is usually offline, on the sidewalk, over the back fence, on the front porch.
MediaVidea offers an interesting take on social networking sites today…
Recent research done in England suggests that the number of close friends you have is mostly a result of your face-to-face interactions in the real world.
Researchers at the Sheffield Hallam University say that your online friendships on social networking sites such as Orkut, Facebook, Myspace, Hi5 and others are ‘shallow’ in nature.
Researchers got more than 200 people to fill in questionnaires and found that most of respondents had around 5 close friends and many (90%) said their close friends were results of face-to-face meetings.
So, it seems that soliciting and clicking friend request on social sites is nothing but an ego trip.
He also writes about the difference between online tools, networks and communities.
There has a been a lot of debate online about communities and networks and many, including startups riding the web 2.0 wave have run into the habit of claiming that their startup is a community. VCs are also prone to this community fever.
So, it is important to note what Joshua Schachter of del.icio.us said about the pioneering social bookmarking site, a site that I think has more value than social news sites such as Digg, for great archival and research uses.
Joshua has said, Del.icio.us is a tool, not a community.’
This is very important. Most online services are first tools and the community of people who got together while using the service, comes later on.
Joshua Porter of Bokardo advocates a focus on ‘personal value over anything else’.
Differencing between communities and networks, Chloe Stromberg from Forrester Research says that ‘while communities are bound by emotion and passion, networks are simply communication links between people who have something in common.’
Interesting to mull over. I think Front Porch Forum is used as a tool by some (receive and spread information), a network for others (e.g., need 20 people to sign a petition to get a stop sign installed), and a community of neighbors for most. Many report that their FPF neighborhood forum has helped created a neighborhood environment where they can more easily establish and maintain genuine friendships.
Ghost of Midnight is an online journal about fostering community within neighborhoods, with a special focus on Front Porch Forum (FPF). My wife, Valerie, and I founded FPF in 2006... read more