
Can Anyone Actually Tap the $100 Billion Potential of Hyperlocal News? - robg
http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/138/get-me-rewrite-hyperlocals-lost.html
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mixmax
_"Why is a media titan like The New York Times Co. -- already stretched thin
by the challenges of a faltering business model -- dabbling in community news,
traditionally the bottom of the journalistic food chain? Call it the Google
Effect. The search giant's model, described by author John Battelle as "a
billion dollars, one nickel at a time," is a perfect description of how media
companies hope to take tiny sources of local revenue and roll them up into big
money."_

I think the New York times is missing the point of how Google makes money and
how their income model works. The reason Google makes obscene amounts of money
even though they only make a nickel per customer is twofold: They have _lots_
of customers, and their expenses per customer is less than a nickel.

While I agree that local advertising is a great potential untapped revenue
stream that can be harnessed through local news I think they have a bad
business model. It appears that they try to set up an old-fashioned news
outfit complete with editors, journalists et al. This adds substantial cost to
the venture, and all of a sudden you need to make more than a nickel per
customer to cover your costs.

In short it looks like an old media empire misunderstanding online
businessmodels, namely create a service that might cost you a lot in initial
effort but will scale (almost) effortlessly to millions of users, thus making
your cost per customer approach zero. An editor and a few journalists for
every community isn't cheap and doesn't scale.

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makaio
I agree that this business model has little in common with that of Google or
other online businesses, but that doesn't necessarily mean it wouldn't work. I
think a better analogy would be a Subway or a Starbucks in which you have a
small staff at each location. By standardizing business processes and sharing
expenses (advertising, accounting, etc) across many small locations, they can
generally outcompete the local, independent operations and, in aggregate,
generate a large amount of revenue.

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electromagnetic
Okay, how do they get from a nickel per customer [ed, they're claiming google
style revenues of ~$0.05 per user], to hundred-billion dollars. Perhaps their
hiring policy should include the ability to use a calculator. 6 billion x 0.05
/= $100 billion. Unless some fucktard divided instead of multiplied (hello,
that's a grade #1 fuck up).

$100 billion dollars in local advertising assumes $16.6 per person on the
planet, or over $333 per American citizen. I _highly_ doubt someone did their
math right, I'd guess more $100 million, not billion.

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Tritis
Blah blah blah

Hyperlocal is the most awful buzzword I've ever seen. Out of all of them,
ever.

I was just reading some "Hyperlocal" news in a paper printed often enough that
I see a new one each time I pick up dinner from the same restaurant. Just
because "The Observer" isn't online with ajax 5.7 pushed heavily by a startup
into a first round blah blah blah

The market is tapped already and anyone who cares is already getting their
news. No one younger than 55 gives a shit about hyperlocal.

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bootload
_"... No one younger than 55 gives a shit about hyperlocal. ..."_

maybe (Adrian Holovaty) but it is having an impact ~
<http://www.holovaty.com/writing/everyblock-acquisition/>

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callmeed
Honest question: is "hyperlocal news" such a novel idea that no one tried it
in the .com/web 1.0 days? It's not as if local news and an advertising
business model are new concepts.

"$100 Billion Potential" ... not sure about that

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brandnewlow
The difference between now and then is that we didn't have so many out of work
journalists then. Any "news startup" that uses actual journalists to do
original reporting will get coverage from journalists for, um, obvious
reasons.

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grandalf
My side project, wikifieldtrip.org, is trying to approach this problem.

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brandnewlow
I'll say this. The academics won't be the ones to figure this out.

