It's going to be fairly difficult, but since you asked:
Step 1: Develop a sufficiently large following among Baltimoreans such that getting featured on mybmore.net meaningfully moves the needle for a business.
Step 2: Charge businesses who would not otherwise be featured in mybmore.net for advertising. You will primarily sell this in $X00 chunks via telephone sales reps.
Should you need good telephone sales reps, ask around at local papers. Their telephone sales reps are exactly who you need to make these sales, and they may soon be be urgently in need of jobs. Why? Local papers already operate on this exact model, and they do not appear to be sustainable, due to high costs and cratering revenues.
Local papers have a host of advantages which you will find it difficult to replicate, such as built-in bases of hundreds of thousands of paying subscribers, irrational advertiser preferences involving overpaying for ads which are nearly untrackable and perform poorly, and cult-like brand loyalty which spans generations. Sadly, these advantages are not merely not in your favor, they work against you, because you will have potential advertisers say things like "Why should I pay you money for advertising to 100 people who we know see my ad, when I could instead pay 100 times more to advertise to 200,000 people who won't see my ad? I'm already spending everything I can afford on advertising."
There exist other potential business models for local-flavored businesses, but they'd involve you doing something more transactional in nature rather than creating videos, so I kept them out of scope for the moment. For example, one could -- hypothetically -- use the site as a portfolio for doing promotional videos of local businesses, and then charge them $X00 a pop for short 5 minute clips that they could e.g. upload to Youtube and thereby generate business from. For example, search for [baltimore hair salons] on Youtube -- now think of all the folks who probably should be showing up there, but don't because they can't figure out how to script, shoot, and host a four minute video showing a nice, professional haircut in a clean environment.
The Baltimore Reddit has 6,000 subscribers, which usually translates into 10,000-20,000 uniques per month.
If your content is good, it's surprisingly easy to hit the top of relevant subreddits. Just make sure to engage a bit with the subreddit by commenting on other stories and your own.
I saw this having created the subreddit in my niche, and regularly hitting the top of much larger subreddit's with casual posts (on another account):
Thanks for the thoughtful reply, Patrick. Apparently the link description is missing so I'll reiterate some of it here. This was originally just an experiement/pet project by a University of Baltimore student to showcase local atmosphere with video mini-documentaries. However it has become popular enough by faculty and locals that the student decided to make venture out and try making it a real business. There are some design and seo issues that are known and can be improved, however the most challenging question was how to actually make this a revenue generating business. Interesting comparison to the newspaper companies and it is pretty spot on with what the Baltimore Sun is currently going through. Thanks again.
All good things started as pet projects...as long as you maintain an interest in building the community you should do fine. Sponsorships and ad sells will come naturally when you establish an engaged audience. Work on building up the content that you curate, and like someone else mentioned maybe use any video editing and recording skills that you may have to create your own video content and commentary, that will give people a reason to come back on a regular basis. Also you should have an email newsletter signup to interact with users when they're not actively looking for new info.
This is great advice. If you want to keep it exclusive and selective, you could ask customers to apply to be covered, part of which could include paying a fee after you vet them to your level of criteria.
Other angles you might want to go down is tying some special offers only to your site for the customer and seeing if you can do some (type of) lead gen for them where they might pay for access to that.
Step 1: Develop a sufficiently large following among Baltimoreans such that getting featured on mybmore.net meaningfully moves the needle for a business.
Step 2: Charge businesses who would not otherwise be featured in mybmore.net for advertising. You will primarily sell this in $X00 chunks via telephone sales reps.
Should you need good telephone sales reps, ask around at local papers. Their telephone sales reps are exactly who you need to make these sales, and they may soon be be urgently in need of jobs. Why? Local papers already operate on this exact model, and they do not appear to be sustainable, due to high costs and cratering revenues.
Local papers have a host of advantages which you will find it difficult to replicate, such as built-in bases of hundreds of thousands of paying subscribers, irrational advertiser preferences involving overpaying for ads which are nearly untrackable and perform poorly, and cult-like brand loyalty which spans generations. Sadly, these advantages are not merely not in your favor, they work against you, because you will have potential advertisers say things like "Why should I pay you money for advertising to 100 people who we know see my ad, when I could instead pay 100 times more to advertise to 200,000 people who won't see my ad? I'm already spending everything I can afford on advertising."
There exist other potential business models for local-flavored businesses, but they'd involve you doing something more transactional in nature rather than creating videos, so I kept them out of scope for the moment. For example, one could -- hypothetically -- use the site as a portfolio for doing promotional videos of local businesses, and then charge them $X00 a pop for short 5 minute clips that they could e.g. upload to Youtube and thereby generate business from. For example, search for [baltimore hair salons] on Youtube -- now think of all the folks who probably should be showing up there, but don't because they can't figure out how to script, shoot, and host a four minute video showing a nice, professional haircut in a clean environment.