Tom from the office (our office, not The Office) sent me a link to a NYTimes article about hyperlocal sites. Surprisingly, I had to log in to the site to read it, which I don’t remember having to do in a while. More on that in another post.
I hadn’t been tracking this area in a while, mostly because 1) most of these efforts are for US cities, and 2) most of them suck, so it was a good chance to see where things were going at a high level.
Sadly, not much has changed, and it’s a bit unfair to say they suck, but the thing of it is that it’s hard enough to get an audience of dedicated early adopters for a given subject area, but adding geographic constraints to the problem makes it even harder.
An analyst named Greg Sterling has a good quote in the article that explains a lot of the core problem: “When you slice further and further down, you get smaller and smaller audiences… Advertisers want that kind of targeting, but they also want to reach more people, so there’s a paradox.”
And it’s not just advertising, content suffers the same issue. At the moment, the people who want to read this kind of site are the exact same people who are working to feed it.
So let’s allow for the time machine to zip forward to a point where any given neighbourhood has a thousand voices and ten thousand readers (hey, will these numbers happen anywhere outside of a condo farm?) – what’s the difference going to be between something like this and the local community paper? We have one in our neighbourhood, the area it covers keeps growing, and it’s biased as anything else you can imagine. The loudest voices are going to win here, just like anywhere else.
Here’s an upside for a Monday: yes, I think these things will all fail, at least in their current approach. That said, I think a lot of great lessons are going to come out of it, a lot of new features and gizmos are going to spin off, and in the meantime, maybe I’ll find out what’s up with that pothole across the way.
Leave a Reply