DON'T GO OUTSIDE

Local Media Isn’t What People Want: They Want Liquid Media

soupsoup:

stoweboyd:

The truth is that the numbers for AOL’s Patch efforts look bad, based on the southern California numbers leaked to Business Insider. It’s especially bad when you contrast them with traffic generated by Huffington Post, with is topical, not local.

The reality is people don’t want ‘reportage’ on a local level: they may want better search, and the ability to complain about potholes, but they aren’t super excited about the PTA board meeting, or even the local high school sports. Yawn.

People are signing up in the millions for experiences online like Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr, where traditional news has been reduced to a stream of social objects, and these find their way to us in social streams. Patch is the effort to build thousands of destination sites in a world where people are spending less time on sites, and more time inside social apps.

The saddest thing of all is that Greg Narain and I sketched out a project for AOL years ago called Nerdvana, which would have been a breakthrough in that area, building on the very considerable headstart that AOL had with AIM.

That’s what people still want, though. So AOL could divert a few million of that Patch money to a startup taking a hard look at what’s going on in Twitter and Tumblr, and do something interesting, instead of building a massive and unsustainable flop.

*cough* Neighborhoodr *cough*

I am SO sick of this argument. 

Local is important. People want local. But Local is not national or global, and when it’s constantly compared to those of course is falls short. Is that because it’s a failure? No, it’s because the whole world doesn’t live on your block.

When we started Metblogs in 2003 no one gave a shit about local and over the next few years people started paying more attention, but always because they expected it to be the next national thing, which it will never be, since it’s local. I’ve written about this numerous times where we’d but heads with advertisers and affiliates who wanted numbers that just didn’t exist, and would then walk away when suddenly there weren’t 10x the population of a city reading about it.

There are just over half a million people in the city of Nashville, 1.5 million in the metro area. You want to run a campaign in Nashville but are going to be disappointed if you don’t get 4-5 million views to it? You are on crack. If a campaign in nashville gets 250K views - a full HALF THE POPULATION of the city, that’s fantastic. Local numbers are only low because they are *constantly* compared to national and global sites which is just stupid.

Oh really, this site about a city with half a million people gets less traffic than Facebook, obviously it’s a failure.

Stupidest logic ever.

Local is important TO THE LOCALS. It’s useless to non-locals which is exactly how it should be. 

On a side note, it’s hilarious to watch company after company dump cash into the wrong efforts for local and then panic and give up. AOL has done it twice now, I’m actually shocked that they didn’t seem to learn *anything* from their failed attempts at local with Weblogs Inc. Patch sucks because *actual* local sites, and *actual* locals know it’s just the front of some outsider trying to capitalized on them and isn’t actually invested in anything local. Meanwhile billions of local sites around the world continue to run perfectly fine because it’s a group of people writing about the neighborhoods and communities they live in and aren’t gauging their success against traffic to sites like twitter.

Posted 11 months ago — 238 notes