Hyperlocal?
AOL acquires hyperlocal aggregator Outside.in for a merger with Patch. Hyperlocal wishes and dreams; http://eicker.at/Hyperlocal
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Gerrit Eicker
Rockville Central Goes Facebook
Community news site Rockville Central (DC-area) moves to Facebook – entirely: where the people are; http://eicker.at/Rockville
Gerrit Eicker
Huffington Goes AOL
Aol. acquires The Huffington Post (HuffPo) for $315M: Arianna Huffington stays editor-in-chief; http://eicker.at/HuffingtonAol
Gerrit Eicker
The News Business
Winer: The paywall may be journalism’s Maginot Line. Time for a philosophy change in the news business; http://eicker.at/1o
Gerrit Eicker
Examiner.com
Hyperlocal: Examiner.com is now getting 10,000 applications a month for examiners; http://j.mp/bwtMqP
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Gerrit Eicker
VB: “While the pay isn’t huge (and Examiner.com officials wouldn’t provide details), Examiner.com is now getting 10,000 applications a month for examiners. It vets each application and accepts about 40 percent of them, after looking at sample stories and writing skills (and doing criminal background checks). The writers can focus on any of 200 categories or subcategories. the writers can look at a dashboard and see how much money they have made in a month. – Examiner.com is making money through local ads, examiner sponsorships, and campaigns that are targeted via Examiner Connect, which combines content creation with social media and search engine optimization techniques. The company did a campaign with pet food maker Iams related to pet adoption. That resulted in much better search results for searchers on the words ‘pet adoption’ and ‘Iams.’ On such campaigns, the competition isn’t as fierce.”
Gerrit Eicker
Local Paywalls Will Not Pay Off
Mutter: Local news rivals will doom publisher paywalls at Yahoo, AOL, HuffPo; http://j.mp/9DWWUB
Gerrit Eicker
Twitter Places
Twitter goes Places: geolocating tweets, integrating Foursquare and Gowalla, API functionality; http://j.mp/cfmoDX
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Gerrit Eicker
Twitter: “Foursquare and Gowalla integration: Many Foursquare and Gowalla users publish check-ins to Twitter. Location is a key component of these Tweets, so we worked closely with both companies to associate a Twitter Place with Tweets generated by these services. This means that if you click on a Twitter Place, such as ‘Ritual Roasters,’ you will see standard Tweets and check-ins from Foursquare and Gowalla.”
VB: “Twitter just launched Places, the location-sharing feature that the company announced at its Chirp conference in April. – Users could already share their location on Twitter – either their latitude and longitude coordinates or their neighborhoods. But with Places, you can share a specific location, like a coffee shop, a restaurant, or a bar. Then users can search to see all the tweets from that location. They can create new Places, too.”
NYT: “Twitter users who want to share their location click on a link that says ‘add your location’ when they write their post. They can choose from a database of places nearby or add their own.”
RWW: “Twitter has ‘data partnerships’ with TomTom and Localeze in order to make Twitter Locations work. Over the coming week, it is rolling Locations out to 65 countries. It is also working to add Twitter Places to Twitter for iPhone, Android, and Blackberry.”
TC: “All of this means huge things for location on Twitter. And the fact that this place data ties in with both Foursquare and Gowalla is excellent. But there still eventually needs to be some sort of unified place database. Maybe Twitter Places will help produce that. At least until Facebook’s location solution comes out and is inevitably incompatible – I kid, I kid. Or do I?“
Gerrit Eicker
Localisation + Real-time = -Global Responsibility?
Dumenco: Time zones are, obviously, the enemy of real-time. Localisation vs. global responsibility; http://j.mp/cXfxiV
Gerrit Eicker
Local Pay Walls
There is some measurable success of pay walls on the local level, but is it comparable? http://j.mp/dqdXgW
Gerrit Eicker
Location Marketing
The new (old) point-of-purchase (POP) is location marketing: with a projected outlay of $4B by 2015; http://j.mp/bOj4hX
HuffPo: “AOL Inc. announced today that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire The Huffington Post, the influential and rapidly growing news, analysis, and lifestyle website founded in 2005, which now counts nearly 25 million unique monthly visitors. … The transaction will create a premier global, national, local, and hyper-local content group for the digital age – leveraged across online, mobile, tablet, and video platforms. The combination of AOL’s infrastructure and scale with The Huffington Post’s pioneering approach to news and innovative community building among a broad and sophisticated audience will mark a seminal moment in the evolution of digital journalism and online engagement. … As part of the transaction, Arianna Huffington, The Huffington Post’s co-founder and editor-in-chief, will be named president and editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post Media Group, which will include all Huffington Post and AOL content, including Engadget, TechCrunch, Moviefone, MapQuest, Black Voices, PopEater, AOL Music, AOL Latino, AutoBlog, Patch, StyleList, and more.”
Huffington: “By combining HuffPost with AOL’s network of sites, thriving video initiative, local focus, and international reach, we know we’ll be creating a company that can have an enormous impact, reaching a global audience on every imaginable platform. … Far from changing our editorial approach, our culture, or our mission, this moment will be for HuffPost like stepping off a fast-moving train and onto a supersonic jet. We’re still traveling toward the same destination, with the same people at the wheel, and with the same goals, but we’re now going to get there much, much faster.”
ATD: “For AOL, the deal gives them a site that is very good at generating lots page views and impressions very efficiently–which is the company’s whole thrust these days. – That means lots more ad inventory to sell and an injection of content talent, giving AOL more scale it desperately needs. – The move also obviously gives AOL a much-needed editorial identity and cohesion, which it doesn’t really have. … Five time multiple to the Huffington Post’s $65 million in expected revenue for the coming year, one-eighth of AOL’s market valuation, the offer was accepted quickly.”
Guardian: “The sale to AOL marks a personal triumph for Ariana Huffington, the colourful and controversial co-founder of the site that bore her name, who under the terms of the deal is given a new role as president and editor in chief of a unit to be named Huffington Post Media Group, and includes management of AOL’s sprawling news operations and other media enterprises such as TechCrunch and MapQuest. … Originally a politics blog aimed at Democrats, the Huffington Post branched out into celebrity coverage and turned itself into one of the biggest pieces of real estate in online news media in the US, rapidly overtaking more established media organisations such as the Washington Post by deftly utilising the internet to exploit untapped markets.”
NYT: “The deal will allow AOL to greatly expand its news gathering and original content creation, areas that its chief executive, Tim Armstrong, views as vital to reversing a decade-long decline. … By handing so much control over to Ms. Huffington and making her a public face of the company, AOL, which has been seen as apolitical, risks losing its nonpartisan image. Ms. Huffington said her politics would have no bearing on how she ran the new business. … One of The Huffington Post’s strengths has been creating an online community of readers with tens of millions of people. … The sale means a huge payout for Huffington Post investors and holders of its stock and options, who stand to profit earlier than if the company had waited to grow large enough for an initial public offering. … ‘The reason AOL is acquiring The Huffington Post is because we are absolutely passionate, big believers in the future of the Internet, big believers in the future of content,’ Mr. Armstrong said.”
RWW: “Can the Huffington Post strategy bring in as much or more revenue than that? While eyeballs have come online fast, ad revenues have been much slower to move. That’s in large part because in the old media world, advertisers used to say “half my advertising is wasted, I just don’t know which half that is. So they bought both halves. Online, that’s not the case. Every click and every conversion is countable – so ad buys can be made much more rational. Thus much less media gets sponsored. It’s hard to say how this is all going to play out in the long run. – AOL is making a strong move, though, in spending more than an entire financial quarter’s subscription revenue on one big content shop and its leadership.”
TC: “Arianna Huffington’s genius is to churn out enough SEO crap to bring in the traffic and then to use the resulting advertising revenue – and her personal influence – to employ top class reporters and commentators to drag the quality average back up. And somehow it works. In the past six months journostars like Howard Fineman, Timothy L. O’Brien and Peter Goodman have all been added to the HuffPo’s swelling masthead, and rather than watering down the site’s political voice, it has stayed true to its core beliefs. Such is the benefit of being bank-rolled by a rich liberal who doesn’t give a shit.”