3 ms·

Do we know of any company that has successfully used hyper-local market idea to grow exponentially?

• knieveltech 18y ago
  Exponentially? Not that I'm aware of. I've seen examples of highly focused niche sites that have generated nontrivial (and growing) ad revenue, but so far nothing viral. And really this touches on one of the key problems in the newspaper world today: editors who are looking for the next Big Thing to replace the classifieds cash cow. I believe tremendous resources are being squandered on what is basically a waste of time. If there was one overarching business model that was going to "save" newspapers, someone would have struck on it by now and everyone would be following suit. The future (again if one exists) is in many carefully managed small revenue streams.
  • abdulkundi 18y ago
    From the discussion here emerges another question. Is professional content creation out of date? Do users appreciate professional content so much that they are willing to be inconvenienced in terms of money or time to acquire it?
    • knieveltech 18y ago
      The guys over at the New York Times sure seem to thing so. They've been beating the "switch to paid subscription models online" drum pretty hard recently. The real differentiator is absolute top-shelf content. As far as I can tell (and my own surfing habits reflect this so I may have a personal bias) most folks don't much care where they get their content from as long as it's thoughtful, well-written and at least bears the appears of solid fact-checking. YMMV. The one thing that I think everyone in the industry agrees on is the kind of vanilla content that's coming off the wire these days is absolutely insufficient to attract users to an online portal. That crap is a commodity freely available on any number of aggregator sites.