AOL a-t-il trouvé la recette miracle de l’info hyperlocale à grande échelle ? Patch prend hyperlocal à grande échelle. Patch. Patch, le site hyperlocal d'AOL, est totalement rebutant. Slate Magazine - Is it too late in the game to call hyperlocal efforts a complete waste of time and resources? Business Insider comes close to convincing me that Patch, AOL's network of hyperlocal sites in 18 states, has little chance of succeeding unless it imitates Groupon and LivingSocial and enters the daily-deals business. Of course, imitating Groupon would not validate the hyperlocal-news idea; it would only validate the daily-deals idea, which needs no validating. Business Insider insists that Patch can't possibly justify the $120 million that AOL is investing a year because of the distance between its current traffic (4 million unique visitors in January) and the traffic it needs to become profitable. Comparing Patch to the Huffington Post, which AOL now owns, the Business Insider reports, "Even if Patch got to 25 million uniques and generated $100 million of revenue (2X Huffpo's per unique), it would still be losing money.
" In other words, social news trumps hyperlocal news. Patch d'AOL vise à quintupler en fin d'année | Médias. Patch, which has already established itself as the biggest network of neighborhood blogs in the country since being acquired by AOL last summer, plans to accelerate its growth dramatically. Patch president Warren Webster tells us the company will add a staggering 400 hyperlocal sites over the next six months, bringing its total to 500. In order to accomplish its goal, Patch will hire 500 more reporters in 20 states, making it - by far - the biggest new hirer of full-time journalists in the US. AOL (NYSE: AOL) had already disclosed that it intended to invest $50m to expand Patch this year, but the company hadn't said exactly how it would allocate that cash. Back in April, for instance, when Patch had 46 sites in five states, Webster told us that the company expected to be "in hundreds of towns" by year-end but wouldn't be more specific.
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