Hyperlocal blogging models have tried and failed in an attempt to bring blogging to a community level, but New Zealand enterprise Flying Pickle is proving that done right, small scale independent local news does have a future.
Flying Pickle is a free community blog for Korokoro, Maungaraki and Normandale, 3 suburbs on the outskirts of Wellington, New Zealand with an approximate population of 6,500 people. The goal of the site “is to bring the community together in an open and democratic environment where people can exchange views, news, opinions, advertise their businesses in a friendly and non-intrusive manner as well as find help and support from others.” Anyone living, working or just being connected to the area can join the blog and contribute content, be it an announcement, garage sale ad, news or opinion.
With a small target audience, the blog would struggle to be read by a sizable (and sustainable) portion of its target audience. To increase the publications reach, the best content from the blog is included in the Flying Pickle Print Edition that is regularly delivered free to every household in the target area. Around a third of the print edition includes ads, but only as many to cover the costs of the publication and to assist in the running of the site as Flying Pickle is run as a community non-profit organization.
ZetaPrints, who print the offline edition, has the full case study here including costs and numbers and it makes for an interesting read. It’s also a model that could well be copied elsewhere in the world.
There are many community blogs but nobody (that I am are of) has yet figured out how to roll them out under one brand across the world to form a conglomerate of “local blogs” to benefit from a wider audience.
Jon
http://dreamclue.com … get the message!
In Turkey there is also very popular and successful community blogging called http://www.Bildirgec.org similar to this one. They share revenue coming mainly from adsense with article writers. Altough cpc is low in Turkey Bildirgec gets from 10 to 15 new articles everyday.
Duncan – I think this post crashed ZetaPrint’s servers. I’d like to read the case study. Hopefully the site will up and running shortly.
Indeed offline marketing must complement the online efforts in order to build awareness of the hyperlocal blogs. This is done in real estate community blogsites where agents market their blog address to their farm and to local merchants.
Maybe we’re just an anomaly, but our site is a case of “if you build it, they will come.” We have achieved significant market penetration without significant offline marketing, aside from spending for a couple weeks of Ripple in two local coffee shops, although you could say that staffing every community event, activity, meeting we can possibly get to could constitute “offline marketing” — although we’re truly there for journalistic reasons, not just to say “hey, ever heard of us?” In our travels, especially outside our neighborhood, we run into people who are DESPERATE for good, high-volume community news coverage – “does anybody have a site like yours in MY neighborhood?” and I believe that whenever and wherever it is created and provided, as was the case with us, word will spread. P.S. to Jon — Do you think “one brand” will be important for hyperlocal sites? I would argue the opposite. Certainly regional and maybe even national alliances for advertising revenue might help, but in terms of an umbrella brand, I don’t think that’s necessary or even desirable.