Even though they haven’t really found a big audience yet, hyperlocal news sites are becoming a hot commodity. In June, AOL bought Patch for $7 million, and today MSNBC acquired EveryBlock. EveryBlock was previously funded by a grant from the Knight Foundation, which ended in June. The five employees will now work at MSNBC.
The price was not disclosed, but like the Patch acquisition, it is not an audience acquisition. Rather it is a hyperlocal platform play which MSNBC can now plug into its site and push in a major way. EveryBlock is a hyperlocal news aggregator, bringing in geo-specific feeds from neighborhood blogs, Flickr, Yelp, Craigslist, and elsewhere to give readers a picture of what is going on in their town or neighborhood.
EveryBlock currently covers only about 15 cities in the U.S. and comScore estimates its U.S. audience to be only 143,000 unique visitors a month (July, 2009). In contrast, competitor Outside.in attracts 800,000 unique visitors in the U.S. These are relatively small numbers, but these services do a good job of collecting neighborhood news without the expense of actually reporting it.
Nice
Saw this a few months ago, and it seemed mostly useless in terms of the kinds of stuff it displayed. It all seemed very clean, and the data looked good, but it just seemed like there was very little to see.
Hope MSNBC doesn’t just end up making it worse, though.
chances are there isn’t much to read about in your specific area.
EveryBlock is quantified and shows 340k monthly US uniques and 1.5m pageviews. Looks to be holding steady.
The idea of taking feeds form different sites, from people that live in your city, sounds cool! I still think that I will be sticking to the morning news though.
Wow, only 148,000 uniques (or 340,000 as noted in a comment above) seems like nothing. The reported number means less than 10k per city
Wonder what the purchase price was? It couldn’t be much for that kind of traffic.
outside-every-patch there lies a lilly.
Wow, you suck at reading comprehension.
If Adrian Holovaty comes along with the deal, that could be a nice bonus.
As noted in the article, MSNBC is picking this up as a system to pipe local news into their main property. Not to mention the founders are both pretty smart dudes and are probably worth a big chunk of whatever the price was.
Congrats to Adrian and the team at Everyblock.
I know the team at MSNBC.com really well and they are a bunch of really smart, good folks. This should be a win/win.
Just to clarify, though, Outside.in is quantified too and our full business reaches more than 4.5mm people each month. That includes our partnerships with local media companies and our core site. http://bit.ly/oinetwork
Good for them. Congrats!
Since TV no longer offers quality news projects like EveryBlock, Patch and Outside.in will be the future
@Ryan if the founders are pretty smart probably they have some new projects to work on
Sure, EveryBlock and Outside.In compare, but only on the surface. The site’s real trump card (and limiting factor to growth, because it takes time and resources to get it in each city) is its public records.
Having an objective feed of crime reporting in your neighborhood is really, really useful, especially if you live in a neighborhood that’s a little seedy.
I saw Adrian Holovaty speak a few months ago, just as his Knight Foundation grant was running out. Glad to know that his idea has something to latch onto. It’s great.
Why does techcrunch quote comscore only when the quantcast directly measured numbers are available? Everyblock, outside.in and iLike are all directly measured. Jason Calacanis also noted the inaccuracy of comscore recently:
http://calacani...t-is-the-rocks/
hello world
hyperlocal is hypercool. wonder if we are going to see any impact of this information on msnbc on tv. is it just for the data aggregation? or something more poetic…
http://web-poet.../17/everyblock/
Also take a look at http://www.localpeople.co.uk. This is what MSNBC will end up doing with it if they are smart. Pushing relevant news, content and user engagement at the local level.
This is great news for MSNBC/EveryBlock and well deserved. However the best part of story is the Knight Foundation and its efforts to make grants available to transform journalism and local communities. Knight Foundation is also is helping open source platforms as well with its http://www.newschallenge.org/.
I’m somewhat surprised by this. There are some better competitors in that market. I’ve seen both outside.in and pointslocal.com in the San Fran market and both seem like stronger enterprise products. Plus the everyblock code was forced to be open source per their award. Why would you buy that?
I wonder if this is a reaction to MSNBC.com’s recent drop in the Nielsen rankings. Maybe a hyperaggressive hyperlocal effort on the way?