The New York Times has a great story about placebloggers in suburbs and smaller urban areas. It speaks to the role they play in providing voice and local coverage in their towns especially in areas that are underserved by their local papers.
It also speaks to who we at Outside.in are trying to help and is a great opportunity to explain a bit more about what we are trying to do:
We help placebloggers optimize, promote and monetize their content.
It starts when these sites sign up to use our free GeoTookit. We process and geotag their feeds and create a rich GeoRSS feed. We then create pretty cool applications (i.e. embeddable maps) and geoanalytics that help optimize, promote and monetize their content. We’ll have more about all of these in the next few weeks as we roll out more tools via GeoToolkit.
But, back to the NYT article. We see such a big opportunity for this model of high quality independent content creators. We see a very clear trend among consumers to demand more “me-centric” content — very discrete bits of content about exactly what they want — keyword alerts, discrete content feeds, email newsletters, etc. The problem (and thus, the opportunity!) is that most existing traditional media are not able to provide local content at the “me-centric” or hyperlocal level. Their business model lets them get to the zip code or town level, and even still they are facing some real challenges. And, just because you live in a town or zip code, doesn’t mean you are the same as everyone else in that town or zip.
This is where placebloggers come in. They can, and do, cover news and info at the neighborhood level. The ease of the publishing platform (blogs) and the acceleration of monetization via networks and targeted ad sales are making this a much more viable way to spend time (as the NYT describes).
We track thousands of these sites and are witnessing first-hand how successful they are and how fast this segment is growing.
So, thank you NYT for shining a little more light on placebloggers and the good work they do.
If you have any thoughts on things we can do to help better support these bloggers, please post in the comments and we’ll respond.
