Outside.in for Publishers
Today we are launching the product we’ve been focusing on for the past year: Outside.in for Publishers.
Outside.in for Publishers (OIP) is a flexible, self-service platform that allows anyone to easily create hundreds or thousands of new high-quality pages for their site, each focused on a hyperlocal neighborhood with targeted advertising inventory.
It has been a very busy few months here at the Outside.in World HQ. We’ve been focused on advancing our technology platform, core algorithms, products and partners.
A lot of the work has been going on behind the scenes and we’re excited to pull back the curtain today with the beta launch OIP.
We have always believed that there is a need for a platform that intelligently aggregates local media, organizes it by city, town, and neighborhood and allows it to easily be distributed across the web.
And we believe that now is the perfect time for a new model to emerge for local media.
Meeting the Needs of Local Media
The business model for local newspapers and media companies is undergoing radical change, to put it mildly. They are under pressure to reduce costs, discover new revenue streams and figure out a way to extend their editorial coverage to the hyperlocal level where they can leverage their brand, traffic and sales relationships.
At the same time there is an explosion of content at the hyperlocal level. There are great individual efforts like Chicagotalks.org, Buffalo Watch, All Things Richmond, Ashvegas, A is For Atlanta and C-Ville Blog. These sites need more traffic and more revenue.
There has also been new platforms developed, like Neighborlogs and Patch.com, that promise to expand the number of hyperlocal blogs, and Twitter provides an ever-growing source of real-time hyperlocal content.
The number of sources in any market has spiked from fewer than 10 to hundreds or thousands — or more. We are currently tracking more than 30,000 hyperlocal feeds every day.
Quite simply, everyone is a publisher today.
All of this leads to a model focused on aggregation — automatically compiling and organizing countless sources by neighborhood.
More than Aggregation
But aggregation alone won’t cut it. There is so much content out there. How does a publisher make sure to only feature the best and most relevant content?
They must be able to curate. Local editors know their market best and every local publisher has a unique point of view and editorial voice. Each publisher needs to be able to start with a massive database of stories and sources and pick and choose only the ones that fit their mission.
And you need to be creating new high-quality targeted ad inventory. $100 bb is spent each year on local advertising and analysts predict $15bb will be spent online by 2012. There is not enough quality inventory to satisfy that demand today.
Consumers are also craving relevant hyperlocal info. We see this in our data —engagement metrics for well-targeted hyperlocal content are off the charts. Click-through rates on our launch partners’ implementations of our product are over 30%. The increased adoption of location-aware mobile devices will only accelerate this need.
This is why we have been building Outside.in for Publishers — to empower any local media company to create targeted Neighborhood News Pages and targetable ad inventory for every city, town, and neighborhood in their market. More pages, more content, more ads, less cost.
We have spent the past few months working behind the scenes collaborating with a select group of forward-thinking publishers to advance and refine our tools for them.
You can see some examples of live Neighborhood News Pages at these great sites:
We’ve been able to develop OIP with constant feedback from real publishers and sites in more than 30 local markets. We owe big thanks to them for helping us deliver a product that we know provides solutions to the problems they face. They’ve also contributed a long list of great wishes for future versions.
So, thank you to our alpha partners and to the outside.in team, who has worked so hard to deliver a killer product. and stay tuned for rapid and continued advancements to the initial launch version.
So, please head over to publishers.outside.in, give it a spin and let is know what you think.
This is going to be an exciting few years as we watch the next model being born and as we all play a part in making it happen.
Thanks.
P.S. We have another blog post here that is a bit more of the nitty-gritty “quick start” guide on using OIP.
