Last week I was asked to give a brief overview of Outside.in at the New York City Investment Fund annual meeting.  Those of you who know me know I love to talk about our business.  But, this time, I only had two minutes.  It proved to be a great exercise in boiling down all of what’s happening in local and what we are trying to do.

So, thought I’d share here on the blog.  Here’s the full text.  I stayed pretty close to it.

Start your stopwatches…..now:

Good evening. I’m Mark Josephson, CEO of Outside.in.

We are a team of 18 people based in Brooklyn focused on revolutionizing local media.

There are a few key trends that are reshaping the local media ecosystem that we think are worth noting.

The first trend is:

An Explosion in the Amount of Local Content Created

Local content used to just be an article written by a newspaper. Today it includes that newspaper article, but also one by a hyperlocal blogger about their neighborhood news. It includes someone adding a star on a Yelp restaurant review, Tweeting about a concert or event, or someone taking a picture with their cell phone of a plane landing in the Hudson River. You can now cover specific neighborhoods, or hyperlocal places and events like never before.

Today, everyone is a publisher.

The second important trend is:

The Cost of Sales for Local Advertising is Dropping

There was $115 billion spent on local advertising last year. Only $15 billion of that was spent on the internet. But that number is changing fast. Dollars are being driven to the internet as circulation and effectiveness of newspapers and yellow page directories drop and advertisers embrace the transparency and results-based pricing of internet advertising.

This is leading to the third trend:

Local Advertisers are Streaming Online for Customers

So, what do we do at the Outside.in world headquarters in Brooklyn to create value in this incredibly dynamic market?

Simply, we use proprietary technology to aggregate all of the web’s local content and advertising, and we organize it all into more than 50,000 neighborhoods across the country and we put it in front of the right person at the right time, and we get paid every time we do it.

We do this in partnership with more than 5,000 sites across the web in every market in the country and on our own website at outside.in.

For example, we recently announced a partnership with The New York Post.  Before working with Outside.in, NYPost.com had one page of news for each borough. Today, they leverage our data and tools to power pages for more than 170 targeted neighborhoods.

In the past year our audience has grown from several hundred thousand people per month to nearly 6MM today. And we’re just getting started.

We think there is no better partner than NYCIF and no better place to be building this business and our team than in New York City, the media capital of the world.

Thank you.