Hyperlocal News One Year Review, Three Years In

Local, Local, Local has been the media’s mantra the past year. While traditional media outlets have been dealing with the decline in ad revenues and shrinking subscriber bases, the big Digital Media companies like AOL, Yahoo, Facebook, and others have been trying to conquer local. Many big and well known Internet companies such as Google, Twitter, Foursquare and others are fighting for the local online space and the revenue that can come from it.  Some are focused on first growing an audience while others are tackling the online revenue side with new types of advertising or marketing. All I can say is it’s getting crowded online.

Since starting in September of 2007 as a neighborhood blog before there was a name (hyperlocal) for what we were doing, we’ve gone through a number of changes, experimented a little bit, and learned a lot. The original concept for starting to write about the local community was never to make a truckload of money. It was a means to learn from, share with, and connect people with their community. If we could make it a sustainable endeavor through advertising or otherwise then that’s ideal. Good thing I found the perfect person to help cultivate and grow the effort. Michelle Ventress our Editor has been instrumental is making this vision a reality. Thank You!

Along the way we’ve learned a ton about the people, places, and organizations in Rancho Cordova and beyond. We’ve shared local news, events, and info with a lot of people (see below). In our day-to-day activity and through major events and through many community organizations from Neighborhood Associations to Neighborhood Watch, Cordova Community Council, to the Rancho Cordova Chamber of Commerce we have connected with those that live, work and play in our amazing city. It’s been a blast and well worth every minute.

Over the past three years many exciting things have happened and we’ve been blessed to share them with you all. I won’t go into detail here about every big story, community event, or surprise along the way. I’ll just say if you’ve been following our news and events for some time, you know what they are. If you haven’t, everything is archived by year, month, date and topic and still available to read on our site.

Now, that was a long build up to say it’s been a challenging year for all Americans. I don’t have to list off the difficulties most all of us have faced or been impacted by with housing, employment, illness or tragedy. I’m an optimist and am always trying to see the brighter side of any situation. Well, here’s the good news from my perspective about our hyperlocal experiment after three years.

In the past year alone, we’ve gone from covering one city to three cities and their surrounding communities. We’ve written or had contributions about the local community of over 1,176 stories from 250+ different people or organizations . We have also amazingly had over 77,092 people visit our local websites at least one time in the past year. While not the numbers of a major metro daily, it’s impressive for a small little news operation. That last figure shocked me and even if it’s a little inflated due to technical Internet stuff it’s still a fairly large number for a local online news site. In addition to our on site numbers, our stories now have the potential to reach a Sacramento region audience of over 2 million people a month through partnerships with Sacbee and News10. Amazing!

All of this to say it’s been a fantastic ride. Thank you for taking part. We appreciate your contributions, comments, tips, and suggestions. While we have yet to figure out the key to making this hyperlocal effort a sustainable and growing, money wise, endeavor we do believe we have accomplished our original vision to learn from, share with, and connect people with their community. We hope you’ll continue to stay informed, get involved, and make a difference in your community.

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Posted by Geoffrey Sakala on Aug 25 2010. Filed under Business, Featured. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. Both comments and pings are currently closed.