Hyperlocal Online Media Acquisitions Heat Up
With the hyperlocal/community based approach to news that we have built on Missouri.me we have already started to witness the community involvment we had hoped for start to happen in various towns across the state. In those towns that either community leaders or community networkers have started to post we get additional content plus the goodwill that comes with the citizens no longer having to fight the battle to get their story out.
As many people have seen this push for hyperlocal news has caused a bit of a stir in the legacy media world as well as sites that focus on online media as they fight to determine the proper business model to approach this type of news model. As much as we love our citizen journalists on Missouri.me we also know that it does take time get these people involved on a community by community basis and as such we have not focused purely on them as our news source. And I think overall the model in the industry will be a mix of local people reporting what they consider news alongside legacy media writers doing true research journalism for indepth stories.
All that said, there have been some great stories come out this past week and month about this, here are a few stories you in the Geo domain space, or online media space in general may find interesting or useful.
I normally try not to do posts filled with links to tons of other stories but these were interesting so decided to loosen up for the day.
Hyperlocal News a $100 billion dollar market - FastCompany.com This is a great read, if you have any interest in localized/geo domains read this.
Everyblock.com Acquired by MSNBC.com - TechCrunch.com
Jeff Jarvis Creates Spreadsheet to Save Local News - TechCrunch.com
Local Yokels - Hyperlocal News Sites
AOL Buys Two Hyperlocal News Sites - AllthingsD.com
And one story about print media continuing to fall on its face (to put it bluntly): Readers Digest Goes Bankrupt
Geo Domains Locked and Loaded – Watch Your Keywords
One thing I have always found interesting is watching what people are searching for that landed them on my site. My minisites are very keyword targeted and usually are pretty predictable but many times I have found that my sites have been "selected" by google to rank high for certain terms I did not necassarily expect and by using this data I can sometimes find solid hand registered domains that I may not of found otherwise.
With the recent launch of this blog I have found a very interesting search that has started to send traffic my way. Recently I posted about Newspapers Closing. I have been a fan of Geo domains for sometime but with the recent fall of old school media I really think the time is now for Geo domain owners to fully develop and take advantage of the opportunity at hand. One thing that really drove this point home has been a term that has been driving many visitors a day to this blog.
That term is Newspapers Closing, at first I did not think much of it but then started thinking, the public has changed mindset enough that they are searching online frequently enough that it would show up in my keyword results. A quick check of the google keyword tool shows small results for this term but in the past 3 days I have had more visitors for this term than the big G shows for average search volume on this term for a month.
As more and more newspapers close their doors people will be looking for alternatives online. If you own a Geo domain it would be a smart move to be that portal. I will be posting in the near future on content that is freely available to develop your Geo domain to provide the content that people are looking for each morning when they sip their coffee.
So, even though this post is focused on why I think a specific term is valuable for Geo domains, the point is to pay attention for trends in the data that you have in your keyword stats. It could be valuable....
