An article on Business Insider is criticising AOL’s hyperlocal offering Patch.com touting it’s lack of visitors as evidence that it’s only going to lose AOL money.
Citing figures from the New York Times, it says that Patch had 3m unique visitors. In fact that was just before Christmas, and an 80x increase on the previous year.
What stood out to me though was the cost. Estimating annual costs of $50m (based on $40-50,000 per editor of which there are 800 plus costs) gives us a monthly cost, per neighbourhood site of $5,200.
That’s about £3,275 in good ol’ blighty.
That would easily pay for a full time editor and a part-time commercial sales person working partly on commission.
How does that sound? Do you think the revenue potential is there to generate £3,275 each month?
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
That may be an underestimate too.
I tweeted about an article I found on PaidContent which estimated it costs $30m a qtr. So that’s a cool $120m p.a. more than double what Business Insider are suggesting.
Either way, it’s a lot of $$$!
Thanks for chiming in,, Damian!
That is a ridiculous amount of money. My own vision of hyperlocal suggests that £2,000 may be sufficient – that would pay a full time editor (who is also a competent multimedia reporter) who manages contributions and ensures stories get proper coverage.
Everything else is achieved through partnerships…