• by Andy Oakes  @andyoakes, January 28, 2014

Last week we heard that AOL is relinquishing its control of Patch, a US site for local news that has always struggled to turn a profit. Patch will become a new company operated and majority-owned by Hale Global, which is a business turn-round specialist. Personally, I think they will have their work cut out. AOL will retain a minority interest and the companies expect their new joint venture to be formed by the end of March.

Patch was founded in 2007 as a way to deliver news about local council news, local crime and other goings-on at the local level. This was at a time when many other news outlets were shutting down or focusing their energies elsewhere. With a network of more than 900 sites, Patch serves more than 16 million people monthly, according to AOL. Patch will be re-launched with a number of new goals, including a mobile-first strategy, geo-targeted ads and easier ways for local people to contribute.

Whether Patch can be reinvigorated is hard to predict. AOL has always had problems making the site profitable, which resulted in a round of redundancies in August last year seeing 500 of the unit's 1,100 employees laid off. Sadly, the site, along with hundreds of other digital news outlets, never really caught on in a major way. This tells us a lot about how the public prefer to get their news from trusted existing sources. It also tells us that perhaps local groups on social media are actually doing the job that projects like Patch were set up to do. In my very rural neighbourhood, we have very active local Facebook groups that spread news much faster than any established news organisation.

I’ve always thought that Patch was an interesting idea but, like many projects they have been involved with, AOL just could never make a solid go of it. Part of Patch's problem was that the site rarely, if ever, broke any big, interesting stories. Certainly, AOL could have struck more partnerships with outside groups and media companies to help subsidize the venture and distribute its content but there has always been an air of nervousness about local projects on both sides of the Atlantic. In recent months, we have seen Northcliffe and the Guardian depart or cut back form the local scene. 

An exception is Archant, who have worked really hard at growing this sector, with their digital ventures unit. They have bought or invested in local projects such as Streetlife.com, Planning Finder and most interestingly Archant Mobile. The project is designed to help local businesses who might have difficulty creating mobile ad campaigns with advice and technical solutions. The aim is to provide agency-style support at a local level, where mobile is especially useful. 

And, of course, if mobile is the answer, then our friends at Facebook will tell you that they are your best route to market. Facebook has the potential to be very big in local marketing – it has local businesses and very high reach. New companies are also in the space, from local Groupon-style apps like YPlan, to local sharing apps, to local social networks like NextDoor, to Placed, which tracks in-store analytics.

So the message to the local media owners seems to be that you need to crack this soon or find your market taken by Facebook, Google or Foursquare

It doesn’t seem that anybody really has one defining answer to making a hyper-local business stack up. If they had then NESTA and the Technology Strategy Board would not have offered £2.5m investment for anybody who could come up with plan. The aim was “to encourage consortia to come forward with proposals for new technologies, concepts and systems which will help people connect more easily with their communities. These innovations, offering access to news or content services specific to a town, single postcode or other small, geographically defined community, will then be tested and assessed for their technological and economic feasibility.”  I’ll be really interested to see what they come up with.