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Hyperlocal business strategies: be professional, licence your content, franchise the model

The prospects for hyperlocal, grass-roots publishing in the UK are good and the sector is growing fast. But with all consumer media – local, national, regional – suffering from permanent content economy shifts (i.e. Google = more efficient than print) and the short-term recession – surely no one can make a living from local online publishing. Can they?

Maybe: they can: James Fryer, co-founder of SoGlos.com – the “online magazine for Gloucestershire” which I wrote about for Press Gazette years ago – told Journalism.co.uk’s News:Rewired conference that the site does make money and plans to make more – but not always through the traditional methods…

  • Professional content: Fryer isn’t all that keen on user-generated content – he says SoGlos advertisers are happy that the site is professionally run by journalists. The site has built up a respectable 67,000 monthly readers and uses things like Flickr, MySpace and Facebook as ways to market the site – not as monetisation means in themselves. Fryer also has some highly appropriate words, given the techie/geek audience: “Don’t spend all your time on Twitter”.

  • Licence content: Don’t just create content, sell it. SoGlos has only ever published about 15 videos on YouTube but has clocked up 3.5 million views. However, that only brings in a few thousand pounds – the big cash comes from licensing video to other media: MTV and the Richard and Judy show are just two customers who have bought SoGlos’s cheese rolling video and others (embedded below for your cheese-rolling pleasure)

  • Franchising: Interestingly, Fryer says he’s looking to export the SoGlos model across the country. There could be a SoManchester or SoBristol, he says. Franchisees may question why they should share revenue – if, indeed, that’s the offer – when they can set up their own site from scratch. But nevertheless, it could make sense to hand over a successful model to publishers that want to hit the ground running.

    • Also see Adam’s neat roundup of the same session.


    This was written by Patrick Smith. Posted on Thursday, January 14, 2010, at 5:26 pm. Filed under Uncategorized. Bookmark the permalink. Follow comments here with the RSS feed. Post a comment or leave a trackback.