local media insider

Outsidein.com aggregates hyper-local networks

Alisa Cromer
Posted
Outsidein.com's curated news page shows the geographic location of each news item.

Outside.in for Publishers lets local media sites aggregrate very local blogs and web sites; however the smaller sites keep ad revenues.

The company creates lists of news stories from very local blogs and sites, including a total of 30,000 hyper-local feeds.

Local media sites can then curate a Neighborhood News page for every town and neighborhood in their area of coverage with mapping pinpoints.

It’s a good way to find and utilize community sites, with the distinct disadvantage that the links all point out, so the only page that is monetizable is the first page.

The local media company is able to show about four lines of text from each partnering site, before the story links out. That page becomes an advertising page for the local publisher, while the hyper local blogs keep the extra traffic to their sites.

Growthspur's is also forming local adnetworks and including outside.in in these discussions, so it is hard to see long term where media will be partners and where they will compete.

Still,looking through the network is a good way to just "see" who is in the space. Many hyper-local sites like Chicagotalks.org, Buffalo Watch, All Things Richmond, Ashvegas, A is For Atlanta and C-Ville Blog are very good news sites. AOL has announced plans to expand Patch.com into a network of hundreds.

Sites that have already launched the platform include SCNow.com, CountOn2.com, Richmond.com and Fox6Now.com.

The Neighborhood News channel looks simple to deploy, here’s the instructions:

Here are the 5 simple steps to launch Neighborhood News Pages in under 30 minutes:

1. Go to publishers.outside.in. Sign up for a Beta Invite by entering your email address, name, and site name.
2. Receive your Beta Invite Email (if it doesn’t arrive within 30 minutes, check your spam folder).
3. Return to publishers.outside.in. Click on Register Now. Enter your email address, create a password, enter the Beta Invite Code from the email, fill out the Captcha, and click Register.
4. Enter the name of your site and choose your market, enter your site’s feed(s) or skip this step and click Continue to Dashboard. Click Configure Layouts and configure your layout, accepting all defaults.
5. Paste the code onto your site.

According to the site, publishers also have a lot of back end tinkering, including the ability to blacklist some feeds.

Alisa Cromer

The author, Alisa Cromer is publisher of a variety of online media, including LocalMediaInsider and  MediaExecsTech,  developed while on a fellowship with the Reynolds Journalism Institute and which has evolved into a leading marketing company for media technology start-ups. In 2017 she founded Worldstir.com, an online magazine,  to showcases perspectives from around the  world on new topic each month, translated from and to the top five languages in the world.

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