Here are some articles about Patch along with the links to them.
I have noticed that readers are sometimes to lazy to click on a link to get to a story, so here are the links plus the articles they lead you to and keep in mind that the articles have comments which are not reproduced here, for those use the link to go to the aritcles.Here is a link to an article readers will find interesting, take a look at,
"The Constant Gardener My two years tending AOL’s hyperlocal experiment" [/b] even the comments are interesting and just a few lines below from one of those comments is on point to what I both think about our local Patch!
"The content on these sites has been steadily decreasing since the start of the new year -- on any given day, what I see on my local Patches is invariably some stupid poll (this week's is for "Best Cupcake" -- I'm not kidding) or a puff piece on the "winner" of the poll (it's a joke; you can vote as many times as you like). Also, there's a lot of house-for-sale real estate content.
#18 Posted by Samantha on Tue 17 Apr 2012 at 03:09 PM"Take a look at: www.cjr.org/cover_story/the_constant_gardener.php?page=all The word count is 3,890 without headers, footers or the many comments, so reading time is going to be at 15 min at least.
The referenced article has a link to another interesting item:
"LEAKED: AOL's Top 10 Patch Salespeople, And How Much They've Sold In 2011". Here is one minor quote FYI: "Outside sales people, by the way, are the ones that actually go out and try to make sales in the field – as opposed to inside sales people who call out to agencies. In most online sales organizations, they are the ones bringing in the big bucks."Read more at: www.businessinsider.com/leaked-aols-top-10-patch-salespeople-and-how-much-theyve-sold-in-2011-2011-12?op=1#ixzz2GaWMeQAwNote: The stats for 11 months of 2011 have the top ten in the $120,000 to $158,000 range for sales.
If you are still interested, below is a link to one item which has active links to a lot more articles.
www.poynter.org/latest-news/mediawire/133020/patch-editors-told-to-post-more-stories-to-boost-traffic/=======================================online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303610504577420193866895860.htmlMay 23, 2012
For AOL, a Costly Gamble On Local News Draws TroubleBy KEACH HAGEY Patch.com, a network of small-town news sites owned by AOL Inc., has emerged at the center of a tug of war over the Internet company's future.
Patch.com, a network of small-town news sites owned by AOL, has emerged at the center of a tug of war over the Internet company's future, Keach Hagey reports on digits. Photo: Patch.com.
The high cost of running the local-news sites has fueled a campaign by dissident investor Starboard Value LP against AOL Chief Executive Tim Armstrong's strategy of investing heavily in online content.
Starboard, which is waging a proxy battle to win several seats on AOL's board at next month's annual meeting, says that Patch should be closed, sold or put into a joint venture, with a partner sharing the cost.
Inside AOL, Patch is also a flash point. Arianna Huffington, who took charge of Patch and AOL's other news and entertainment sites after AOL acquired her Huffington Post last year, distanced herself from the business after disagreements over how it should be run.
"They wouldn't let Arianna fix it, so she walked away from it," said one media executive familiar with the matter.
Mr. Armstrong, has held his ground in defending Patch, which he co-founded in 2007 before he joined AOL, but he recently promised to make it profitable by next year. In a small step toward that goal, Patch said Tuesday it will cut around 20 jobs, or less than 2% of its workforce. The cuts will come from merging the management of its eastern and southern regional reporting operations.
Whether Mr. Armstrong can make Patch a success could determine his fate at AOL. As the ad-supported network has expanded to more than 850 towns from 30 in the past two years, its annual loss has widened sharply to more than $100 million in 2011, analysts say.
The main problem: It is tough to sell enough online ads to cover the cost of producing local news, especially while maintaining a local reporting staff and a local advertising sales force.
"I don't think anybody's figured out local yet," said Rick Blair, an angel investor in several companies that run local websites.
Several big media companies, including Washington Post Co., Politico parent Allbritton Communications, New York Times Co. and Gannett Co., have given up on similar experiments after failing to wrest a profit from online local news.
Others are still trying. Examiner.com, backed by billionaire Philip Anschutz, draws roughly the same traffic as Patch, according to comScore, but its approach differs from Patch's.
The website has a full-time editorial staff of fewer than 30 people, who organize articles, photos and other media submitted by more than 85,000 freelance local "examiners." These examiners write about topics ranging from restaurants to running. Patch, by contrast, employs nearly 1,000 full-time journalists
Mr. Armstrong thinks Patch is on the right track, and just needs time to hit its stride. "To not believe in Patch, you have to believe that consumers in a town don't want local information, they don't want local advertising or commerce, and they don't want a platform they can engage on," he said in an interview.
Frustrated by the lack of local online news about his hometown of Greenwich, Conn., Mr. Armstrong developed the business model for Patch with Jon Brod, the former president and chief operating officer of his private investment group.
The idea was to target wealthy small communities that generated about $20 million a year in advertising though TV, radio, newspaper and direct marketing.
"We basically said, 'based on our model, if we could get [less than 1%] of that $20 million, we would have a profitable Patch in that community," Mr. Brod said. "And then, multiply that by thousands of communities across the country, and it becomes a very material and interesting business."
Patch, however, has fallen well short of that target. AOL says the business is on track to bring in between $40 million and $50 million in revenue this year. That translates to an average of $50,000 for each of its 850 local sites. But the average Patch site costs between $150,000 and $200,000 a year to operate, Mr. Armstrong told investors last year, or a total of $160 million.
Ms. Huffington's recent withdrawal from overseeing Patch highlights internal divisions over the operation. Following Huffington Post's acquisition last spring, Ms. Huffington set about integrating Patch with the Huffington Post.
She recruited Liena Zagare, the founder of a successful network of hyperlocal blogs in the New York borough of Brooklyn, to improve Patch's ties to its local communities, and Patch quickly adopted a blogging platform modeled on the Huffington Post's.
The blogging platform attracted more than 20,000 local bloggers within a year, pleasing Patch's local and regional editors. The sites also got a traffic boost when their local scoops were linked by the Huffington Post.
But they sometimes chafed at top-down directives, called "fire drills," that required Patch journalists to pitch in with reporting for national trend stories in the Huffington Post, draining resources from their local mission, according to several people familiar with the matter.
Ms. Huffington also ruffled feathers by promising local editors they could each hire associate editors to help with their workload, even though salaries for such posts weren't part of the website's business model, according to people familiar with the matter.
People familar with her plan said the associate editors would have been paid for with savings in freelance costs.
"There was a big disconnect between what we [at Patch] felt and what Arianna was throwing into the mix," according to a person familiar with the situation at Patch at the time. "It led to a lot of gears starting to grind."
Within six months of AOL's merger with the Huffington Post, Ms. Huffington's involvement in Patch had waned, according to several people familiar with the situation, and by the end of last year, Ms. Zagare had moved on to a job at the Huffington Post. In May, Ms. Huffington announced that she was scaling back her portfolio to focus on her namesake news site.
The good news for Patch is that its traffic has grown sharply, swelling to 10.3 million visitors in April from 6.9 million a year earlier, according to comScore. Patch attributes the improvement largely to growth at its established sites.
In addition, more than a third of Patch's content now is generated by users uploading announcements, photos and other content, helping Patch shrink its budget for freelancers.
"What's happening is, we're getting more content on the platform, [unique visitors] and engagement are going up, while costs are going down," Mr. Brod said.
As well as relying even more on content from the public, Patch is planning to move beyond advertising and into local commerce, Mr. Brod said, and to look for new sources of revenue in partnerships.
Last week it began a partnership with WPIX, a New York TV station owned by Tribune Co., in which a Patch correspondent delivers the area's top local news stories from Patch headquarters during the evening news.
In an internal memo, Mr. Brod called the partnership "yet another way for us to distribute and monetize our content."
"I think Patch has got an approach that will be a long-term win," said Mr. Blair, the angel investor. "It is just going to take them some time."
==============================================jimromenesko.com/2012/02/08/patch-to-reduce-staff-change-editorial-focus/February 8, 2012 Romenesko
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Patch’s plan to reduce staff, change editorial focusA Patch insider tells Romenesko readers that the AOL-owned hyperlocal news sites plan to cut staff and freelance budgets and start producing “easy, quick-hitting, cookie-cutter copy.” Examples: Best Ofs, and features like “What’s happening to this vacant storefront?”
The Patch source adds: “This morning we just got word of the hiring of Rachel Fishman Feddersen in the newly created position of Chief Content Officer. She was editor in chief of Parenting.com and held leadership posts at Ladies Home Journal, Disney’s Family.com and was, most recently, editorial director of The Parenting Group. Brian Farnham, our Editor In Chief, now reports to her.”
That hire, says the source, “feeds so logically” with the changes described below.
Patch has implemented a new “One Team One Goal” strategy, with a budget that effectively eliminates anywhere from 50 to 100 percent of freelance dollars, depending on the Patch region and how the supervising editor and regional ad director choose to allocate dollars.
The editorial emphasis is now on “easy, quick-hitting, cookie-cutter copy,” including mandatory “Best Of” features (i.e., best coffeeshop, best burgers, etc.) that compel businesses and readers to visit and participate in the Patch directories. (Each Patch has a directory of local businesses, organizations, churches, etc.)
“We’re going so far, in many of our Patches, to host ‘Pizza Playoffs’ — a tournament-style bracket that pits all the pizza parlors in town into showdowns to attract the most comments and star-ratings. Features like this could go on for weeks at a time, and when one ends, another will begin.”
Every Patch is adopting other, similar features. One example: “What’s happening with this vacant storefront?” — a photo-driven feature that asks readers for comments about what they’d like to see in the space.
Also, I’m told that this is in the works: Every Patch employee given a rating of “Developing” on the recent 2011 Employee Annual Review will likely be placed on a Performance Improvement Plan (PIP) that begins a 30-day countdown to either improve or lose your job. (“Developing” is the second-lowest on a five-tiered scale; there’s Top Performer; Exceeding Expections; On Track; Developing; and Off Track.) Managers have been asked to write a three-page letter supporting why this employee should stay; otherwise, the employee will be placed on a PIP. The Patch insider estimates this will affect anywhere from 100-150 employees Patch-wide, and people will be let go by the end of March.
“My guess is this is a way for Patch leadership to enact layoffs without saying it’s laying anyone off — it’s merely ridding itself of employees who ‘aren’t working out’ — while also showing AOL’s board it can shave a lot of overhead while building toward profitability.”
I asked the Patch insider about AOL’s commitment to the sites. “I think AOL is committed to Patch at least through this calendar year,” the source says. “Arianna Huffington will make sure we’re all charging up to having a big impact on coverage of the elections in November. But if we haven’t shown real moves toward profitability by then, I can’t imagine AOL will put another penny into Patch in 2013.”
I’ve invited Patch to comment and will post the response when/if it comes in.
========================================ALSO FYI: Why Patch will never be profitablePosted on March 24, 2012 by Howard Owens
Patch faces to huge obstacles on its path to profitability: The first is expenses; the second is revenue.Expenses: Tim Armstrong is absolutely right that a great deal of the expense of a print publication can be wrung out of local news coverage. Not only do you get rid of industrial age presses and trucks along with paper and ink, it also takes a lot less staff — because of the efficiencies of online publishing — to cover a community.
Reportedly, AOL is spending $160 million a year on Patch. That’s a lot of money, and I don’t just mean because that’s more money than a lot of us will ever see in a lifetime. I mean, it’s a lot of money because the Patch content model shouldn’t be that expensive. That means Patch is spending about $190,000 per each of its reportedly 864 sites.
In the one-reporter-per-community model, expenses should be $140,000 or less per site. (I’m also including in that some expense for sales and support.)
Of course, Patch isn’t spending $190,000 per site. It’s spending less than that, and the remainder of its $160 million annual expenditure is going to overhead. Some of that is legitimate, such as infrastructure, programmers and technical support. By legitimate, I mean, there is some level of expense on technology for every local news site.
But some of that money is part of the unsustainable expense of running a large chain news organization. For Patch, it’s regional editors, regional sales managers, supervisors for the regions, executives over them, HR departments and legal and regulatory departments (necessary for a publicly traded company).
These are all expenses that the local independent site doesn’t face and raises the bar much higher for Patch overall to become profitable.
It’s a major factor of expense that advocates of “scale” in local news often overlook. News isn’t a widget. It isn’t a washing machine or box of software. It isn’t an industrial product. In industry, scale is vital because the largest part of the expense of making the product is just turning the machine on. In news, each new piece of product (a news story, say) costs essentially the same amount of money as the previous piece of product. There is no expense savings in producing more product, there is only more expense.
The same analogy applies to each individual news org you create (each of the 864 Patch sites). In trying to scale a national news organization, you’re not saving money by scale. You’re scaling up your expenses, both in local staff and then in the national and regional staff (as pointed out above) to run the company.
Expense is the Catch-22 of trying to scale local news.
This expense was masked in the newspaper industry because every newspaper that is now part of a national chain was a HUGELY profitable, family owned newspaper at the time it was absorbed into a chain. That profit helped feed the beast of corporate overhead, thereby masking the real expense of creating the chain.
In fact, the problem for newspapers today isn’t so much that individual newspapers lose money; it’s the fact they’re still saddled with the expense of being chain owned.
Revenue: According to Ken Doctor, Patch executives claim 1/4 of its 864 sites is making at least $2,000 per month, and Doctor is somewhat rhapsodic over the figure. He sees this bit of revenue growth as a “rocket launch.” In reality, $2,000 is nothing.
With The Batavian, we went from practically no revenue in March 2009 to more than $4,000 a month four months later. And that’s with one person covering the news and selling the ads, and in a market that is far more economically challenging than any Patch has launched in.
The successful independent sites I know are all doing at a minimum $10,000 per month.
Clearly, Patch is struggling to sell local ads, which should be the bread-and-butter of its strategy.
If somehow, every one of the 864 sites managed even just $10K per month, that’s still only $106 million a year in revenue, far short of the $160 million in expenses weighing down the chain.
To achieve break even, each Patch site needs to do more than $16,000 per month in total sales. That is a very achievable number with the right business and sales model (which I don’t believe Patch has, but that’s another topic).
So the problem Patch faces is burdensome and unnecessary corporate overhead expenses and a failure, so far, to generate any meaningful amount of revenue. Patch should be much further along on the revenue side than it is and that spells trouble for investor patience.
CLARIFICATION: Shortly after posting, I should add. I think each of Patch’s 864 markets is capable of generating at a minimum of $500,000 in annual revenue. I just think time will run out on Patch before the chain breaks even. Also, as Patch generates more sales, expenses will increase. That will further delay the break-even point. If Patch were to survive, fix its business and sales model, achieve maximum velocity, we’re probably looking at a company with $250 million in annual expense and $500 million in annual sales (at the current size of the company). I assume investors would be happy with that performance. I just don’t see how they sustain the losses to get there.
===================================AOL’s New Patch Still Has Lots of HolesA redesign helps, but fundamental flaws are still obviousBy Jonathan Berr, InvestorPlace Contributor | Sep 26, 2012, 1:14 pm EST
Article can be seen at:
investorplace.com/2012/09/aols-new-patch-still-has-lots-of-holes/Marissa Mayer’s Vague Platitudes Won’t Cut It AOL (NYSE:AOL) this weekend unveiled a redesign of its Patch hyperlocal news network, which has struggled to make a profit. The new Patch, though, is still a work in progress and just doesn’t seem ready for prime time.
One of the beta sites covering a town on Long Island, N.Y., does have some interesting ideas. It’s based around “groups” focused on particular subjects such as schools or local business. Readers can form their own groups as well. Editors’ picks are shown at the center of the page. The problem is that much of the content was not particularly unique or even interesting.
For instance, much of the main police story was cobbled together from accounts from other sites. Allowing regular folks to submit news items leads to stories such as this one about a young man who was admitted to Alfred State, a New York college, that reads like it was cut-and-paste from a press release. It even ends with “The College is accredited by the Middle States Association of Colleges and Schools,” as if there were some doubt about it.
Maybe the point of this item is to encourage other parents to share the news about their child’s admission to college. That’s not necessarily a bad way to build interest in the site, but it’s not going to be enough to keep the public engaged. Readers want to read about stuff besides the accomplishments of other people’s children.
The overall design looks as though it’s a template that someone downloaded for free. It’s cheesy. The graphics look amateurish.
Photographs are cropped so small that it’s hard to see much in the way of detail. According to Poynter.org, Patch will beta-test the design before it rolls out to 50 or mores sites by year-end. All Patches will be redone by the first quarter of next year.
Patch’s struggles are well documented, as is the backstage drama surrounding it and AOL’s future. It was a focal point of the recent losing proxy battle that activist investor Starboard Value waged against the New York-based media company. CEO Tim Armstrong vehemently disputed Starboard’s claims that Patch was not a “viable business” and was on track to lose as much as $133 million. Though Patch is expected to take in $40 million in advertising revenue, its costs are about four times that amount, according to media reports.
Armstrong has already retooled Patch once, revamping its management structure and axing 20 employees. Editors, who previously have complained about being overworked, are faced with having to do more with less. Traffic to the network of more than 800 sites, which had been steadily growing as more towns were added, peaked last August, according to a May commentary in Forbes by Jeff Bercovici.
For Patch to be a success, it’s going to need to attract newspaper-size audiences and keep them engaged. The best way to do that is to provide readers something that they can’t get any place else, which Patch can do at times. I recently looked at a Patch site from a neighboring town where I live and found out that a prominent local businessperson was moving her firm into the site of a grocery store that had been closed for years. I haven’t seen it reported elsewhere.
That sort of community news used to be the bread-and-butter of local newspapers and still is to some extent, though as the industry withered so has that kind of coverage. Patch could take up the local news mantle that newspapers abandoned, but it seems to lack the vision to do so. That’s a shame.
Jonathan Berr is a former AOL contract writer. He does not own shares of the companies listed here. Follow him on Twitter @jdberr.
