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Comment by aabalkan | Hacker News Reader

What is Patch?

Hyperlocal news site. The idea is to have dedicated sites for small towns, usually with a single local employee writing all the articles. These towns are very underserved by other news sources, since traditional newspapers have cut staffs so much. Then when you have local traffic, you can sell ads to local businesses.

They shuttered a lot of the sites a few months ago.

Site that the CEO of AOL founded before joining AOL. Then bought once hired at AOL and poured millions into before being forced to cutback/sell to keep his AOL job.

Tim Armstrong is the current CEO of AOL and former senior Google Executive. He is reputed to have been the driving force behind the success of Google's Ad Words business.

He seemed to become less effective at Google as his responsibilities expanded and moved on to AOL.

Patch was his big play to make AOL relevant again and has proved to be a complete economic failure.

Highlights an unfortunate reality of the Silicon Valley that past success can sometimes just mean a longer rope to hang yourself with.

The reality is that running AOL is thankless job.

From the patch.com website:

"Patch reports on everything you need to know about your town, from local government to school news to what to do with your family this weekend.

And your local Patch makes it easy for you and your neighbors to connect and post your news and events too.

All of this, plus comprehensive listings of local restaurants and shops, home improvement services and businesses, events, and more – all in one place – in over 1,000 communities and counting."

i.e. so-called "hyper-local" media http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperlocal

Exactly.

That was going to be my response, but you beat me to it.

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