Can Anyone Actually Tap the $100 Billion Potential of Hyperlocal News?

I think the New York times is missing the point of how Google makes money and how their income model works. The reason Google makes obscene amounts of money even though they only make a nickel per customer is twofold: They have lots of customers, and their expenses per customer is less than a nickel.

While I agree that local advertising is a great potential untapped revenue stream that can be harnessed through local news I think they have a bad business model. It appears that they try to set up an old-fashioned news outfit complete with editors, journalists et al. This adds substantial cost to the venture, and all of a sudden you need to make more than a nickel per customer to cover your costs.

In short it looks like an old media empire misunderstanding online businessmodels, namely create a service that might cost you a lot in initial effort but will scale (almost) effortlessly to millions of users, thus making your cost per customer approach zero. An editor and a few journalists for every community isn't cheap and doesn't scale.

$100 billion dollars in local advertising assumes $16.6 per person on the planet, or over $333 per American citizen. I highly doubt someone did their math right, I'd guess more $100 million, not billion.

Hyperlocal is the most awful buzzword I've ever seen. Out of all of them, ever.

I was just reading some "Hyperlocal" news in a paper printed often enough that I see a new one each time I pick up dinner from the same restaurant. Just because "The Observer" isn't online with ajax 5.7 pushed heavily by a startup into a first round blah blah blah

The market is tapped already and anyone who cares is already getting their news. No one younger than 55 gives a shit about hyperlocal.

"$100 Billion Potential" ... not sure about that