How's this different from Patch and EveryBlock, both having demonstrated how to fail at monetizing "local news" communities?
It seems like crime data is the only real data of local interest/inbound traffic.
It seems like crime data is the only real data of local interest/inbound traffic.
Revenue numbers were leaked at some point: http://techcrunch.com/2013/08/18/inside-patchs-leaked-revenu...
The core problem is this. If 1 reporter writes "Top 6 reasons why kittens are cute - number 5 will SHOCK YOU", the potential audience is millions. You can scale your content as needed, and readers / writer is potentially unlimited.
If 1 reporter writes "Bishop School closed due to heavy rains", the potential audience is merely the students and parents of Bishop School. Your potential audience is thousands - you simply can't scale past this except in special cases (e.g., Boston bombings, school shootings, hurricanes).
tl;dr; For local news, readers / writer is simply too low and your margins suck.
(Disclaimer: I worked for Patch. However, this post is based on no inside knowledge - I know little more than what techcrunch leaked.)
Even in this scenario you still need a tremendous amount of domain authority and/or a Herculean marketing effort to achieve any kind of traction in terms of traffic.
The real question, which you touch on, is what do you want to talk to your neighbors about? Crime data is certainly one thing, but local email lists that I'm a part of indicate others:
* can I borrow a tool? * anyone have a recommendation for a service (lawnmower, roof replacer, etc, etc)? * I have free stuff in front of my house. * I have friends who want to move into this neighborhood, anyone looking to sell?
I think that event organization is possible, given enough uptake.
Disclaimer, I used to work for a real estate brokerage that was pursuing a neighborhood model (8z.com) and was a competitor of NextDoor.
I was an EveryBlock user in Chicago for about a year and it was definitely more that a distribution of stats (although I think they may have started out that way originally). There was a very active social neighborhood based network where people talked about what was currently going on in the neighborhood.
They have "leads" in every neighborhood and they financially reward leads for bringing in new users.
I think what the above poster is referring to is the referral program where if you invite someone to Nextdoor AND that person starts a neighborhood, you get a $25 Amazon giftcard. I've personally invited a few people to Nextdoor, but all of them already had a Nextdoor website for their neighborhoods so I didn't get anything even though I referred them.
https://help.nextdoor.com/customer/portal/articles/1287247-h...
And speaking of Patch, I used to be a huge fan. Right after they had a big layoff the quality went way down and the essentially started posting non-local news to my Patch. I stopped visiting shortly after that.