As Patch expands aggressively across the country, its new hyperlocal sites aren’t just competing with traditional media, but also with independent bloggers like Timothy Rutt in Altadena, California. “It’s a WalMart moving in and driving out the mom-and-pop businesses,” he told LA Weekly.
So Howard Owens, who runs the indie hyperlocal site The Batavian, has posted a guide for other independent bloggers on how to beat Patch. “The biggest weakness Patch has is Patch isn’t you,” he said. “You are truly local. Your business is based in the community you cover, not New York. You need to be sure your advertisers and readers know this.”
Owens recommends that indie sites beef up their one-sheets to brag about their traffic, restricting ad sales to local businesses (that means no Google Adwords), and putting every advertiser on every page without any ad rotation. “They distrust sites when they can’t see their ads every time they visit,” he says.
But perhaps the best advice is when Owens recommends beating Patch on costs (keep ’em low) and on price (don’t be afraid to out-negotiate Patch for advertisers.) This is the critical piece, because WalMart has been successful beating everyone on price through tremendous efficiencies of scale. Patch is striving to match these efficiencies, along with the added benefits of ad targeting. And as WalMart has shown, price always ultimately trumps the “we’re local” argument, all other things being equal.
“You can afford to beat Patch on rate,” Owens writes on his personal blog. “In other words, you can disrupt the disruptor.”