StateCollege.com covers State College, PA. Built by City Portals, they claim that they have helped local newspapers to grow revenues by 6x.
I just ran across an interesting PDF that lists local / niche news sites, listing their annual revenue. Revenue for local news / feature sites has been a challenge for the news industry as well as for domain name investors. Some have succeeded; mostly, people like Fred Mercaldo, and the Castello brothers who all own great city or regional domain names like PalmSprings.com and Scottsdale.com.
But big revenues don’t come easy for these kinds of sites. This may be changing. I have followed the online news / media business for many years and recently run across Michelle’s List. This site, produced in collaboration with the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism tracks the success of online media. They just added eight new local news / niche sites with annual revenues of over $1 million dollars each. That’s nice to see.
The newest list includes sites like 30A.com. 30A celebrates small-town beach life along Florida’s Scenic Highway 30-A and started as a local beach guide but is fast becoming an international brand. Others include Soo Today and the NJ Spotlight which are local news sites.
The entire list is available online here:
or here:
