AOL’s 2010 plan to digitize towns across America includes an aggressive expansion of Patch, the growing hyper-local news and information platform already available in 40 communities. The company also intends to relaunch its City’s Best properties in 25 cities later this year and add high-quality, city-specific content to its “best of” entertainment options for each of these metro audiences.
As part of its expanded focus on local, AOL is establishing a dedicated venture capital fund to evaluate entrepreneurial initiatives in the local space—one of the first such initiatives of its kind. An increasing number of start-ups are fundamentally improving the local experience for consumers, businesses, governments and organizations throughout the world. AOL will target these types of companies with its local fund which will operate out of AOL Ventures.
“AOL is investing meaningfully in our communities through trusted, professional journalism and location-specific content in a compelling way that is valued by our users and attractive to our advertisers,” said AOL chairman and CEO Tim Armstrong.
“Local is the one area of the Internet that has not been built out in an extensive way. While there are companies in the local space, AOL has the technology to digitize the local space at scale. We believe it’s an untapped market for the most part and one of the largest commercial opportunities online that has yet to be won.”
In addition, AOL intends to increasingly incorporate local content on the AOL.com homepage, using intuitive geo-targeting technology to tailor information across a range of interests to the user’s location later this year.
“AOL is focused on building meaningful content with our local platforms—regardless of how or where consumers connect to us,” said Jon Brod, EVP of AOL Ventures, Local and Mapping.
“All of the ways people share information now—Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Foursquare and others—will also be targeted to distribute our content. The outstanding quality of our local content and its relevance to users are among the key elements that will drive this effort.”
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