Borrell Reports that City.com Sites Threaten Newspapers

[Chicago]

Many of these independent local sites are reporting revenues well into six figures, and some recently formed their own trade group, Associated Cities. A flurry of acquisitions has begun as well, including a $500,000 acquisition for a "City.com" URL, and a $12 million offer by a newspaper publisher for
LasVegas.com.

PRNewswire [prnewswire.com]

Many of these sites use a url that includes the name of their city, like Houston.com and Toledo.com. As a result, they garner traffic even without much marketing, because some people navigate the Web by typing proper names directly into a url field.

Borrell also states that annual revenues at these local sites have "moved into the six-figure range"--and in some cases, surpass $1 million. "As the Internet tide rises, these once-mired local boats have begun to float," states the report.

MediaPost [publications.mediapost.com]

[Webwork]

And where's there's no city county names also work well for some of that low budget traffic. :)

Interesting article. What I find amazing is how blind the bigger players were to the emergence of such trends. Then again, they'll still so loaded with cash, they can often buy their way out of the predicament caused by their failure of vision.

I'll be playing a bit more in this space in 2006, so hopefully I'll have a bit more to talk about as the year moves forward.