Local People Network
Associated Northcliffe Digital (AND) is planning to double the number of sites in its hyperlocal network to 200 by next year.

The localpeople network, which was launched by the publisher in July 2009 with 20 websites in south west England, now includes 100 sites just a year after launch.

AND will also look at increasing the number of staff managing each site, particularly in areas where a site's traffic is strong or a site is generating good commercial interest, managing director Roland Bryan told Journalism.co.uk. Each site is currently run by a combination of community managers hired from within the local area and journalists working at Northcliffe titles and the aim of the sites is to share information about the local area rather than operate as local, news-led websites. Finding the right people to manage the sites from within the communities has been the biggest barrier to rolling out new sites more quickly, Bryan said.

To mark the network's first birthday, it is coming out of beta and has updated the design of its sites, which include roughly 50 sites in the south west of England, 30 in the south east of England and 20 in London. Community and commercial content now work better together on the websites as their design has been tweaked, said Bryan.

"In a lot of the towns we publish in there isn't a huge burning news agenda each week, but there is a huge interest in really local community content which is also really valuable for us in terms of bringing in commercial partners," he said.

The commercial potential of such local offerings is a big focus for the network and central to its plans for future development: a new sales team has been set up in London, which is predominantly engaged in field sales. Bryan said he wants to put sales heads into each of the areas where there is a cluster of sites and that scaling up the network's sales operation is a significant challenge.

"What we're trying to do is go to really localised, small businesses and offer them a proposition that we think is completely different to anything out there. We can say to them: 80 per cent of their custom can come from within their town, but at the moment only 40 per cent of their marketing budget will be spent within that town. That to me says there's a problem with the way they are spending their money, because a whole raft of people aren't actually their potential customers because they are outside their area. Because our media is completely focused in that town, and in most of our towns is the only media or only digital media for that town, we are able to offer them a really compelling proposition, where the people seeing their ads are really their customer base," he said.

"Thirty to thirty-five per cent of page impressions a week are commercially-related. We don't want it to be a whole lot of content over here and commercial stuff somewhere else."

While not disclosing any figures, Bryan said the revenue from the network is in line with the group's expectations. Paid-for business profiles, business directories and voucher discount schemes from advertisers have worked particularly well and AND is now offering website building services using the localpeople package and template. The network will soon add AND's Jobsite directory as a feature on the sites and is keenly interested in developing a model for "buy and sell" ads, but with a more localised feel than existing Gumtree or Craigslist-style sites, said Bryan.

According to AND figures, the network has more than 332,000 unique users a month - a figure which is growing by 15-20 per cent a month, said Bryan. These users have contributed more than 50,000 comments, reviews and other posts to the sites. On average the sites reach around 20 per cent of households in their catchment areas with the strongest sites reaching 40-50 per cent, said Bryan.

Some of the network's original third-party deals with technology providers have ended, including user-generated content suite OneSite, to give AND more control over the 'backend' of the sites, particularly the user-registration process.

But despite this move in house, the publisher remains keen to forge partnerships with other websites, including independent, hyperlocal sites, and would be particularly keen to forge licensing arrangements for its platform for the localpeople sites with other local publishers, said Bryan.

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