Joe Ricketts is a billionaire. He's the founder of TD Ameritrade and owner of the Chicago Cubs. The shrewd investor has also thrown his hat into the hyperlocal news ring. More on his site DNAinfo.com from the New York Observer:
Like seemingly everyone else these days, Mr. Ricketts wants to figure out the future of news, and he has chosen the streets of New York to conduct an experiment of sorts. The name of his venture may sound more like a bio-genetics company than a earnest news site dedicated to zealously cover community board meetings and the like, but Mr. Ricketts chose the name (which stands for Digital Network Associates) to reflect the organization's multimedia ambitions.
DNAinfo.com is now up and running, cranking out daily videos, brief articles and slide shows, focusing on the tick-tock-zoning disputes, fires, crimes, restaurant openings, transportation disputes, roosters-of 22 neighborhoods throughout Manhattan. The sleekly designed Web site went beta in November 2009 and is still finding its audience. According to estimates from Quantcast, DNAinfo.com was visited by slightly fewer than 35,000 unique visitors over the last month.
We have to give Ricketts credit -- he's building an honest to goodness, truly local community news site in Manhattan. This isn't a play at aggregation, or a sales heavy-content light boiler room operation -- this is community reporting and a social tool-rich site.
We don't know how much Ricketts spent to develop his Web site but we do know we can provide everything a billionaire needs to run a hyperlocal venture -- and more -- for a lot less than he paid.
We provide Neighborlogs for free and here are the cool things from the billionaire's toy box we'll give you:
- A simple to use, feature rich content management system including cool solutions like feed aggregation, scheduling and mobile posting
- A self serve display advertising system designed for local businesses to use. We've already have more than 500 businesses buying ads through the system, powering sites in Seattle and beyond.
- Social and geolocation tools that are cutting edge and part of a high engagement, community driven news and info environment
- The Chicago Cubs
OK. So that last part is not true. You do not get a Major League Baseball team with Neighborlogs. But you do get a state-of-the-art, one-package solution for creating a community news site and business. And we provide it for free. Our business is based in your success. We share 20% of your ad revenue generated by the self-serve system. That's it. In exchange, you get cutting edge tools that just work and don't have to invest in hiring technical help or spending your valuable time hacking through code and cutting and pasting javascript.
Sign up for Neighborlogs today and you can keep up with the billionaire hyperlocal news publishers of the world -- for free.
