American Towns, your online “public square”

September 12, 2007 | Dan Kaplan | Comments |

Updated:

amtwnslogo.png You may have never hard of American Towns, a company building an online “public square” for every town in the United States.

It has received a $3.3 million round of capital to realize that goal.

The financing comes from Idearc Media, the publisher of the Verizon Yellow Pages and owner of the local search engine, Superpages.com.

Fairfield, Conn.-based American Towns is one of a number of companies in the “hyperlocal” market — sites that target small geographic regions. Back in July, we reported that BackFence, a hyperlocal site that had attracted a $3 million investment, was closing its doors. Some suggested that the site’s failure reflected larger problems with the hyperlocal market and questioned whether a legitimate business opportunity existed here at all.

There are plenty of companies still trying. Outside.in, which features hyperlocal news and blogs, may be the best known; Smalltown offers listings for local businesses, Topix aggregates community news and classifieds, and Judy’s Book covers shopping.

As the investment in American Towns and another recent $10.6 million first round for citizen journalism site, NowPublic, shows, the belief that this market will generate substantial returns carries on. (Mark Potts, a founder of BackFence, offers his two cents here ).

In December of 2006, the site listed 140 towns and the company’s president Jim Maglione says it had reached up to eight percent of the households in many of them. It now lists 10,000 towns, and says nationwide coverage is due by the end of the year.

American Towns has built a crawler that finds URLs related to a specific town and extracts events, news, and community announcements. It uses this crawler to create virtual town squares, with content relevant to each town, but encourages users in its communities to take ownership of these town squares and start generating their own content. Whether or not a significant percentage of the population will participate is yet to be seen. In comparison Topix is getting user-generated content to the tune of 60,000 comments a day across 1400 towns.

The partnership with Idearc will give American Towns a new outlet for its content and help Idearc enhance its own locally-focused services.

American Towns also raised a $1.1 million round from undisclosed investors last July, and is only now announcing it.

More context here, from the Kelsey Group, which calls American Towns an “also ran.”

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About the Author, Dan Kaplan

Once upon a time, Dan considered himself a magazine journalist with dreams of "The New Yorker" and a couple of well-reviewed but only mildly successful books. Then one day, life, as it is known to do, decided it was time for rebirth. Like so many things before it, this rebirth was conceived on a mostly-empty plane to Reno. Now, instead of magazine writing, Dan would plunge into the world of New Media and write for Matt Marshall's blog.

It's funny how it goes.

  • Baden Gilmore
    Sounds like "Chortal"
  • One of the most interesting challenges of "cracking the code" on local is to kick-start a hyper-local website with timely and interesting content. The next challenge is to replicate that success in many locations.

    In general, there are two ways to achieve this: (1) launch hundreds of local sites and hope that they catch on (wide, then deep) or (2) launch one site, focus on getting rich content, and then somehow replicate that one success hundreds of times (deep, then wide).

    IMHO, "wide, then deep" doesn't work for local. I visited the AmericanTowns website for Burlingame, California and did a search for "pizza". I got no results. (Did I do something wrong?) They have another search option to "find more businesses in Burlingame", but that just took me to a third party online directory.

    Then I clicked on their "videos" tab and the top video is, ironically, one that Smalltown (wwww.smalltown.com/burlingame) produced for the town of Burlingame. (By the way, that video is copyrighted and used by AmericanTowns without our consent. But that's a whole 'nother topic.)

    InsiderPages and Backfence did their own unsuccessful versions of "wide, then deep". There are some more examples here on Smalltown's blog: http://hrucker.typepad.com/smalltown_blog/2007/...
  • Rodolfo
    I'm a startup founder working on something better than this, and I'm eating rice and beans, no 10M in funding yet.

    It's a hard problem but not impossible. These sites need two major features done correctly if they're going to be successful, this site has neither.
  • Tim Jones
    I also find American Towns less than compelling, however I don't agree that going "wide then deep" is a problem here. Sites like Topix have shown that you can build community by going wide then deep if you have (or can aggregate) compelling content.

    The problem I see with American Towns is that they try to do lots of things and end up doing all of them poorly. Their news aggregation is a joke, from what I've seen their events calendar is spotty at best, and their business coverage, as Hal notes, is paltry.

    Would the site be better if they focused on a few localities? Maybe. But I think it would be even better for them to focus on doing one or two things really well instead.
  • "None of these hyperlocal services have the scope of American Towns."

    *cough* Looks like we need to get you in here for an update Matt :-)

    Topix has commentary in over 1400 towns *daily* with over 60,000 comments a day, as well as climbing into a top 20 news spot on Nielsen, with over 60% of the activity on our site on *our* content (commentary).

    Anyway, yes, there's certainly a market here, but I would hope you stack up the space in line with the scope and success of the various participants.

    Chris Tolles
    CEO, Topix
  • Dan Kaplan
    Chris, thanks for pointing this out. Updated.
  • Hey Dan, thanks....

    Let me know if you and or Matt want to see under the hood here at some point in time.