Some consolidation afoot in the world of local online publishing: American City Business Journals, the Advance Publications-owned publishers of the Bizjournals network of local business sites, has bought Streetwise Media, which runs two websites based on crowdsourced local news, Bostinno in Boston and In the Capital in Washington, D.C. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Together the two sites in Streetwise had more than 9 million page views and 2.6 million monthly uniques, with their core audience young professionals in their 20s and 30s. It’s not clear whether the sale was because that wasn’t enough critical mass to keep the operation going as an independent concern — or whether Advance was interested in the two sites because they target a younger demographic than Bizjournals. The press spin, at least, puts the answer in the latter category.

“In a short amount of time, Streetwise has attracted a very loyal and robust audience that is different from but complementary to what we do at our business journals in Boston, Washington and elsewhere,” said Whitney Shaw, president and chief executive officer of ACBJ, in a statement.

Streetwise founders Chase Garbarino and Kevin McCarthy, the company says, will remain with the company as chief executive officer and chief technology officer, respectively, and they will continue to be based in Boston, and the plan is to expand the franchise to more cities. ”With the support of their experience and nationwide platform, we believe Streetwise can become the country’s leading local news platform,” Garbarino said in a statement.

Whether that will extend to cover as many local areas as, say, AOL’s Patch remains to be seen.

In addition to 45 regional titles for Bizjournals, American City Business Journals publishes runs 700 business-to-business events annually and owns sports media company Sporting News; Hemmings Motor News, serving the collector car market; Inside Lacrosse and NASCAR Illustrated. Advance also owns Conde Nast, cable TV assets and more.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

AOL CEO Tim Armstrong today announced three new content partnerships which effectively will hand over coverage for sports, health and real estate. The partners are Sporting News, Everyday Health, and Move.com for real estate. These will replace AOL’s own properties Fanhouse and AOL Health, whereas AOL Real Estate will remain. (Disclosure: AOL owns TechCrunch).

Armstrong suggested on a conference call that these are not areas that are core to AOL. “The reason we did these deals is because we believe the partners we are working with will be better at doing their core business than we are.” AOL isn’t getting completely out of sports, health, and real estate content. Especially when it comes to local (through Patch) or video, AOL will continue to create videos and articles covering these topics, some of which will appear on the partner sites and some of which will appear in AOL properties.

Outsourcing these content areas is supposed to allow AOL to “double down” on the categories it wants to own, namely local, women, and influencers. Although, health traditionally draws a large female audience, so maybe it’s more of Armstrong cutting his losses and going with the strongest sites.

As far as cost cutting and layoffs go, some Fanhouse employees may lose their jobs, but Armstrong is hopeful that they can be absorbed by Sporting News. The number is to-be-determined and could be anywhere from “zero to dozens.” The brand will continue to exist within Sporting News as part of the deal.

The deals are structured essentially to trade traffic from AOL for content and a revenue-split. “The partnerships are built on our ability to offer the partners traffic. In return for that we are getting content and monetization from the partners,” says Armstrong.

The Move.com partnership is a particularly interesting choice, given the past relationship between the two companies back when Move.com was called Homestore. Yes, that Homestore, the one that sparked a government investigation after the dotcom bubble because of roundtrip transactions where AOL invested in the company, and then Homestore repaid the favor by buying a ton of advertising on AOL. The former CEO of Homestore was convicted of insider trading (a conviction which was later overturned). The company changed its name to distance itself from the controversy. But that was a long time ago. Still, an interesting choice for a partner.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Facebook has released new statistics on its Facebook+Media Page about users who click Like buttons on Open Graph-enabled websites, as well as the influence of the Like button and social plugins on site traffic and engagement. They show that the “likers” have more friends and click more links on Facebook to external websites than those who don’t use the Like button. Sites implementing the Like button get significantly more traffic, and their users visit more often, view more pages and videos, and spend more time on site.

“The average ‘liker’ has 2.4x the amount of friends than that of a typical Facebook user” meaning they may be more active on Facebook, have denser real-world social networks, or have been members for longer. Likers click links to external websites found on the news feed, profiles of friends, Pages, and elsewhere 5.4x more than the average Facebook user. This means those clicking through to websites Liked by their friends are themselves more likely to click Like buttons and share back to Facebook.

Demonstrating the gap between online and offline news readers, the average liker on a news website is age 34, twenty years younger than the average newspaper subscriber. Users who click Activity Feed plugins on Open Graph-enabled sites generate 4x more page views than the average visitor to a media site. The note also explains that Pages can increase on-Page engagement by 1.3-3x by publishing compelling links or status updates to those that Like them.

Websites which have Implemented the Like button or other social plugins have experienced the following traffic increases: ABC News (+190%), Gawker (+200%),  TypePad (+200%), Sporting News (+500%). Facebook also published various statistics about how NHL.com has been affected by the implementation. “Visitors are reading 92% more articles, spending 85% more time on-site, viewing 86% more videos, and generating 36% more visits.”

David Swain of Facebook’s Product and Platform Communications team has also quoted CTO Bret Taylor as saying that “five months after f8, about 2 million sites are using social plugins”.

These statistics show the positive effect integrating with Facebook can have on websites. The experience of other sites and the ease of adding the few lines of code necessary to install many social plugins should encourage sites to at least experiment with the Open Graph API.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook