Patch: What Backfence Wanted to Be

Patch has crossed the 100 town threshold on its way to 500 towns by the end of the year. It’s fascinating. Patch is exactly what Backfence envisioned for itself but never realized. It’s part cityguide, part community site, part SEO play, part local newspaper. Reportedly a mobile strategy is coming.

Stripping away everything, AOL sees Patch as a massive geotargeted ad network for its national display advertisers, as well as a local advertising vehicle for SMBs. There are coupons, indirect SEO, display ads, classifieds and email marketing. And if AOL is now a content site and network — producing valuable, targeted ad inventory — Patch could turn out to be one of its most valuable content plays.

Yahoo has a very similar local content and display ad strategy in the works. Associated content is part of that overall initiative. Examiner.com is in this same space as well. Interestingly Metacarta (now part of Nokia) had a similar idea for a massive network of geo-pages, though created with a very different methodology some time ago.

A major focus of all these efforts — at Patch and similar sites — is SEO exposure for a range of local queries. This is why SEO is not a viable long-term strategy, by itself, for anyone in the local market. Everyone is gunning for very limited slots on the first page of Google for the same queries. And Google is likely to “own” name-in-mind searches over time.

SEO must be part of a broader strategy that focuses equally on brand and content. Patch itself needs to become a “brand” for long-term success. It cannot expect to rely on SEO alone.

Patch is clearly not spam but there is a spectrum of decentralized content farming efforts trying to “colonize” Google results and it’s going to create a major problem that Google will have to deal with fairly aggressively at some point. Yet it will be challenging for Google to algorithmically distinguish between the pretty good, decent and near-spammy content pages.

Traditional media publishers should consider whether sites like Patch offer potential distribution for their advertisers. Newspapers and yellow pages publishers should rightly see Patch as an SEO competitor but there may be partnership opportunities.

Patch has not indicated it will do biz dev deals with existing publishers but I suspect it will to monetize these pages. AOL is not likely to build a major “feet on the street” sales force to sell local advertising — although AOL did SMB telephone sales years ago. We may eventually see one or two sales people for each Patch site or perhaps for “territories” that include multiple Patch sites.

And Patch can also potentially tap the growing number of local ad networks (CityGrid, Chitika, Marchex, LocalAdXchange, DealMap, Where) out there for monetization.

What are your thoughts on Patch’s outlook vs. others trying to do similar things? And how do you think Patch ultimately impacts traditional media sites in local?