The only statement AOL made about “local” in yesterday’s earnings release and slides was the following: “Patch grew traffic, advertisers and ad impressions over 100% year-over-year.” However, on the earnings call AOL CEO Tim Armstrong opened up a bit about Patch and its performance.
Armstrong reaffirmed the company’s commitment to the embattled product: “Patch is not a pet project. Patch is a business that means deep consumers needs and advertising needs.” He added that he is “expecting to make a lot of progress on revenue in 2012.”
Below are some of the others statements Armstrong made about Patch (as reflected in the transcript, which is a bit ragged in places):
–Patch ended Q4 in 863 [markets] and with roughly 10 million unique users
–Patch ended Q4 as a number four local property on the web
–We now have 14,000 bloggers, signed up to the Patch platform
–Patch ended Q4 with roughly 6,500 advertisers (compare: ReachLocal had roughly 19K advertisers in Q3 2011)
–Patch’s sales force in Q4 at 230 people with the average [tenure] being about eight months…
–Ending Q4 2011, there were 401 Patches about $2,000 per month in revenue…
–To-date in 2012, we have already sold 50% of the total revenue we did in 2011
Armstrong also spoke about how Patch would be a magnet for political ad dollars because of its hyper-local targeting capability. And he spoke about “flattening” the organization in a recent restructuring to minimize costs.
AOL also continues to try and drive traffic to local Patch sites with the Huffington Post.
February 2nd, 2012 at 10:00 pm
[…] AOL CEO: ‘Patch Is the Number 4 Local Property on the Web’, http://www.screenwerk.com […]
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