Learning More About Outside.in with John Geraci

Outside.in is a company focused on aggregating information that is relevant to place. So, for example, if you live in Nolita in New York or Primrose Hill in London, you can find restaurant reviews, community board decisions, events, news, and all sorts of information that is targeted or “geo-tagged” exactly to your specific neighborhood.

It is part of the broader trend of location-based information, allowing people to access content that is relevant to where they are at any given moment. PSFK recently spoke to John Geraci, co-founder of Outside.in, on the company’s business model, the future of local advertising, their plans for mobile adoption, and how they can potentially partner with local newspapers and other media outlets.

Describe the revenue model for Outside.in.

The general idea is that if you know where someone lives, down to the neighborhood level, that creates a pretty good foundation for serving ads. Right now most websites can place their visitors only down to the city level, which is pretty rough by advertising standards. Sure, that visitor lives in San Francisco, but do they live in the Mission or do the live in Pacific Heights? The two are totally different demographics. So knowing that, plus all of the other standard ways that social networking sites profile users, adds up to a pretty strong platform for advertising. That’s essentially what we’re trying to do, at the business level.

What sorts of advertising interest have you received so far?

We only very recently started to move on advertising, because until now we’ve been focusing on just building the site properly, but in the short time we’ve been dealing with it, we’ve already gotten some very good interest. We’re talking with a bunch of different players right now, deciding what our first foray into advertising will be, and will know more soon.

We’re also getting strong interest in advertising from the bloggers themselves. Something we’re playing around with is the idea of becoming an ad partner for some of the local bloggers, getting ads with higher CPMs on their site than the typical Adsense ads pay.

There’s a good opportunity for Outside.in to be a conduit between the big advertisers and the excellent-but-hard-to-find local blogs out there. So bloggers get more ad revenue, and advertisers get ads on the blogs that are the leading voices in their communities. The bloggers we’ve approached about this idea so far are very enthusiastic.

How far away do you feel hyper local advertising is from being a reality?

As soon as we can build it!

Seriously, local online advertising has lots of potential pitfalls, and many have tried to do it and failed. We have some really good ideas on how to make it work, in a uniquely outside.in way, and I’m excited to get into that stage of development. I think we’ll be able to offer something that is smart, that is effective for local businesses, and that outside.in’s users appreciate as well.

That said, we’re not waiting for all of the local bars and cafes to get into online advertising before we start making money. The other aspect of hyperlocal advertising is finding hyperlocal audiences for national/ international products, and letting those products speak to people at the hyperlocal level. That’s what we’re focusing on first.

Have you entertained the idea of building a location-based mobile application?

Outside.in really has the potential to offer up the killer mobile app. It organizes info on the web by location, down to very granular levels, so it’s a natural fit for mobile devices. If you’re out on the town and want to know what’s new and interesting around you, outside.in is in a pretty unique position to answer that question, seeing as we’re tracking everything people are saying online about the things around you, organized by neighborhood name, venue, etc. That could be really powerful on your mobile device. The only problem at the moment is the actual interaction between the site and the phone, knowing where you are and so forth. That’s something that has always held mobile apps back because it’s rough and there’s no common way to go about it. We think that problem will be solved soon, so expect to see an outside.in mobile application in the near future.

How would Outside.in potentially work with a citywide newspaper? Do you see potential synergy with the online content sites for daily papers?

Absolutely, and we’re working on partnerships with some major players in this area right now. Newspapers are pretty hot on the idea of outside.in. They’re all hearing day in and day out that the traditional model of news is done for, and are looking around for ways to modernize the idea of news reporting. They want to start to bring down the wall between newspapers and blogs a bit, and see how the two can interact and build on each other. And that idea, of blogs and newspapers interacting, is pretty central to outside.in. So there’s a lot of mutual interest there.

Are there any plans to syndicate Outside.in with other websites or content providers?

Syndication is totally central to our approach. We’ve already doing it in several ways. One, you can grab an RSS feed for anything on the site - that means you can tap into our feed for a neighborhood, or a particular place like a restaurant, or a topic in your area, like crime, and get everything that’s being said on that subject in raw form. Then, one step up from that, is the Neighborhood News widget, which allows anyone to run local headlines from Outside.in on their blog via a widget. Finally, there’s an API that we make available to partner sites who want to display local headlines from the blogosphere, but who want more control than the widget gives you. We’re currently talking with a bunch of sites about using this API as test cases, and should have a few up and running by early November.

Thanks, John!

Outside.in