Innovation Lab

How are hyperlocal publishers monetising their services in the UK and Europe, and which revenue streams are proving most effective? This report aims to inform hyperlocal publishers of the different revenue models and opportunities available to them, to help them develop more sustainable and resilient services.

Key findings

Viable, sustainable and resilient hyperlocal publishers are diversifying their revenues and do not rely on one revenue source, resulting in substantial income differences.
Partnerships are an important part of the revenue ‘mesh’. The small size of hyperlocal media services could be a permanent obstacle in moving towards maturity; partnerships could help to solve this problem.
Native advertising or sponsored content is sparking increased interest and some lucrative revenues.
There is resurgence in the interest of print, which plays an important role in discoverability and sustainability of hyperlocal media services.
Crowdfunding is a valuable opportunity for specific projects and campaigns.
There is a high use of and reliance on volunteers; they can be used creatively and to great effect as a resource.
To date, Europe hasn’t benefitted from a comprehensive study of the current and emerging revenue streams available to hyperlocal publishers, and the new opportunities afforded by digital technology.

Therefore, we worked with strategic organisations and selected 35 case studies from the UK, the Netherlands, France, Belgium and Sweden – as these are territories with a similar hyperlocal media landscape in regards to growth, challenges and innovation – to find out how these publishers are monetising their services and what we can learn from them.

The objective is to inform hyperlocal publishers, from across Europe and beyond, as to which methods and strategies are available to them, to help them develop stronger business models.

Authors: Clare Cook, Kathryn Geels and Piet Bakker

Questo rapporto presenta un’analisi approfondita del concetto dei beni comuni e di una
possibile declinazione politica e gestionale nel contesto di una economia della conoscenza. La
ricerca presenta una iniziale rassegna critica della letteratura insieme ad un’analisi concreta dello
sviluppo dei commons e dei beni comuni.

This work shows the strategic importance to connect the D-CENT democracy pilots with the
social currency pilots. Only through a democratic and participatory deliberation system, citizens
can collectively define bottom-up their social needs, and inform the choices made on resource
allocation and investment in social objectives and ethical criteria. This concerns the notion of
“social sustainability”: without participation and real democracy, local monetary
circuits run the risk to remain too little, too dependent on the local political cycles,
too far from the real demand that may be expressed by the local economic system.

D3.4 provides a background for building a framework for implementing and federating digital complementary currency experiences, and for improving their social benefits. Enabling communities to manage exchange using alternative digital social currencies as new tools for growing a civic sharing economy, including a strong role for interoperable digital social currencies remains the principal goal.

D-CENT aims at developing large-scale collective platforms to support citizen empowerment. As shown by the preliminary considerations from the first round of interviews with alternative and complementary system managers in Spain, Finland and Iceland (D1.2 and D3.4), decentralised and privacy aware digital infrastructures are needed to allow institutions to integrate social feedback from the citizens, leveraging the potential of the extended society and social experts to improve democracy and many aspects of our society. In turn, the experimentation on the Digital Social Currency Pilots in D-CENT can be conceived as an open-source approach to decentralized complementary currency design, which becomes ever more relevant where pilot communities are already actively designing tools for collective engagement and decision making on monetary economic matters affecting their communities.

Amongst the emergent forms of collaborative use of digital technologies it is possible to identify an innovative practise and experimentation, the Brazilian experience of the Pontos de Cultura 1 , a priority action within the Programme "Cultura Viva" of the Ministry of Culture of Brazil that contributes to the creation of a grassroot digital ecosystem promoting Culture, Education and Citizenship. The methodologies of transfer of knowledge and the processes of collaboration and cooperation experimented in the deployment of the Pontos de Cultura can help to enhance the training and knowledge contents, which in the digital business ecosystem (DBE) still appear to be rather rudimental. In addition the two initiatives would complement each other, representing an interesting case of cultural cross-fertilisation. The usage of digital ecosystem technologies within the "Pontos", and its adaptation to local needs, would turn the "Pontos" into incubators of new ec...