The two-year-long program geolocated content to neighborhood communities and brought local advertising dollars back to the news organizations.
ENGLAND, UK – Today, Nextdoor, the neighborhood network, and Bloom Labs, a spatial journalism startup, published a case study for a two-year-long program that involved local news syndication and revenue sharing with 18 independent news outlets in the United Kingdom. The program’s revenue share model was the first implementation for local news on Nextdoor. Starting in May 2021, the program partnered with news outlets to enhance the accessibility of their content to residents throughout England. By the end of the program this past October, over 5,000 stories had been distributed to Nextdoor’s neighborhood communities, surpassing 4.7 million views from their residents. The case study briefly shares the activities, outcomes, and lessons learned from the collaborative program.
Nextdoor and Bloom Labs created the program to fulfill and experiment with the increasing demand for trustworthy local news in regions in England. According to Nextdoor, 78% of residents join the platform to stay informed of what’s going on in their neighborhood. During the initial peak of the coronavirus, the platform’s daily active members grew by 80% in the UK. In 2021, 1 in 7 UK households were on Nextdoor, which varied from city to city, such as London, where 1 in 5 were registered. By the end of the program, registrations increased to 1 in 4 households throughout the country.
“What sets Nextdoor apart is our focus on local; one main reason neighbors join our platform is to stay informed and discuss important issues affecting their local community,” said Jason Hwang, Business Development Lead at Nextdoor. “Our Bloom partnership ensured the news content shown to neighbors in their newsfeed was hyper-targeted to where they live.”
The program was intentionally designed to give news outlets control over the neighborhoods where stories were distributed and tap into a revenue share based on advertising impressions on Nextdoor. Bloom Labs provided journalists the tools to geotag stories precisely, making them accessible in machine-readable formats that enabled Nextdoor to distribute reliably to nearby residents. The program’s workflow enhanced the capability for local news discovery and engagement in the regions served that would have otherwise been dependent on stories only being posted by residents.
“It was incredible to work with such adaptive and innovative news organizations,” said Stephen Jefferson, Executive Director of Bloom Labs. “All of the program’s partners had a hand in experimentation and learning with the program’s new approaches. Initially, many news partners in the UK were unfamiliar with the platform and technology. Therefore, we designed the program to ensure our teams regularly engaged with news outlets each month, building trust and relationships over time as we learned how to best work with each other.”
Download the case study at: news.bloom.li/download/nextdoor-bloom-program-case-study/.
About Bloom Labs
Bloom Labs is a spatial journalism startup focused on improving the accessibility and capability of journalism for local communities. Our mission is to research, experiment, and implement new ways to inform and engage people with local news. Learn more at www.bloom.li.
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