Shields Bialasik has been critical of Adam Westbrook’s book Newsgathering for Hyperlocal Websites on his blog hyperlocal101. Bilasik says that Westbrook ignores the issue of how to generate an income from a hyperlocal blog. It would be a useful addition to future editions.

In its current guise hyperlocal journalism is either an experiment by the large regional publishers such as Trinity Mirror’s Your Place network in the North East, or is the pursuit of freelancers as part of a portfolio career.

Sources of funding are limited. Online readers almost certainly won’t pay for local news and Google’s adword network is not sufficiently granular to stretch to a post code area and is overly complex.

It’s why I think Addiply’s hyperlocal ad network is compelling. It makes advertising as simple as posting an ad in a newsagent. And that’s important for local businesses with limited technical expertise.

The Addiply team has a two-fold strategy: it is brokering deals with regional media groups and individuals that run hyperlocal blogs at the same time as pre-loading its ad network by pulling in national advertisers seeking to roll our regional campaigns.

At the point that Addiply reaches near nationwide coverage and is able to offer hyperlocal bloggers a startup package of guaranteed inventory to run on their sites from launch, it will have created a compelling business model for hyperlocal sites.