Hale Global

How Patch’s CEO Makes Hyperlocal Profitable

Patch is profitable for the past 15 months, serving 1,200 communities with 148 staff, under owner Hale Global since a 2014 acquisition from AOL. The company aims to monetize hyperlocal news via a four-pronged revenue model: programmatic, direct-sold inventory, business development, and commerce, with notable wins including nearly $1 million in Amazon Prime Day sales driven by Patch content and campaigns with Diageo and Barnes & Noble; Realtor.com integrations also feature in its tech stack. In expansion, Patch has added new metros like Miami and Houston, and generated about 20,000 Florida email subscribers around Hurricane Irma. Traffic is driven by features such as alerts (20% of total traffic), and the tech stack is lean (one Chartbeat, one Google Analytics, one CMS) with a server-to-server link to Amazon and Index Exchange for header bidding. The company emphasizes platform-focused products and self-serve tools to enable citizen-sourced content.

YouTube’s New SVP Talks; The Forecast For TV Upfronts

AdExchanger’s Tuesday news round-up highlights key ad-tech moves. Google’s YouTube chief Susan Wojcicki discusses Google Preferred, packaging the top 5% of content into 14 categories and offering it upfront on a guaranteed basis to advertisers, signaling a push to capture TV ad dollars. The piece notes a broader industry debate on whether digital video will steal TV spend or expand reach, with RBC Capital Markets’ David Bank stressing reach and ComScore’s Andrew Lipsman arguing that multiplatform consumption extends overall reach. SHIFT announces next-generation self-service ads within its Open Marketing Cloud, enabling marketers to use their own data for CRM matching, cookie retargeting and lead generation across Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. AOL sells Patch to Hale Global, with editors saying reporting remains similar but posting requirements have changed. Elizabeth Jackson joins HookLogic as Chief Marketing Officer and EVP of Corporate Strategy, highlighting leadership changes in ad-tech.

Bitly: We Are The Independent, Third-Party Arbiter Of Clicks Between Every Platform

Bitly positions itself as the independent, third-party arbiter of clicks across platforms. In an interview with AdExchanger, CEO Mark Josephson outlines Bitly's evolution from a simple Twitter link shortener to a cross-platform data engine that encodes content, tracks where it travels, and reports back on who clicks. The company has 55 employees and recently added Rob Platzer as CTO and Melissa Wallace as VP of Marketing; Moz will track and score inbound links. Bitly counts more than 40,000 brands under its Brand Tools, with a paid tier in the mid-hundreds. It encodes roughly 500 million links per month, which are clicked about 7 billion times, and handles cross-property profiling of roughly 600 million 28-day active users. Bitly emphasizes first-party cookies and cross-platform cookies, with 75 integrations, including Adobe, Salesforce, GE/Percolate, Hootsuite, Sprinklr and Spredfast. It aims to connect content to CRM, marketing automation, and analytics across earned, owned, and paid media.