It”™s an electronic town square of immense proportions that only the Web could support ”“ 14,000 American communities listing information on 100,000 community organizations and 6 million local events ”“ everything from Rotary Club meetings to church services, from local restaurants to rocking nightclubs, local public library hours to local entertainment venues.
“By Aug. 1 we”™ll be in 15,000 towns covering 250 million people,” said Jim Maglione, co-president, community, at the Fairfield-based American Towns ( HYPERLINK “http://www.AmericanTowns.com” www.AmericanTowns.com) ”“ which bills itself as the largest national network of hyper-local community Web sites. And by year-end, American Towns will feature more than 15 million calendar events in virtually every community of any size in the country ”“ more than 20,000 of them covering the nation”™s 300 million people.
“We anticipate being fully national by this November,” Maglione said. “We”™ve gotten the system down. It”™s primarily driven by technology. We already have a site for every town in the United States, so technically, there”™s something there for every town.”
“The nice thing about our business and rollout is that it”™s not based on unknowns at all,” he said. “This is not a startup and throwing darts at a board.” The privately held company”™s “revenue metrics are based conservatively on what”™s been generated in the past.”
American Towns is in its seventh year, started in early 2000 by Mike Kelly, then publisher of Entertainment Weekly and a Fairfield resident. He left the company two years later, and is currently president of AOL Media Network in Manhattan.
Maglione and Edward Panian, co-president, technology, joined Kelly that summer. “Mike Kelly is my uncle, actually,” Panian said. “He was starting this up and needed a launch team and knew that I knew a lot about technology.”
Panian earned a degree in media studies and communications at Fordham University in 2000, and had been producing independent short films with some friends and classmates while in college, then, “Went to Europe for the summer and started looking for a job and wound up here at American Towns.”
Maglione earned a degree in political science from Southern Connecticut State University, spent four years at Readers Digest Children”™s Publishing, first in Westport, then in Chappaqua, N.Y., then joined Save the Children in Westport as director of development for the Northeast region, doing fundraising.
But in the late ”™90s “this thing called the Internet was shaping lives and the economy, and I wanted to be a part of it,” Maglione said. “I wasn”™t looking to become a millionaire overnight, but wanted to do something in line with my concerns and interests. I found out through a friend who knew Mike that he wanted someone with experience on the community and grassroots marketing side.”
Massive data base
American Towns launched in November 2000 in five towns ”“ New Canaan and Fairfield, and Chappaqua, Briarcliff Manor and Pleasantville in Westchester County, N.Y. “Originally, Mike and the advertising guy he brought over from Time Inc. felt the best potential would be in high-income areas that advertisers covet,” Maglione said. “We started off with the more expensive towns, but they were really our backyard. Mike was a Fairfield guy; his partner was a Westchester guy.”
As the Web site expanded to other communities, however, they discovered that “income level doesn”™t matter at all,” that the success of the site depended more on broadband penetration. The site grew slowly, building up to 140 towns last fall. “Ed and I went to the board in February 2006 and said that now is the time to go national and quickly, that local is hot,” Maglione said. The board approved the duo”™s plan for a national American Towns, and “we really spent most of last year building the technology platform and preparing for our national launch.”
Starting last December and continuing through the present, the site began adding new communities. “Right now we are in 14,000 towns. We spent a lot of the last seven years learning how to think outside the box and launch a town economically. We”™re building the most massive event data base on the Web.”
Maglione and his staff have built “a very successful community outreach program that goes to all community offices like the mayor, the historical society and sports clubs. “That”™s where technology comes in,” he said. “We can put keywords in for every town and find all the information for all the organizations, all the information that”™s available. We”™ve just found a way to aggregate that information.”
The Web site has been funded by a core group of investors since its inception, “and has been an idea that has resonated with them for the past seven years,” Maglione said. Revenues are generated by self-provision ads, an annual $139 fee for businesses such as restaurants and real estate agencies that gives them a listing on the site, “and from a combination of community resources,” he said. For example, “every time a user books a hotel room on our site, we get a percentage of the transaction.”
“We”™ve gotten the system down,” he said. “Projections based on our metrics from the last seven years show that by November we”™ll have about 2 million monthly unique visitors ”“ a person who comes back at least once a month ”“ and 10 million monthly hits for page views. Right now we”™re at about 225,000 unique visitors and just about 1 million page views.”
New features
That massive amount of digital information is being housed in five servers at a data center in Dallas. “To host a Web site, you need a server and a dedicated line to the Internet, but rarely do you find the pipe into your office or house,” said Panian. “All the hosting companies host servers in data centers all over the country, all over the world. Right now we think we”™re probably OK with our five servers for our scalability, but it”™s hard to know until we ramp up and see the metrics.”
“We”™ve basically launched the company from a technology standpoint,” Panian said. “We”™ve built applications that allow us to do the type of content application we need, we”™ve just built a content management system around the things we”™ve gathered, and we”™ve re-engineered the Web site with completely new features.”
“It”™s a huge, huge data base, with 8 million pages of content,” Maglione said. “When we”™re fully national in the fall, we”™ll have between 15 million and 20 million calendar events. And as we launch a town, our role in adding content goes down.” The goal, he said, is to encourage community organizations to post their events and take ownership of their community”™s pages. Still, “it”™s an enormous data base that needs a lot of day-to-day upkeep, and that”™s what Ed and his team do.”
American Towns, Maglione said, really doesn”™t have a competitor. “There are some phenomenal community sites like WestportNow.com, but we”™re more of a community information site focused on the community and community organizations on a national basis. Others are very on-the-ground, but are not scalable.”
In the next few months, American Towns will launch an effort to bring local newspapers into their communities”™ sites, along with other media and other local community Web sites. “We”™ll aggregate and pull in those fragmented local sites and bring them under one umbrella so visitors can find everything in one place,” Panian said.
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