Local TV sites, competition and growth

B&C has posted a story on our “Going Local” panel, where we urged TV stations to take a broader view of the local web. The story quotes me as saying that stations’ web growth will be “at-best-flat outlook for the near-term.” To add some context, I said that from a revenue perspective, increasing local competition will result in slowing and flattening growth (or worse) for many stations if they don’t launch new products outside their core compentencies. Those products are of the type that we demo’d at the session, such as local ad networks, content aggregators and hyperlocal communities (and I wish we had time to show some advertorial video directories, too.) From a traffic perspective, I believe local TV sites will continue to grow, but as Borrell predicted, “The decade-long era in which the banner ad ruled the web appears to be drawing to a close.” Which means local stations need to find new approaches to online revenue or see flattening or even declining revenue growth in increasingly competitive marketplaces.