After SanDiego.com, now comes Kelowna.com's turn:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/...rticle1538920/

The battle for readers in Kelowna's tech-savvy media market has claimed a casualty with the demise of Kelowna.com, a sleek news and information website launched last year to serve a growing appetite for local online content.

“We're not shutting down completely, but we are taking the entire news component off of Kelowna.com,” said Rob Montgomery, CEO of the website's parent company, Ogopogo Media. “All the news people went with it and also the extra sales people that we had hired to handle the extra business.”

From the sound of the article, it was the news staff that specifically created such high overhead. Local news is certainly important, but is it really a magnet for local traffic and ad dollars?

The owners have alot of experience and I'm sure they will bounce back from this (they are long standing member here).

As a general thing, with SanDiego.com aswell, it seems that the mainly content geos are not doing well. One of the Costellos said it well a while back when they said it is advertising that pays the bills and is the main thing, and I would think it is tourism related advertising that is really the main opportunity.

"plan to return Kelowna.com to its former role as a tourist information website."

This sounds like a good move.

Not talking about this name but I think a couple of years ago the frenzy in geos was badly overdone, in reality it was only the tourism sites that were doing well, one highly profitable/targeted subset of the area.

Doesn't surprise me in the slightest - when they were in San Diego 2 years ago talking about becoming a news source and hiring actual reporters I thought they were crazy.

You can make a crapload of money from the tourism game, but the news game and local advertisers are a whole different ballgame.

GEO's are great, but non-tourist geos are very, very tricky.

Sometimes, being too early is just as bad- if not worse- than being too late.

The transition from offline to online media is inevitable, but the profit models are changing just as fast. I think a lot of geo owners thought that by virtue of owning city.com and hiring some writers, they were the defacto heir-apparent to the old-media Newspaper of that city. Not the case. Lets also not ignore the fact that Geo.com was hyped to the point of outright mania in Domainer circles.

Congrats to all those who got desirable tourist destinations in .com back in the old days for peanuts. You're really in the chips. For anyone buying at todays price levels or, buying cities that aren't tourist destinations, the profit models are much more difficult- a vertical mountain to climb if you don't actually live in that city.