In Oakland, we have an angry community member who is telling his peer group that Oakland Local is going to "gentrify the web"--i.e take traffic away from his site and the other grassroots sites that have existed for the past 4 years.  This person is an angry cyber-bully who talks about conspiracy theories, and Big Brother, but the question he raised--could you gentrify the local web?--was interesting enough that I went home and did a little research and want to share what I found.

Basically, gentrification means that local people who live in a area and have roots there are pushed out as outsiders come in and improve the buildings and raise the cost--and value--of housing. This is a classic pattern of displacement that happens all too often in cities, often with the new people as white gentrifiers and the displaced people as people of color. In Oakland, where neighborhood have been disrupted due to development, gentrification is a big issue--as it is in many cities.

So can this happen on the web? Understanding whether the local web could gentrify--or, to be specific with these accusations--was the existence of Oakland Local actually taking audience and attention away from pre-existing local sites, particularly those few run by people of color--seemed a worth exercise.

In Oakland, where Oakland Local launched in October 2009 and had an immediate, popular impact (we have over 3,000 Facebook fans), there were a large number of web sites and blogs already in existence--over, 1500, to be precise (see the Blog directory we built for more details),  Oakland Local's M.O. is to be a portal, or community hub, where we feature and send traffic back to content and community partners, as well as feature original writing and multimedia.

To test whether Oakland Local--and other new media sites in Oakland--were indeed gentrifying, or taking traffic away from older local sites, we did a little experiment with metrics--follow along and see what the results were.

First, we identified a set of local sites to test with:

• Block Report Radio--the web site of the person who was so angrily calling OL out
• The Black Hour at Laney College, a student web site
• Oakland Rising, web site for an East Oakland project to register voters, particularly in the Latino community

Next we set up a research methodology--look at the free, public Alexa data on each site and see how the traffic was being reported as increasing or decreasing over the past 3 months. Then, check Google search, using custom date ranges and the URL of each site, and see if the number of referring links--a way to measure influence--had increase or decreased over the past 11 months. To do that, we established two sets of date ranges--one from June 2009-October 2009, before Oakland Local launched, and the other from November 2009-May 2010, when Oakland Local was active.  We did not factor for issues of quality, frequency of updating, relevancy or any other issues that actually bring users to a web site--we just went for the basic comparison.

When we ran the data on these sites what did we find?

In every case, the discernable traffic for these sites--and the number of links they receive in Google--has gone up, typically by 30-60%.  These number show that The Block Report, rather than losing traffic since Oakland Local launched, has gained traffic, and that these other sites in Oakland have gained traffic as well.
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In other words, this suggests the local web is NOT like a city block, or a local neighborhood. The concept of displacement--of a web user abandoning one web site in favor of another--is not supported by this data. Instead, it suggests what common sense dictated all along--web sites compete for audience based on the quality and relevancy of what they offer, and most people spend their day visiting several--certainly, in Oakland, they have many to choose from.

Block Report Radio

Alexa.com statistics  for Block Report Radio report that the site grew 90% in traffic over the past 3 months, and 300% in the past month.

The Google links to the site between June and October 2009 were 155; the links between November 2009  and May 2010 were 252.

The Black Hour

We then looked at this college-run site, which offers terrific coverage for Black students at Laney College, one of the Peralta Community Colleges in Oakland, Their coverage is also of keen interest to the broader community in Oakland. (Note: The Black Hour has been an active partner with Oakland Local, and we have published and co-published a lot of work with its editor.)
Alexa data on The Black Hour showed that the site had taken a 40% dip in the past  month, but that the site has grown 20% overall in the past 3 months.

Google links show that from June-2009-Oct 1, 2009, the site had 4 links; from  Nov-May 1, 2010, there were 10 links

Oakland Rising

Oakland Rising is a slightly different kind of site than the previous two, because it belongs to a non-profit project, but since it is both local and community-action focused, it seemed like a good choice to research (note: they are also an OL partner)

According to Alexa, Oakland Rising took a dip in the past month of  50%, but in the past 3 month, their traffic rose 150%.

From October 2009-May 2010, OR received 13 Google links, from June to September, they received 14, so that's pretty much a wash..

Other data

Although it is outside of Oakland, and has a very different focus than Oakland Local, we also looked at stats for the SF Bayview, a historically Black web site in San Francisco, since our accuser said we were harming them.  Was that true?

According to Alexa, traffic for SF Bayview was down 20% in the past month, but up 30% over the past 3 months. Google links for SF Bayview were 607 for June-October 2009,  and for November 2009-May 2010, 11,600 (!!!) ) (Clearly, I am not the only person who thinks this site is providing great news and value).

Oakland Local's data
It doesn't seem right to go through this exercise without also sharing Oakland Local's stats, which I ran as a comparison (and to understand whether our critic might also be motivated by jealousy). Here's that data:

Alexa says that our traffic has gone up 40% in the past month, 22% overall,
Google links: Oakland Local was not alive before October 19, 2009, so we don't have site results to report. From October 2009-May 2010, we have 14,500 references in Google.