San Fran Sites Battle For Tech-Savvy Users

The San Francisco Bay area has been “wired” for years, a frontrunner in local, as well as national, online media. The birthplace of Craigslist and Twitter is also hometown to one of the first newspaper Web sites, SFGate.com.

The San Francisco Chronicle’s trend-setting Web site is a powerhouse locally and nationally. SFGate.com is the Bay area’s top local media site, dominating the market. And it ranks as one of the Top 10 newspaper sites in the country. SFGate.com averages more than 110 million page views a month and more than 11 million unique visitors.

The San Francisco market, which includes Oakland and San Jose, is packed with highly educated consumers who flocked to the Web from its very beginning. And they are among the first in line to purchase state-of-the-art devices such as smartphones and iPads.

“We have a high concentration of very tech-savvy people in this area,” said Jennifer Mitchell, director of Web operations for KGO-TV, San Francisco’s ABC owned-and-operated TV station. “It’s also a market where people are using a lot of new technology, early adopters.”

That has meant, in part, that newspaper and broadcast outlets in the Bay area -- the nation’s 6th largest media market -- have to jockey to keep on top of the latest trends involving social media and smart phone and tablet apps.

These sites have other challenges. They must also address the region’s desire to be kept abreast of goings-on in Silicon Valley. That is driving the creation of more hyperlocal offerings by the incumbent Web sites, who face a new competitor in AOL’s Patch.com, which entered the market a year ago.

“We were excited to go to the Bay area because it is such a tech-savvy, wired area where people are also very interested in what goes on in their community,” Patch Media president Warren Webster said.

San Francisco’s local online ad spending was an estimated $386.4 million last year, according to Borrell Associates. The research firm predicts that the market’s local online ad revenue will hit $714.3 million by 2015, an 84.9% jump.  

That gain reflects “a healthy increase,” according to Kip Cassino, a Borrell executive vice president, though perhaps “not as dynamic” as other cities that are now playing catch-up in local online media.

“San Francisco was very early to go online,” he said. “Silicon Valley had a lot of very online-sensitive people, people who had used the Web, who had been early adopters and who were used to using it a lot earlier than a lot of markets of the same or even larger sizes.”

Today online ad revenue in the Bay area has somewhat “slowed down,” according to Cassino. “A lot of the big changes that are happening now in other parts of the country have long since occurred in the Bay area.”

SFGate, owned by Hearst Corp., is by far the leading local media Web site. Last year 27.6% of San Francisco’s adults logged onto SFGate.com, followed by 17.5% for KQED.org, the site for the city’s public broadcasting TV station and radio station, according to an annual survey by Media Audit.

MercuryNews.com, the online home of Bay Area News Group-owned San Jose Mercury News, drew 17.3% of the market’s adults, according to Media Audit. The Walt Disney Co.’s ABC7News.com, with 16.2%, and the site of CBS’s KPIX-TV, CBS5.com, with 15%, followed.

The Chronicle’s online presence began in November 1994, and by spring 1995 it had established its permanent site, SFGate.com, according to the site’s news director Vlae Kershner.

“We were right there with The New York Times and others, within the same week,” he said.

This year, the market leader is focusing on expanding its hyperlocal offerings, catering to the city’s passion for food and drink and creating more smartphone apps, according to Kershner.

SFGate.com is partnering with smaller news organizations to cover specific areas or neighborhoods. For example, the University of California at Berkeley’s journalism school is providing SFGate with coverage of the Mission district, via a blog. Hyperlocal is “a major area” of expansion for the site, Kershner said.

“In our position, you can’t really go hyperlocal very easily with our staff, so you need to do partnerships,” he said.

San Francisco is a foodie haven, with food and wine more popular than sports, Kershner said. So last year SFGate.com debuted its local restaurant blog, “Inside Scoop.”

But there has been one recent exception to the food-over-sports rule in the Bay area.

“We have never been a sports market to compare with some of the others -- Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, New York,” Kershner said. “But the Giants winning the World Series last year was still awfully good for us. Our biggest day ever was the day of the victory parade, people looking at photos of that. For two months, the whole town was enveloped in this Giant’s fever.”