That is because the sites have failed to "articulate a value proposition," Mr. Todd said.
Yet over the years, a number of so-called hyperlocal news sites have failed, and the idea is largely unproved financially.
Last month, Gen. Tommy R. Franks, commander of American forces in the Afghan war zones, said searches of about 60 sites had failed to turn up evidence of weapons of mass destruction.
Mr. Takeuchi and others in the online media point to a number of reasons the sites have failed, beginning with advertising revenues that are too low to support even a skeleton newsroom staff.
Verizon Wireless said 6 percent of its cell sites were down in the storm-damaged areas, T-Mobile said roughly 20 percent of its network was down in New York City and 10 percent in Washington, and Sprint and AT&T said some of their sites had failed in badly hit areas as well.
The E-commerce (Not So) Merry-Go-Round E-commerce sites have failed to take into account enormous marketing budgets, somewhat unpredictable infrastructure costs and constantly shrinking margins.
YouTube managed to work around this by transcoding all of its videos into the H.264 format, but other video serving sites have failed to follow suit.
The official reason is that these sites had failed to obtain licences from the Press and Publications Department in accordance with a law that Prime Minister Abdullah Ensour himself had voted against when he was a member of the Lower House.
And to write in a magazine that purports to be credible that "attempts to sell traditional online ads on Facebook and other social-networking sites have failed miserably" flies in the face of the facts.
But attempts to sell traditional online ads on Facebook and other social-networking sites have failed miserably: Banner ads can sell for as little as 15 cents per 1,000 clicks (compared with, say, $8 per 1,000 clicks for an ad on a targeted news portal such as Yahoo Auto) because marketers know that members ignore them.
The readers clearly believe (as do I) that the site has failed in all three areas.
