Chalk up another flop to another plan to turn a profit with digital hyper-local media.
Hyper-local was all the rage a few years ago, but there are few success stories in 2014.
Hibu, which was the former Yellow Pages, had an aggressive plan, launching dozens of local community magazines over the past two years.
On Monday, it was shutting the magazine unit down.
About 200 journalists were let go with only a month’s severance, according to the media blog JimRomenesko.com — but it was unclear how many were full-time employees.
The company had grown from 10 titles in 2012 to more than 60 titles by the end of 2013. Many former employees of the ill-fated Patch network had landed at Hibu when AOL CEO Tim Armstrong pulled the plug on that hyper-local digital operation after tens of millions of dollars in losses.
Hibu said it is going to concentrate on its “still large and important print directory business” as well as digital directories.