Instead of just running generic creative from national advertisers, 6AM City's team offers a white-glove service to rewrite and editorialize the copy with a local angle. They find that when they are allowed to tailor the message to their specific community readers, the ad's performance is almost guaranteed to be better than the original national version.
Initially, 6AM City hired two editors per market. Over time, they discovered a more efficient model: empowering a single, autonomous local editor and centralizing all other operations (marketing, sales support, design). This streamlined the process, reduced overhead, and allowed the local editor to focus purely on creating a high-quality, localized product.
To maintain quality, 6AM City's AI newsletters don't generate content from scratch. Instead, they use "extractive generative" AI to summarize information from existing, verified sources. This minimizes the risk of AI "hallucinations" and factual errors, which are common when AI is asked to expand upon a topic or create net-new content.
To decide whether to launch a "core" market with full-time staff, 6AM City evaluates it against three criteria: an existing advertiser base, a clear path to audience growth, and a local advocate (like an economic development group) to champion their entry. This "Three A's" model provides a structured, qualitative checklist for de-risking new market expansion.
6AM City found that their lowest-spending advertisers often required the most sales and fulfillment effort. To solve this, they created a self-serve portal for smaller, one-off ad buys. This automated process freed their sales team from low-AOV transactions to focus on larger, regional, and national clients, dramatically improving team efficiency and revenue focus.
To generate content for its AI newsletters, especially in news deserts, 6AM City pulls information from a wide array of non-traditional sources. This includes city government pages, visitor bureaus, small businesses, large employers, and non-profits. This treats the entire community as a network of content creators, providing a rich source of relevant local information.
6AM City treats its reliable cost-per-subscriber from Meta lead ads as the baseline for evaluating all other growth tactics. For any new initiative, like a community event, they compare the cost against the number of subscribers it would have generated via Meta ads. If a $5,000 event doesn't yield 5,000 subscribers, the ROI is considered negative.
Instead of subscriber counts, 6AM City uses a specific revenue threshold to decide when to staff an AI-powered "seed" market with a human editor. Once an automated newsletter can generate enough revenue to cover an editor's salary (e.g., $5,000/month for a $60,000/year role), the company invests. This ensures financially sustainable, de-risked expansion.