AOL’s Patch.com, which is now in 813 markets, is meeting internal goals and poised for success, according to President Warren Webster, who addressed San Diego Interactive Day yesterday.

Webster said Patch is now reaching 6.9 million unique visitors and has seen 194 percent growth in the past six months. The site will continue to rapidly add new communities, including some special local/vertical sites such as inner city Newark and military community sites for Camp Pendleton and Coronado, California. By the end of the year, Patch is expected to hit the 1,000-site milestone. “We’d like to have thousands more,” he said, noting that today’s typical Patch community has a population of 27,000 people.

Webster noted that one of the keys to the site’s potential success is a tight focus on potential users. The typical Patch “persona,” he said, is a 41-year-old wife and full-time mother who is a daily Web user; checks Facebook on her iPhone; and is engaged in activities involving kids, friends, school and her town.

Editorially, the site is focused on a Patch 360 initiative, hitting users in every way they need to be hit. Core to the strategy is the daily email newsletter, which integrates content from a variety of sources — especially seasonal content, which gets 67 percent higher usage. New initiatives include the Patch eSaver on Tuesdays, which show all the deals that are available in town. “Patch is all about giving people 10 things they want every day,” said Webster.

Mobile is also playing a major role in the site’s strategy, added Webster, especially for weekend use. iPhone users generate 7 percent more traffic on the weekend than the average weekday. “We could be an entirely mobile company and be just as successful,” Webster mused. “But we would never do that.”

All this is a big bet on on being an attractive local ad medium, added Webster, who said Patch already has several hundred salespeople. “We are focused on being a concierge to the Web” for local businesses. The challenge is “to find the right feature set on our site that is very, very simple, trackable and drives traffic.” Businesses need a single source like Patch to “do it for them.”

While the site runs banner advertising because businesses are used to it, “we want to put products up on Patch the drives people to retail business. Banner and click based advertising doesn’t work for local,” he said. The focus, he reasserted, is on providing solutions that are “less fragmented, platform agnostic and hugely simplified.”

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In a discussion with paidContent, Patch President Warren Webster discussed Patch’s check list of 59 variables that the site uses to determine which new towns it enters, including a first cut that consists of town population between 15,000 and 75,000; having better than average school scores; and better than average household incomes and voting penetration. A second cut includes qualitative characteristics such as civic “walkability” and the presence of an active business community.

While the site hasn’t focused on revenues to date, Webster told paidContent that it has had some experimental advertising, including banners ads and business listings that can be upgraded into advertising. It also has had some geotargeted national advertising for campaigns such as Pepsi Refresh. The site also plans to syndicate the data it is collecting on local communities to marketers.

There has, of course, been a blind assumption that if AOL is investing, then hyperlocal is finally ready for prime time. It is too early to come to that conclusion — witness The New York Times’ pullback a few weeks back from The Local, its aborted hyperlocal effort.

But AOL CEO Tim Armstrong’s consistent and vocal support for Patch, which he founded in 2007 as a side project when he was at Google, is definitely seen as validation for multimillion-dollar investments by others. These include other news-centric town site nets such as Main Street Connect; content creator sites such as Examiner.com; and city sites that break out neighborhood info via ZIP codes such as Allbritton’s TBD.com in Washington, D.C., Citysquares and various newspaper efforts.

Hyperlocal commerce sites such as MerchantCircle, DataSphere, Matchbin and ShopCity should also be seen as part of the mix. So should sites that have hired human writers to supplement local news feeds, such as HelloMetro and Yahoo Local. Event sites such as Zvents and Eventful are also part of the mix, as are sites that have a lot of events and local in them, such as Center’d and AmericanTowns.

City guides that are more metro-oriented, such as Citysearch and Yelp, should also be part of the mix, as should social directory sites such as YP.com, Local.com and MojoPages.

So, what’s the prognosis? We certainly like what we see at Patch. The town sites are attractive; they invite interaction and have a good “human” feel — some more than others, often based on how long the town site has been open. The longer, the better.

The aggregation of events is good and so is their mapping. There is also some intriguing video that draws people in. I especially enjoyed the contentious town meeting in my hometown of Chappaqua, N.Y. A lot of the infrastructure is more economically produced by central resources.

But in truth, Patch’s success or failure won’t ride so much on content and feature differentiation. Fifty million dollars is a lot of money. But it represents the scope of the project, not the individual sites. You wouldn’t go to a Patch community such as Westport, Connecticut, and say it stands head and shoulders above other local alternatives, such as Hearst’s Westport News, Main Street Connect’s The Daily Westport or Westport Now. Patch’s young and enthusiastic reporters are sometimes better (or not better) than their young and enthusiastic reporters.

What Patch’s ultimate success really rides on is changing local user behavior so that people feel compelled to check out the local patch at least a couple of times a week. It has to be a bigger swath than the older home owners who make up the primary audience of community weeklies — it’s got to be everybody. And then they’ve got to sell SMBs from the directory level on up — much of the effort probably riding on self-serve. And then they’ve got to get the geotargeted national advertising going.

Patch hopes to get over the hump by having enough of a footprint in its communities to begin marketing in a major way, perhaps, I speculate, on TV and radio and online. For sure, it is an exciting effort, and no one should dismiss it out of hand. In fact, AOL is spending the money and making the effort that could, in theory, save local journalism and hyperlocal commerce for everyone.

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Jon Brod, EVP, AOL Ventures

Patch.com, AOL‘s hyperlocal network, will grow from its tally of 30 sites today to “hundreds” by the end of 2010, per an internal memo read by Business Insider (and that we saw on www.netnewscheck.com). The memo sites AOL’s goals to be “the global and local leader in sourcing, creating, producing and delivering high quality content,” and calls local “one of the most promising ‘white spaces’ on the Internet.”

AOL had previously said it would be investing $50 million into its local efforts during 2010. In November 2009, Patch.com President Warren Webster told us that Patch was just starting to sell advertising in the towns that it initially launched in. “We have a multi-prong revenue model, with fixed placement banners, classified ads and other products,” he said.

AOL Ventures EVP Jon Brod, the primary architect of AOL’s local strategy, is our opening keynoter at Marketplaces 2010 in San Diego March 22-24.

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