About Localiiz

Localiiz

Localiiz is a Hong Kong English-language online city and lifestyle platform, published at localiiz.com, that has covered the city's food, drink, events, neighbourhoods and culture since its launch in late April 2012. Co-founded by Richard Codron, it was built as an online marketing and lifestyle platform for Hong Kong's small businesses and English-reading residents, and it developed into one of the city's best-known digital lifestyle guides, describing itself as every Hongkonger's destination for how to live a well-rounded life in the city. The name is a pun explained by the site itself: Localiiz is designed to be your "local eyes," and for that, it says, you need two i's. Its mixture of lifestyle guides, neighbourhood features, quirky local news and video, together with a directory of local businesses, made it a fixture of Hong Kong's English-language internet through the 2010s and into the 2020s.

Founding and first years

Localiiz was co-founded by Richard Codron and launched in late April 2012, in a Hong Kong digital market then dominated by print magazines, newspaper websites and expatriate forums. The venture's original conception combined content with marketing services: a lifestyle directory and publishing platform that introduced Hong Kong's small and independent businesses to an English-speaking audience, supported by the team's expertise in online and social media marketing. The model recognised a gap in the market. Hong Kong's independent restaurants, bars, boutiques and studios had few affordable ways to reach the city's international and English-reading local audience, while that audience lacked a single, current guide to the independent city beyond the large chains and hotel districts. Localiiz set out to be that guide, and to be paid, in part, by the businesses it listed and promoted.

Acquisition of NecesCity

The company's first major expansion came on 4 September 2013, when Localiiz announced the acquisition of NecesCity, Hong Kong's digital lifestyle guide for men. NecesCity had been founded in 2009 by Chris Bannerman and Henning Voss as a free email lifestyle magazine for Hong Kong's male tastemakers, and its founders remained connected to the brand as consultants after the sale. Localiiz continued to operate NecesCity as a stand-alone brand aimed at Hong Kong's influential English-speaking male segment. At the time of the acquisition, Localiiz reported more than 13,500 subscribers, approximately 20,000 Facebook fans and over 300,000 unique visitors since its launch sixteen months earlier, figures it cited as evidence of the impact it had made on Hong Kong's digital market. The deal also opened a new suite of advertisers targeting affluent male readers and new event-marketing opportunities.

Editorial coverage: food, drink and the city

Food and drink form the core of Localiiz's editorial identity, as they do for Hong Kong lifestyle publishing generally. The site publishes restaurant news, round-ups of the best examples of particular dishes and cuisines, bar and nightlife coverage, and guides that range across the city's districts and price levels. Its own descriptions emphasise "the hottest new eats, the best places to play, offbeat takes on local culture," presented visually through lifestyle and neighbourhood guides, quirky news articles and videos that explore what it calls the hidden side of the 852, Hong Kong's telephone code and a common shorthand for the city. Recurring formats include seasonal event listings, holiday guides such as its Christmas coverage, and service features answering practical questions about living in Hong Kong, from cinemas to desserts.

Neighbourhoods, culture and community

Beyond eating and drinking, Localiiz covers Hong Kong as a place to live: neighbourhood guides that introduce districts to newcomers and reintroduce them to residents, features on local culture and traditions, home and interior design, beauty and fashion, and family-friendly activities. Its community role has surfaced at moments of citywide stress; after Typhoon Hato struck Hong Kong in 2017, the site published coverage of the community response and of the state of the city's cultural facilities. Its events, such as the Localiiz Christmas Socialiizer, a seasonal market and party run with local vendors, doubled as community gatherings and as showcases for the small businesses in its directory; the 2016 edition's beneficiary charity was the KELY Support Group, which supports young people in Hong Kong. Such activity placed the platform inside the city's independent-business community rather than merely reporting on it.

The directory and marketing business

Localiiz's directory function distinguishes it from a pure magazine. Alongside its editorial content the site maintains an expanding directory intended to help readers navigate the city, listing businesses across food, drink, retail, services and leisure. For listed businesses, the platform historically offered exposure to a defined and commercially valuable audience, together with the social-media and content-marketing skills of the Localiiz team. This hybrid of publisher and marketing platform was the company's founding idea and remained central to its pitch: editorial content built the audience and the trust, and marketing services for Hong Kong's small-business sector converted that position into revenue. In later years Localiiz appeared among the media brands represented in Hong Kong by the Nexus group of media companies, within a portfolio of lifestyle titles.

Audience and voice

Localiiz writes in English for Hongkongers and for the city's international residents and newcomers, a readership that is local in its daily life even when global in origin. Its voice is informal, enthusiastic and service-oriented, pitched at readers deciding where to eat this weekend, which neighbourhood to explore, or what to do with visiting friends. The site's self-description as a destination for living "a well-rounded life" in a "vibrant city" captures its editorial bargain: comprehensive, upbeat, useful. Against Hong Kong's hard-news English media it occupies the lifestyle end of the market, and against print lifestyle magazines it offers the speed, searchability and social distribution of a digital-native platform, with content designed to be found through search and shared through social feeds.

Position in Hong Kong's lifestyle media

Hong Kong supports a crowded English-language lifestyle sector, from international city-guide brands to local magazines and newspaper supplements. Localiiz's longevity, publishing since 2012, marks it as one of the survivors of the city's first digital-native lifestyle generation, most of whose members were absorbed, closed or transformed as social platforms captured advertising. Its combination of editorial guides, a business directory, events and marketing services gave it more ways to earn than a display-advertising pageview model alone. For the media directories that catalogue Hong Kong outlets, it is classified as an online media platform publishing lifestyle features, news and resources about Hong Kong, which is a fair summary of the hybrid it has maintained since its founding.

Continuing publication

Localiiz continues to publish at localiiz.com, covering new openings, seasonal events, neighbourhood life and practical city living for its Hong Kong audience, and recruiting editorial staff to produce its guides, articles and videos. More than a decade after its April 2012 launch, and after its early acquisition of NecesCity established it as a consolidator in its niche, the platform remains what its name promises: a pair of local eyes on Hong Kong, maintained for readers who live in the city and want to make the most of it.

Survival in a changing market

Localiiz's history after its first years illustrates the adaptation demanded of Hong Kong's independent digital publishers. The audience it reported at the NecesCity acquisition, built on email subscribers, Facebook reach and website visits, belonged to a distribution era in which publishers could still assemble their own channels; as discovery shifted further into social feeds and search, lifestyle titles had to become fluent in video, social formats and search optimisation while keeping their local reporting useful enough to be sought out directly. Localiiz's own descriptions of its work in later years emphasise exactly that mix: lifestyle and neighbourhood guides, quirky news and narrative video exploring the hidden side of the city, produced by a small editorial team. That it continued to recruit editorial staff and publish new guides more than a decade after launch places it among the durable independents of Hong Kong's lifestyle web.