Speed is not everything but it could count toward your audience chosing nothing instead.
Consider the following screenshots. At top are geo-location informations for webservers of St. Louis area media websites. At bottom are speed test informations for each site. I ran these tests 3 times for each site and chose the lowest numbers for each example. You can find the exact same information yourself and run the very same tests using Geoip Flagfox and Pingdom Tools respectively.
Stldesktop is, right now as of 7-16-2012, a 1 man operation
It is running on a very minimal virtual host server configuration. It does not have a staff of journalists, editors or photographers neither does it have dedicated hosting or anything else that would require it to have a large budget and charge crazy fees to advertisers or sponsors to cover such. Yet, even dealing with those kind of underdog circumstances, it is right now faster than the sites listed above that have Million Dollar budgets and technical staffs of 5, 10 or more people.
Look back through that list and note that stldesktop is the only one that is among the top fastest 85% of sites ever tested by Pingdom. The closest any other gets is Charter.net at 74%. Those 11% points are equal to a 15% increase! Also note that these tests were done after midnight on a Monday morning when there is relatively no one online and system administrators are most likely not doing anything but letting the servers idle. I have tested these sites on weekdays in the 9am - 11am high traffic times and still received similar results: stldesktop at 1.09s, 1.16s, 1.11s while the others usually just go up by 2, 3 and sometimes as much as 7 or 8 whole seconds. If stldesktop's main server were not 1 Virtual server but 1 or 2 Dedicated servers and not located in Philadelphia but split between St. Louis and Chicago... load time would be well under 1 second. But, 1 person with nearly 0 funds simply can not afford that.
With sponsors stldesktop could afford to bring content to the site, run promotions at area events and enact cooperative adverts with entities from opposite sides of the STL area
Consider Grafton Illinois or Sullivan Missouri. How does one of those cities communicate to the residents of the other "If you just want to get out of town this weekend... Come here!" ? The sad truth is that they don't. They don't because there is no mechanism for them to do so. Sure, there are lakes the size of the St Louis Post that they can each throw a hook into but very few residents of either community even read the St Louis Post... so they don't because it's just not worth it. Which begs the question: Would they pay any attention at all to stldesktop? Answer: They would if it was in their face! Meaning if they felt a part of it, if there were Grafton and Sullivan based bloggers on it and there were banners at the front of concert stages in their cities with stldesktop written on them informing them of it.
Does it need to happen?
The answer to that is simply no. For instance, residents of the St. Charles area are doing just fine with their hometown papers and online resources such as the St. Charles Patch right? Residents get their local news briefings and local businesses get what? They get to compete with a Google adwords sidebar that looks like this:
How many local businesses listed there? 0. And why the advertisements for dieting, watching my weight and penny stocks? For some reason Google thinks that I am fat AND poor. That's nice considering I've not visited any pages relative to those subjects. It's pretty clear that Google thinks of people in the mid-west as being both fat and broke by default. Bring up a similar page from a Denver, L.A. or New York IP address sometime and you'll see that it is true. I don't think that is very polite of them to make such demographical assumtions based upon the location of the visitor. Do you? Better still what does the average St. Louis internet user think of that practice?
So does it need to happen? No. But if it does local businesses, area residents and St. Louis metro area communities will benefit. How so? By being bombarded less and less with competitive adverts from companies located in California or New York and Big Box Corporations that take local monies and pay people in China $.15/hr to manufacture lower quality goods in inhumane working conditions. Communities would see an increased awareness by other communities 50-100 miles away from them as to what they have to offer them as out of town visitors. That's just for starters.
In the end it is up to you to decide what is worth what to you. I will be doing my thing and chugging along toward making a site that flat out kicks ass no matter what. If you should happen to be in a position of sponsoring this endeavor I would be more than happy to hear from you and appreciate even an email saying "Good luck! Here's a tip: Don't take any wooden nickels" which you can do at any time by mailing: sponsoring @ stldesktop dot com