With more than 800 Patch sites providing hyperlocal news across the United States, the Patch Network was ranked No. 5 by the OMMA Magazine’s list of the 100 Most Important Online Publishers.

OMMA is the magazine of online media, marketing and advertising.

Patch is in good company, bested only by Facebook at No. 1, followed by The New York Times, The Huffington Post and Netflix. The Huffington Post is an affiliate of Patch, both of which are owned by AOL, which ranked no. 6.

Earlier: Patch launches iPhone app.

Patch, which publishes dozens of sites in the Chicagoland Area, ranked above Google, The Wall Street Journal, CNN.com, the Associated Press, NPR, ABC, YouTube, The Washington Post, USA Today, National Geographic, the Los Angeles Times and US News & World Report.

Rounding out the top 10 are Google (no. 7) followed by The Wall Street Journal, Fox News and CNN.com.

Here’s what OMMA had to say: “Founded by former Google sales chief Tim Armstrong before he was CEO of AOL, local online news reporting hub Patch has since been acquired by AOL and is now the core of the company's hyper-local media strategy. With a network of more than 500 community news reporting sites, Patch now rivals much, maybe most, of local newspaper and TV coverage.”