The hyperlocal news platform Patch has been criticized for a number of reasons, including its traffic, which some say should be higher based on the organization’s operating costs.

Apparently, the property has been working on it. It tripled its UV traffic between December 2010 and December 2011 according to comScore data released this week.

This makes Patch the fourth largest regional/local property behind Yelp (#1); CityGrid (#2), Yahoo! Local (#3), and followed by CBS Local (#5). In December 2010, it ranked #10.

Last month, Patch, which currently has 863 sites in 22 states, including Washington, D.C. showed a 5% traffic bump over November.

“Given that the average Patch site is just over a year old, we couldn’t be happier with the traffic growth we’ve shown to date,” said Warren Webster, president of Patch Media.

Recently, Patch, which is now driven by more than 1,000 journalists and 13,000 bloggers, launched its first three Latino sites. It has also revved up coverage of the 2012 election season in primary-state Patches, among others.

Editor-in-chief Brian Farnham, currently in New Hampshire, commented to FishbowlNY about the role that local news plays:

It was great to see Patch in the thick of things in a nationally spotlighted political circus like the primaries. Walking around Manchester with the editors and seeing all the interactions they had with local leaders who they’d been working with for months really hammered home how all politics really is local.