CityVoter.com, a review and “best of” voting site that powers websites for TV stations and other traditional media outlets, has signed a new deal that will boost its count of Hearst-Argyle TV affiliates from five markets to eight. The old markets include Sacramento, West Palm Beach, Orlando, Milwaukee and Jackson. The new markets include Omaha, Kansas City and Louisville. Besides Hearst Argyle, CityVoter works with stations owned by Fox, Gazette Communications, McGraw-Hill, and Post-Newsweek.
Sacramento is the oldest Hearst-Argyle market with CityVoter. Since launching on KCRA.com in February 2007, the “KCRA A-List” has attracted more than 60,000 registered users, who have logged more than 200,000 votes. The 2008 Best of the A-List received more than 120,000 votes –a third higher than 2007.
In addition, users have posted more than 45,000 business reviews and added more than 2,000 new businesses to the guide – which now features over 3,000 local business profiles. Sacramento Sponsors of the A List include McDonalds, Tires Direct and Cache Creek Arts.
Just one more venture where the “city guide” concept of monetizing is a flawed business model because it presents a false value proposition to the local business -Meaning these sites have very limited users (local consumers). It’s about eyeballs people! What local business cares about their rating and reviews if the site doesn’t deliver a reasonable amount of traffic? City Voter is a terrible search engine – a user only gets the local businesses that have been sold a sponsorship by the third party reseller, the local radio, TV station or print publication. I typed in “office furniture” and got florists because the local media company hasn’t sold any office furniture businesses into the local guide. You only get one chance in this world of Internet users.
CityVoter is just one more player behind the 100’s in the long tail of local search – the tail begins after the 95% factor of all searches that originate on Google, Yahoo, MSN and AOL. With the exception of “Yelp”, a foodie review site, Cityvoter is just another Kudzu (talk about a terrible name!)