When CityVoter.com launched in 2005, its founder and CEO Josh Walker expected to make money from hundreds then thousands of small business owners.

It didn't turn out that way.

“We were ready to help the small business owners compete with big, scary media companies,” says Walker. “Well, it turns out those big scary companies need our help even more. They're dealing with really seismic shifts in their business model. We're certainly taking a more humble approach to the challenges they face.”

But while humility is rare in a successful Internet start-up, don't mistake it for lack of confidence. In more than dozen markets, CityVoter has already achieved good results for stations—by custom-building turnkey social networking sites about local businesses. Their customers can vote for, talk about and even post photos of their favorite local burger joint, concert venue, hair salon, cosmetic surgeon or whatever.

Each featured local business is given its own MySpace-style Web page, which it can customize with information and photos and comments from happy customers. Collectively, these pages constitute an ever-growing consumer guide, organized topically and by locality—often down to the neighborhood level.

“If we launch a [consumer] guide with a thousand businesses, we will double the size of that guide in two months,” says Walker. “We've seen that happen every single time we've launched, and we've done this in 15 different cities.”

With an average of 45 votes per business, and with every consumer voting between two and five times, the Web traffic piles up quickly. “We've never launched a guide that drew any less than 50,000 unique visitors.”

The key to CityVoter's success is counterintuitive. Local businesses aren't the main advertisers; they're the content.

A veteran of Internet commerce think tank Forrester Research, Walker knew better than to try to squeeze listing fees from cash-strapped small businesses. “Instead we focus on how to make the business owners feel special, and motivate them to send all their customers to our site.”

In turn, the stations generate revenue by selling ad space on their CityVoter-powered Web pages to businesses with much deeper pockets than the mom-and-pop operations vying for customer votes. Typical banner ads include national brands like Miracle Gro, Ford and Mercedes-Benz.

CityVoter makes sure that each site is locally-branded and closely identified with the client TV station. In fact, Walker credits much of his company's success to each station's “emotional connection and interaction with the community ... that cannot be replicated by national media outlets or search engines.”

Besides national banner ads, “our client stations have sold a number of umbrella sponsorships,” Walker says.

Fox O&O WJW Cleveland sold its MyFoxCleveland HotList to the University of Akron. Post Newsweek's WDIV Detroit sold its 4 The Best Guide  to the Detroit Convention & Visitors Bureau, while KCRG Cedar Rapids, Iowa, sold its A-List to Community Savings Bank.

And because visitors must register in order to vote, they self-generate a powerful cache of marketing data with which stations can generate still more sales. One satisfied customer is Adrianne Anderson, VP of creative services of Fox-owned KTTV Los Angeles, whose MyFoxLA HotList was profiled in Market Share last September.

“This project is like a mini focus group,” said Anderson at the HotList's launch. “As a marketer, I can't think of anything better than having this ongoing database of consumer preferences.”

One reason the CityVoter model works so effectively with station Web sites is that it was designed to meet the needs of station sales departments—a result made possible by one of its first clients, WBZ Boston, and the rest of the CBS Television Stations group.

In a shocking departure from the arrogance typical of digital marketing gurus, Walker and his team presumed they needed to learn more about the traditional TV sales biz.

“We literally sat in their sales pit for a few weeks to really understand how they work,” recalls Walker. “Some TV sales people have been selling and renewing 30-second spots for years. It's very different to cold call and to be looking for $20,000-$30,000 sales as opposed to six figure deals.”

And because modern TV sales departments have no time or personnel to waste, CityVoter quickly learned they had to provide help both in closing sales and in growing the content—that is, encouraging local businesses and their customers to participate.  “That's why we've created a tremendous amount of collateral material to help them with the sales process," Walker says.

Another satisfied station is McGraw-Hill's KGTV San Diego, where the 10News.Com A-Listdrew over 28,000 visitor comments and 66,000 votes in just eight weeks.

“The idea went off like a rocketship,” says Walker | More …