More than 3 Million Votes and counting...

Today, CityVoter announced in a press release that we have passed an important milestone for the company and for our partners nationwide. We've verified more than 3 million votes on behalf of local businesses and media companies. We stand by the results of our contests because we go to great lengths to make sure votes are valid and there is no ballot stuffing. People are encouraged to get people to vote for them, but we make sure votes are legitimate so our contests are fun and fair.

Why is this big news? We only had 2 "best of" city contests in 2006 when we launched our website. This 3 Million number represents a huge amount of engagement, growth, and energy in our cities over the past 3 years. For example, we just finished our 3rd year of voting in Detroit and they had more than 180,000 official votes. We just finished our 3rd year of voting in Denver and they had more than 109,000 official votes. We're smack in the middle of our 2nd year contest in Seattle, and that city is cooking with more than 86,000 votes. Year-over-year, media brands are building social media experiences with CityVoter that really engage their local audiences.

We're proud that people are passionate about local businesses and take time to register to submit their vote. We're even more proud that they take time to write recommendations to help others. In San Diego, our year three contest yielded a 76% increase in recommendations from the year before. And in Indianaopolis, we had 100% increase in recommendations. This is tens of thousands of recommendations in just a few weeks.

I'm very happy to share the news and congratulate our partners and the CityVoter team for keeping true to our mission. There are many online contests that trade integrity for web site traffic and let people vote as many times as they want. We remain focused on discovering the "best of" every city by encouraging people to share their genuine recommendations. Business owners appreciate this and tell us all the time. They love reading all the great feedback from their fans and friends...as of today, we all have more than 3 million reasons to say thank you to their loyal local customers.