Exclusive by market
One Publisher per city or county. Nobody else sells your town, and no other CityKits market overlaps yours.
Own Your Market.
The Publisher OpportunityYou build the market. We build everything else. Exclusive territory, no buy-in, and 80% of what you grow.
The opening
The Platforms Local Businesses Rely On Are Quietly Losing Them
50%
drop in Facebook referral traffic to publishers in twelve months
6%
decline in Yelp restaurant and retail ad revenue, full year 2025
22%
of Angi service professionals lost in a single year
Local businesses still pay for reach they no longer get. The check clears. The phone stays quiet. Nobody owns the local audience anymore, and the owner of the shop on Main Street feels that long before an analyst writes it up.
Sources: Press Gazette; Yelp FY2025 results; Angi Q1 2026 investor materials.
The product
A CityKits Portal Is a Local Media Company, Not a Website
One local brand. One audience. One business profile that carries a company everywhere on the site.
A restaurant claims its profile once. After that it turns up in Food, posts an event, lists a line cook job, runs an ad, gets written about, and lands in Thursday's newsletter. Same record. Nine surfaces.
That connection is the product. Everything else is a directory.
Proof
It Is Already Live
DouglasCountyCO.com covers eight towns across Douglas County, Colorado. Independently owned, published by AAERO Media.
8
towns covered
2,547
businesses listed in Castle Rock and Parker alone
618
neighborhoods mapped
72
events live on the calendar
The platform works. The playbook works. What a new market needs now is somebody to run it.
The division of labor
You Sell. We Run Everything Else.
You, the Publisher
- Own the local relationships
- Sell and grow the Business Alliance
- Bring in advertisers and keep them
- Support the content with what you know locally
- Be the face of the brand in town
- Show up at the chamber, the ribbon cuttings, the games
Us, CityKits
- Website build, design and hosting
- Writers, editors and designers producing content
- Social media marketing and the newsletter, daily
- SEO, so the town finds you first
- Ad delivery, billing, collections and bad debt
- Every feature built once, shipped to all markets
You sell and you show up. We build, write, design, market, bill and support.
The revenue model
The Alliance Is the Base. The Upsells Are the Business.
Local Business Alliance
$49/mo
Enhanced listing, membership badge, and a seat in the local business community.
- Advertorials
- Social ads
- Display
- Retargeting
The membership gets you in the door and keeps you there. The upsells are where the money is. Both bill monthly. Both renew. And the book of business you build this year is still paying you in year three.
The economics
80% of Everything Above Baseline Is Yours
The first $2,500 of monthly market revenue covers what CityKits actually spends running your market: platform, hosting, ad delivery, billing, support, and the team producing content and running your social channels.
Every dollar above that splits 80/20 in your favor.
- No buy-in
- No franchise fee
- No territory purchase
- No monthly platform charge
You never write us a check, because we bill the advertiser and pay you your share. Short month? You owe nothing, and it never carries forward as a debt.
What that pays
Your Income Climbs Faster Than Your Market Does
| Market revenue / mo | You keep / mo | Your share of gross |
|---|---|---|
| $5,000 | $2,000 | 40% |
| $7,500 | $4,000 | 53% |
| $10,000 | $6,000 | 60% |
| $15,000 | $10,000 | 67% |
| $20,000 | $14,000 | 70% |
| $30,000 | $22,000 | 73% |
Baseline is a fixed number, not a percentage. It doesn't grow when your market does. So the bigger you build, the more of every dollar you keep.
Illustrative model based on a $2,500 monthly baseline and an 80% share above it. Not a projection of any market's results.
A modeled market
What 250 Members Actually Looks Like
250
Alliance members at $49/mo
$12,25050
of them buying upsells at $250/mo average
$12,500Total
market revenue per month
$24,750Less the $2,500 baseline, times 80%
$17,800 / mo $213,600 / yrThis is a model, not a forecast. It assumes 250 Alliance members, a 20% upsell attach rate, a $250 average upsell, a $2,500 monthly baseline and an 80% share. CityKits has no operating Publisher history, and no market is guaranteed to reach these numbers.
The honest part
This Doesn't Pay You in Week Two
-
1
Months 1 to 3
Build
You learn the market and walk the main streets. Founding members sign at a charter rate. Our team puts the content and the calendar live behind you. Income is real, but it's small.
-
2
Months 4 to 6
Traction
The Alliance starts stacking and the first upsells attach. This is the stretch where people either find their rhythm or work out that this isn't for them.
-
3
Months 7 to 12
Compounding
Renewals pile on top of new sales. Audience and newsletter growth start doing some of the selling for you. You clear baseline earlier every month, so your share of gross keeps climbing.
Most networks in this business hide the ramp. Then they lose half their operators before month twelve. So we'll say it up front: plan for a runway, and judge us on your first full year.
Territory
One Market. Yours.
No purchase, no fee
You don't buy the territory and you don't pay to hold it. Nothing to finance. Nothing to lose.
Yours while you run it
The territory stays with you for as long as the market is being actively built to the standards we agree on.
Room to grow
Publishers who prove a market can take on the territory next door, or bring in an associate to run it alongside them.
We assign markets one at a time, in conversation. Nobody here is racing to plant flags.
The ideal publisher
Built for Somebody Who Already Sells This Town
Real estate agents fit this better than almost anyone, and the reasons are practical rather than flattering.
The relationships exist already
They spend every week with the same business owners you need in the Alliance.
Commission is normal to them
A ramp doesn't frighten somebody who already eats what they kill.
They have income while they build
That solves the runway problem that washes out most new operators.
They bring the IDX feed
Their MLS access switches on the real estate vertical from day one.
What the agent gets
Exclusive real estate presence on the town's homepage, so no competing agent buys placement in your market. Neighborhood pages, market data and home search all feed your pipeline instead of a national portal's.
Agents pay $300 to $500 a month in smaller metros, and past $1,000 in major ones, for zip code lead share on Zillow. This is your own channel instead.
IDX runs under your broker's authority with the brokerage identified on the display, per NAR policy. You supply the feed. We integrate it.
Fit
Who This Works For
This is for you if
- You already know people in your town
- You're comfortable asking for the sale
- You want to build something with your name on it
- You can fund six months of ramp
- You'd rather own a market than hold a job
This is not for you if
- You need predictable income starting month one
- You want to write, not sell
- You're looking for passive income
- You want somebody to hand you leads
- You aren't willing to be seen in public as the brand
We'd rather lose you on this slide than in month seven.
Next
Let's Talk About Your Market
The next conversation isn't an application. It's a look at your town: the businesses, the audience, and whether the numbers on this page actually hold up where you live.