Best Of, run properly
The contest runs on your domain, not ours. The search traffic, the reader emails and the winners directory all land on your side of the line — and stay there, all year, every year. Laurel is the engine underneath: one quiet “Powered by Laurel” line at the foot of the page, and your masthead on everything above it.
No signup form, no credit card, no trial that expires. Every Laurel contest starts with a conversation.
Food & Drink
12 of 40
One vote a day. Come back tomorrow.
Running totals are never shown. Not to voters, not to entrants, not to sponsors.
Built for the titles that actually run these contests.
An annual Best Of issue, a real rate card, and a digital team of two.
A contest everyone in town knows, and nobody left to babysit it.
One or two people running the whole season between other work.
How it works
Everything else is the part that used to eat a month of somebody’s year.
Last year’s ballot as a spreadsheet, or a starter pack for your market type. Your business list comes across as CSV with a preview of what every row will do before anything is written.
You decide the placements, the prices and how much inventory exists. The storefront opens with your numbers in it, not ours.
Nominations open on your domain under your masthead. From here Laurel runs the season and asks you for a decision only where a person is genuinely needed.
Revenue
A local business finds its category, picks a placement, pays by card and uploads its own artwork. Nobody on your side has to be awake.
The one deliberate human step is the last one. Creative does not run under your masthead until someone on your team has looked at it.
Title sponsor, supporting sponsor, group banner, category placement, interstitial, enhanced listing, sponsored write-in, custom deep link. Your rate card, your prices, your inventory limits.
Laurel charges a flat subscription and takes no percentage of a sale your own team made.
The contest, handled
Anyone can collect votes. These are the parts that turn a contest into a month of somebody’s life.
Nominations
A voter types, picks their business from live Google Places results, and the nomination arrives with a real address and a real phone number attached. The duplicates you would have merged by hand in February mostly never get created in January.
And where the match is not certain, Laurel refuses to guess.
The transition
Laurel closes nominations, resolves everything unambiguous on its own and hands you one bulk confirm. What is left comes one card at a time — thin fields, ties, empty categories — each with a recommended default and a one-tap alternative. It is resumable: half tonight, half tomorrow.
Exceptions one at a time, never a wall of spreadsheet.
Integrity
Suspicious votes are flagged, clustered and explained in words a person can act on — and the publish step warns you when a flagged cluster is larger than the margin. Nothing is silently rejected, because a false positive is a reader who thinks your contest is rigged. Only a person disqualifies a vote, and the record of who did it is written in the same breath.
When a local business calls to argue, you have the answer.
All year long
Winners get a permanent profile on your domain with their whole award history — “winner 2022 to 2026” — plus finalists, a map and structured data for search engines. Businesses that close stay, marked closed, with their record intact, because the award they won in 2021 still happened.
This is the part that separates a contest from a Best Of page nobody visits after March. It is a civic reference for your town, it is indexed under your domain, and it is the reason next year’s nominations already know who exists.
See a published directoryWinner
2022–2026
Best barbecue
Your wordmark sits here
In build
The award RECORD is live today — every win, every year, per business, on the directory and in the export. The downloadable badge kit that turns it into a window cling and a web embed is still being built, and we would rather tell you that now than at launch.
Laurel has not run a public season yet, so there is nothing here that would be true. When the pilot finishes, this is where its numbers and the publisher’s own words go — measured, dated and attributed. Until then we would rather show you an empty frame than a made-up one.
[PILOT METRIC]
Ballot completion rate
[PILOT METRIC]
Self-serve sponsorship revenue
[PILOT METRIC]
Duplicate entrants after transition
[TESTIMONIAL]
Pricing
No revenue share on the advertising you sell, no per-vote pricing, no setup fee hidden in a footnote, and no annual commitment. Pay annually and you pay for ten months instead of twelve.
One publisher, one market, one contest a year.
$100 per month
or $1,000 a year — 2 months free
A group running several markets under one bill.
$300 per month
or $3,000 a year — 2 months free
A regional or state-wide group with many markets.
$500 per month
or $5,000 a year — 2 months free
A custom agreement — scale, limits and terms set with us.
We haven’t set a public price for this one. Tell us what you run and we’ll quote it.
No lock-in. There is no minimum term and no cancellation fee. Stop paying and your data goes dormant, never deleted: everything is still there, and turning it back on restores it exactly as it was.
Allowances are meters, not walls. Going over an allowance bills a block; it never stops a vote being counted or a contest working, mid-season or otherwise.
The same on every tier. One “Powered by Laurel” line sits at the foot of every voter page, on every plan, and no tier removes it. Everything above it is yours.
Questions
Answered from the software as it is today, including the parts that are not finished.
It stays, and it compounds. Your entrant list, your nominations, your votes and your published winners belong to the project rather than to one season, so year five still shows year one — which is what makes a business able to say “winner five years running”. If you stop paying, you keep the period you have paid for and the account then goes dormant: the admin turns read-only and badge kits stop resolving. Nothing is deleted, and turning it back on restores it exactly as it was. One thing worth saying plainly — today a dormant account’s public winners directory stays up rather than going dark. The switch to take it down is written and deliberately not turned on.
Yes — that is the point of the product. The contest and the winners directory run on your hostname, so the links, the search traffic and the archive accrue to you and not to us. Being exact about how it works today: there is no self-serve domain screen yet. You point a CNAME at us and we set the hostname and its certificate up with you during onboarding, once. If you would rather not touch DNS at all, a contest can run on a laurelvoting.com subdomain instead — but then the SEO is ours, not yours, and we will tell you that rather than let you find out in a year.
Stripe, on our account. We are the merchant of record for your subscription and for every sponsorship a business buys, which means the buyer checks out on Stripe’s own hosted page, no card number ever reaches your systems or ours, and the PCI burden is not yours. Your share of self-serve sponsorship revenue is reconciled onto a statement you can download and paid out by bank transfer. That transfer is made by a person on our side today, not by an automated payout API — it is reliable, it is not instant.
Every submission is scored as it arrives — shared devices, address and subnet velocity, disposable and sequentially generated email addresses, bot user agents, implausibly fast completion — and anything that looks wrong is flagged, clustered and explained to you in plain language, with a warning when a flagged cluster is bigger than the margin in that category. What Laurel will not do is quietly reject a vote. A false positive is a reader who thinks your contest is rigged, so only a person disqualifies anything, and the database itself refuses to change a vote unless the record of who did it is written in the same breath. Voting resets at midnight in your timezone, and running tallies are never public.
No, and the storefront is built on the assumption that you do not have one. A local business finds its category, picks a placement, pays by card and uploads its own artwork with nobody from your side involved — at two in the morning, if that is when they get to it. There is one deliberate human step: the creative does not go live until someone on your team approves it, because you should not be the last to know what is running under your masthead. If you do have a rep, an attribution link credits them and changes the split.
Partly, and here is the line. Your business list and your category structure come across as CSV — forgiving headers, a template to start from, and a preview showing what each row will do before anything is written. What you cannot bring across yet is past winners or past vote totals: there is no historical results import, so your first season on Laurel starts the archive fresh and the multi-year win history builds from there. If prior years matter to you, raise it on the call — it is on the roadmap and it is not built.
Book a demo
Tell us the publication and the market and we load one of your past ballots into a staging contest before the call — so what you are looking at is your categories and your businesses, not a generic demo with somebody else’s town in it.
A real person replies. There is no sequence, no drip, and we will not add you to a list.
Not ready to talk yet? Open a live ballot and vote in it — no account, nothing to install.
Four questions. It takes about twenty seconds and it goes to a person, not a queue.