• by Lynn Russo , February 21, 2006

Surf the Internet for any local city Web site and you'll generally find either a site owned by an offline media property like a daily newspaper, or one that's part of a chain of local city sites run by a national online player, such as About.com or Citysearch. OnMilwaukee.com, however, is neither. It's an independent site that thrives unencumbered by the baggage of an offline parent company.

What makes the business model and the site itself unique? For starters, OnMilwaukee has successfully competed against other media properties in its hometown for seven years. In fact, the site considers itself a magazine rather than a dot-com because of its robust content. It claims to be the No. 2 media property in Milwaukee behind the daily newspaper, The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, with 40,000 registered users and nearly 30,000 daily visitors. OnMilwaukee even caught the eye of President Bush when he visited the city in May 2005.

Not bad for a business conceived on napkins in a Chinese restaurant, which launched at a time when local Milwaukee advertisers weren't spending a dime on digital media.

"We built OnMilwaukee.com as a magazine that people like us would want to read," says Andy Tarnoff, the site's publisher and cofounder. "There was a void in the marketplace at the time. The twentysomething, fresh-out-of-college young professional knows why they live in Milwaukee, but existing media didn't take advantage of the fact that it's a quirky place and has blue-collar roots. We portray Milwaukee differently than everyone else, but we're just telling the stories we see in this community."

Today, the lifestyle and entertainment site boasts such national ad brands as Northwest Airlines, Dell, and Verizon, as well as the Wisconsin Lottery and the Milwaukee County Transit System. "A lot of these companies work with us because we were out doing all the marketing and grassroots work that got them in before they might have been ready to advertise elsewhere," says Jeff Sherman, president and cofounder. "But what kept them was the quality of the content and the growing number of visitors."

A visit by the president didn't hurt; Bush stopped in Milwaukee last spring to give a speech on Social Security and decided to give OnMilwaukee a call. "They said, 'The president wants to stop by a young, technology-oriented company,'" Tarnoff recalls. Bush chatted with the staff and asked some questions. Then the OnMilwaukee crew let him push the button to upload a pre-written article about his visit.

The high-profile event helped put the site on the map, with coverage from as far away as London. More than 1,000 sites link to OnMilwaukee's RSS feeds, including Time Warner's Road Runner service. Site traffic has increased 60 percent since December 2004, and on average, the site receives 750,000 total visitors per month. "That's a lot of eyeballs in a city of just a million people," Tarnoff notes. "We're changing the media landscape."