Happy Hour App Pours A Round Of Revenue

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 The whole point of happy hour is to get a little something extra, and the Portland Mercury’s Cocktail Compass app capitalizes on that drive from every possible angle. For users, it’s a lean-forward tool that geolocates a smartphone and then serves up a list of bars, ordered by proximity and garnished with contact details and drink specials. For the Mercury, it’s an effortless way to repurpose its trove of bar listings into an app that has numerous doors for the money to come in.

Users lean forward to find their way toward the closest watering hole that will save them money. The Mercury leans back and makes it.

Cocktail Compass’s simple premise was concocted by Erin Rackelman, a former Mercury staffer and current chief of business development for Portland-based Night & Day Studios, which developed the app jointly with the paper. Well-versed in the Mercury’s ever-updated listings of bars and restaurants (busy interns keep up with the ever-shifting terrain of closings and openings, along with a healthy flow of reader feedback), Rackelman saw a potential new platform for revenue.

“I knew all of that information was just sitting there,” Rackelman said. “On their end they didn’t have to do anything extra; everything was already there.”

That everything included listings for over 800 local bars, all of which instantly poured into the app from the Mercury’s proprietary Foundation CMS. Bar owners didn’t pay for inclusion, but they were presented with the option of enhanced listings, which include more details and a photo, along with a yellow highlight on their venue in the vertically-scrolling list.

Additional streams of revenue come in through a front door sponsorship, display ads on the app’s internal pages and click-to-call links to local cab services for users who’ve hit the tipping point. Ad sales are bundled with a twice-yearly print version of the listings, also called Cocktail Compass.

The app rolled out in Portland in April 2009 and with its sister paper, Seattle’s The Stranger, the following month (both papers are owned by Seattle-based Index Newspapers). A white label version has also been sold to nine other alt weeklies across the country that use the Foundation CMS (which was designed specifically for alternative media). Four more papers have signed on to launch the app later this spring.

Mercury publisher Rob Crocker said those new clients will be jumping on board just as the app gets its first major redesign in March, the highlight of which is a repositioning of separate city apps for Cocktail Compass under the umbrella of a single app.

For users, that means just one app in the store and the chance to toggle between different cities as part of its functionality. The redesign will also allow users to schedule happy hour meetings with friends further ahead than the data currently looks along with a graphic makeover.

In a market with no shortage of cocktail apps, Crocker said the Mercury’s differentiator is the quality of the content inside of it, particularly its freshness. Often, he said, competitors’ data is not well maintained. “What we’ve found is that if you provide that [stale] information in those apps, it becomes very unpopular very quickly, both to the users and to the merchants,” he said.

Those merchants are among those giving the most enthusiastic feedback so far, he added. “What’s important to us is having quality data and quality partners, so it has stayed very small, but I think that the quality has stayed much higher because of that,” Crocker said.

Traces of the Mercury’s edgy voice help, too (a disclaimer on each listing notes “If this information is vital to your success in love or business, you might want to call the bar and confirm!”).

And for many parched users at the end of a workday, the app has started to elbow its way to the bar of routine. “A lot of people get off of work, and the first thing they do is open their Cocktail Compass to find out where to go close by to get the best happy hour deals,” Crocker said. “It has done very well for us.”

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Vital stats:

Launched: 2009

Cost to consumer: Free

Compatible devices: iPhone, Android launching in March

White label version: Yes

Number of downloads: 70,000 for Portland iteration, 100,000-plus in Seattle

Revenue streams: Front page sponsorship, display ads (bundled with twice annual print publication), enhanced bar listings, click to call taxi links

Key characteristics: Serves up geolocated happy hour listings arranged by proximity to the user and features a countdown clock for each bar’s specials. Listings, which include click to call and map, are repurposed from twice-annual print publication and updated regularly, along with user feedback on bars. Enhanced listings feature more information and photos.