I am extremely excited to announce that Narcity Media Group's Community Round is now open to our Canadian readers & users 🎉
Over the last decade, Narcity Media Group ("NMG") has built a passionate community of city lovers across the country, coast to coast, from Québec City in the East to Vancouver in the West. Despite challenging legislation in Canada with Bill C-18, NMG is still reaching over 2.5 million Canadians monthly across its properties every month with over 25,000 new users creating accounts monthly.
In the last few months alone, we have now reached over 185,000 registered users across our sites while our mobile apps consistently rank in the Top #100 for News in the iOS App Store. We now understand, more than ever, that owning a direct relationship with our core users is the single most important thing we need to do. And to do that, we need to earn your trust and loyalty over and over again by delivering the best local content and experiences.
That being said, we have major ambitions to build a new sustainable local media business model for Canada and we have decided to raise money from our community to help us get there.
Narcity Media Group Equity Crowdfunding 2024 Promo Videowww.youtube.com
Why are we doing a round of financing in 2024?
Despite our audience size and our ambitions, we're in the midst of a major transformation.
Our ambition is to evolve into a tech company that unlocks the full value of the content we create, to level up our local economies and to build a new type of sustainable media business we’re all proud of. A key initiative in this transformation is the upcoming launch of Milla, a round-up and cashback program focused on savings and rewards. The platform will allow you to save and earn points (money) for engaging with our content as well for spending money at your favourite stores.
To help us finance this transformation and give us the runway to build significant traction, we've decided to raise our very first Community Round (equity crowdfunding round), and allow you, our reader, to participate in the upside.
What is Milla, your city loyalty platform?
In the next few months, we will be launching Milla, our city loyalty platform that rewards you for saving (round-ups) and doing the things you love in your city (reading articles, shopping local, watching relevant local ads).
A few months after launch, we will be launching our Merchant Program, which will be focused on onboarding local and national merchants to participate in our cashback offers.
The goal of the cashback program is to increase customer lifetime value and discovery for local merchants while incentivizing our users, you, for shopping there. We make our money mainly through contextual marketing & referral fees (so no upfront costs for merchants). It’s a win + win + win.
What does Milla have to do with MTL Blog?
Milla brings value for our users and merchant partners by unlocking the off-site experience of our MTL Blog users from the moment they leave the website. For years, MTL Blog has brought in dozens of millions of dollars in revenue to local businesses across the country through our fun listicles and social media stories, but we were never able to track the actual impact on the local economy.
Now, with Milla, MTL Blog users will be able to start benefiting directly from exploring their city, while saving money in an easy and effortless way through our frictionless round-up & cashback app. By tracking transaction data, we will be able to build a closed-loop advertising model that will benefit all merchants looking to grow their businesses in their communities.
What is equity crowdfunding and how does it work?
We partnered with FrontFundr, a Canadian equity crowdfunding platform that makes it easy for all Canadians to invest in Canada’s most exciting startup businesses, for as little as $500.
Equity Crowdfunding is a dynamic source of funding for startups and early stage businesses with high growth potential. Private companies raise funds in return for equity or shares from a large group of investors (aka “the crowd”).
Ready to invest?
Simply head to frontfundr.com/narcitymediagroup to invest today.
Whether you decide to invest or not, we appreciate you for being a reader and subscriber.
We will continue to inform, entertain and inspire you to connect to your city in every imaginable way.
Onward,
Chuck
Co-Founder & CEO of Narcity Media Group
Note for our US users:
Unfortunately this opportunity is only available for our Canadian readers via FrontFundr.com at the moment.