It’s a new year — and a new opportunity for local businesses and organizations to reach Arlingtonians via ARLnow.
Our revamped 2024 Media Kit is out, with a newly optimized set of options for making a big local impression.
From display advertising to sponsored content to email marketing, ARLnow is proud to deliver the best bang for your hard-earned local advertising buck. Our offerings remain affordable for small local businesses, while also providing high-impact bundle options for larger organizations.
If it seems like most everybody in town is reading ARLnow, it’s because they are. Along with your targeted social and search ads, advertise with ARLnow in 2024 and reach a broad swath of the community.
Email us at [email protected] or call 703-348-0583 and our Arlington-based team will be happy to help. Alternatively, you can learn more about our self-serve advertising options here.
Thank you to ARLnow’s many advertisers for helping to keep the site free for the entire community to read over the past 14 years.
As another year comes to a close, ARLnow’s advertisers — along with members of the ARLnow Press Club — have helped us continue to report on your community.
To the long-term and new advertisers alike, we say: thank you for supporting local news in Arlington.
Interested in reaching hundreds of thousands of readers while supporting local reporting in your community? Check out our new 2024 media kit.
Announcement on ARLnow (left) and promoted in our daily newsletter (right)
Local companies and community organizations share a challenge: figuring out how to get the word out quickly and cost effectively.
Good news: ARLnow has you covered.
Our recently revamped Announcements feature lets you self-publish an announcement, with an accompanying photo, directly on the website and our email newsletter. Fill out one form, and you’re done.
For just $99 your message appears:
On the ARLnow homepage*
Below ARLnow articles*
In the ARLnow newsletter*
In search engine results
The homepage gets 100,000 to 150,000 weekly views while our email newsletter has 16,000 active subscribers. Also, for an extra fee, we’ll boost your announcement via our Facebook and Twitter accounts, with about 100,000 followers total.
Amid the economic uncertainty of 2022, ARLnow’s advertisers (along with members of the ARLnow Press Club) have helped us continue to report on your community.
We wanted to take this opportunity to thank those that have advertised with us so far this year (as of Sept. 1). This list includes numerous long-term ad clients, who have supported us for many years.
To the long-term and new advertisers alike, we say: thank you for supporting local news in Arlington.
Board Chair Katie Cristol during the Tuesday, Feb. 15 County Board meeting (via Arlington County)
(Updated 3:45 p.m. on 2/22/22) A typo in a recent public hearing notice has had some larger consequences for Arlington County.
The error — an incorrect date printed on posters around town — also sparked a County Board discussion yesterday (Tuesday) about finding more effective ways to communicate with residents about upcoming hearings and projects.
This is a recurring conversation for Board members, who have now critiqued the county engagement processes for being neither penetrative nor inclusive enough.
Currently, the county posts signs at and near near the sites of future land-use projects, per its zoning ordinances. It also prints advertisements in the Washington Times newspaper to meet state public notice laws.
The fliers posted this time around bore the wrong date: Feb. 19, or this Saturday, instead of Feb. 12, when the County Board actually met.
As a result, most of the hearing items impacted — including plans for a church moving to Ballston, a new daycare coming near Clarendon and a private school opening in a church near Crystal City — will be rescheduled for a meeting on Saturday, March 19.
A hearing for the Marbella Apartments, a forthcoming affordable housing project near Rosslyn, will be heard at a special meeting on Monday, Feb. 28 at 6:30 p.m. so that the project can meet an early March deadline to receive tax credits from Virginia Housing.
Those who spoke at the Saturday meeting will have their comments entered and don’t need to return, officials said.
“Unfortunately, [for] this error — which anyone can make an error like that — we didn’t have redundancy, which is something we’re going to address immediately,” County Manager Mark Schwartz said. “We’re going to be immediately improving our process to address this.”
Only one person reviewed the dates before the printed placards went out, he said. The newspaper advertisement, meanwhile, had the correct date, but County Board members mused about whether putting legal notices in the Washington Times, a conservative daily newspaper with a circulation around 50,000 in the D.C. area, is effective.
“This invites the question of not just ‘What went wrong here?’ but ‘What could go better in the future?'” Board Vice Chair Christian Dorsey said. “Many have long decried our practice of advertising in the Washington Times, given its relatively low circulation in the county. While it meets the legal requirements, it doesn’t necessarily meet the spirit of broad notice.”
In Arlington, Board Chair Katie Cristol said, the challenge is that the county can choose broad circulation and additional expense with the Washington Post or low prices with the Washington Times.
She said she “would love” to advertise with an online news source, but state law mandates that such notices be placed in print publications.
“We have at least one of those where a lot of Arlingtonians get their news,” Cristol said. “We are constrained by state code from doing that — and some very effective lobbying from what I understand is the Virginia print industry, which is very interested in keeping that requirement the same.”
Virginia Press Association Executive Director Betsy Edwards says the current system “works very well for the majority of the citizens of the Commonwealth.”
ARLnow’s advertisers aren’t just reaching a huge local audience, they’re helping us serve the community with award-winning local news coverage.
It has always been our focus to find the intersection of highly effective ads (for clients) and legitimately useful and interesting ads (for readers). In other words, ads that you actually want to read.
With a greater range of cost-effective options, we can deliver more value to our clients and more locally-focused ads to our readers, while also reporting more local news.
We’ve kept pricing in the new Media Kit largely the same as 2021, as local businesses continue to recover from the pandemic. But we’ve added a number of new options, including:
In addition to those options, available by contacting our account team (via email, phone or the form below), advertisers can now quickly book four types of sponsored content via self-serve options:
All four include links in our email newsletter, homepage placement, and optimized search engine indexing. The Listing, Job and Promoted posts are also promoted via social media.
Our ad options provide a viable, local and affordable alternative to social media ads, which are increasingly expensive on a per-impression basis, and print ads, which reach an increasingly limited audience.
If you run or manage marketing for a local business or organization, figuring out how to reach the widest possible audience for the lowest reasonable cost is hard. Luckily, ARLnow makes it easy by putting your message in front of a huge local audience.
With hundreds of thousands of readers each month, ARLnow reaches a diverse swath of the Arlington community — north and south, young and old. In fact, a survey commissioned by Arlington County found that ARLnow is the No. 1 source of local information for Arlington residents, above the Washington Post and the county government’s own website.
Our effective and engaging advertising options let your company reach those local readers for less than Facebook or print.
Book your ads now for the fall and you can keep that rate after pricing goes up in 2022. See our current Media Kit or fill out the form below and we’ll get in touch to discuss your marketing goals.
It’s hard to believe, but Labor Day is just two short weeks away.
The holiday serves as the unofficial end of summer and, for ARLnow, represents the start of our busiest advertising season.
If you’d like your company’s message to reach the widest possible Arlington audience — young and old, south and north, renters and owners — while supporting essential local journalism, we should talk. And soon.
Despite the pandemic, much of the local economy has remained resilient. We anticipate running low on advertising inventory again this fall, as we have over the past couple of years.
Find out more about advertising with ARLnow here and reach out to our client team at [email protected].
Normally around this time of year, Market Common Clarendon would be buzzing with shoppers, diners and outdoor events. Unfortunately, these are not normal times. Aside from the always-bustling Whole Foods, and the recently-opened Nicecream, Market Common — like so many other shopping centers across the country — has been quiet.
There are a lot of things that make a community great, including its people, its parks, its schools. But one of the most visible is its businesses. Going out to eat at a cool new restaurant, getting some stretchy workout gear on your lunch break, setting your wedding registry and then walking across the street to a brewpub for a cold beer — these are all amenities that, in their small way, make a place more livable.
Anyhow, this is all to say that we’re looking forward to all of the businesses at Market Common Clarendon reopening safely, whenever that may happen. Until then, you can still head there for some primo organic produce, some small batch ice cream, and — starting Friday — some margaritas on an outdoor patio.
During the pandemic ARLnow has been thanking the small business that have stuck with us through these tough times.
We are also thanking some of the other types of organizations that sponsor the site. Today we’re spotlighting one of our longest running advertisers, the Crystal City (soon to be National Landing) Business Improvement District.
The BID has been sponsoring ARLnow so long that when it started doing so people were still writing articles asking if Crystal City would ever be a “hip place to live.” Well, now HQ2 is arriving and, pre-COVID, the 22202 zip code became one of the hottest real estate markets in the nation. So there.
We always believed in Crystal City, and we’re proud to have the BID as a sponsor.
The virus has unfortunately temporarily put the kibosh on the BID’s signature events — a 5K Friday followed by a trip to the pop-up beer and wine garden would be nice right about now — but there’s plenty more that they’re doing, from commissioning artwork for local storefronts to hosting a new weekly video series “featuring a different local business owner who will bring tutorials, how-tos and entertaining content directly to you at home.”
Crystal City is also home to a vibrant collection of local businesses, from Freddie’s Beach Bar (recently in the news) to an empanada stand that bravely opened in the middle of a pandemic. To see which local businesses in the community are currently open, the BID has a handy list.
Thank you, Crystal City BID, for supporting local journalism during this crisis.
We’re proud to work with GMU and grateful for their support of local news in Arlington.
Be sure to check out GMU’s Juris Master program if you were thinking of bolstering your legal cred at your job, or the Schar School’s May 28 virtual open house to learn more about the master’s degree and graduate certificate programs in policy and government offered at the Arlington campus
