Colorado's Best Denver Metro: How Voting Works & How to Win

Three ballots, one Denver-metro audience

coloradosun.com/colorados-best-denver-metro is the entire confirmed footprint of this sub-edition: one URL, running annually, under The Colorado Sun's name. Compare that to Colorado's Best Western Slope, a regional edition of the exact same program with zero overlap against Denver's alt-weekly and city-magazine ballots. Denver Metro has no such luxury. Westword's Best of Denver has reached a confirmed 43rd annual edition. 5280's Top of the Town runs its own vote through 5280scene.com. Both were already asking Denver business owners for attention long before The Colorado Sun's entry showed up.

That's the sharpest available fact here, not a vote total or a winner's name, because neither is published. It is a market fact. A Denver-area business now has three readers-choice ballots asking for the same click, not two.

Half of that table says "not published," and that is honest rather than padded. See the Colorado contest hub for the rest of the state's readers-choice ballots and prep-sports polls, listed together in one spot.

Denver's three readers-choice ballots, side by side

No single business should treat Colorado's Best Denver Metro, Best of Denver, and Top of the Town as interchangeable. They share a metro area and not much else.

The Colorado Sun's entry looks like the newest of the three by public record, at least on paper. No confirmed edition count, no confirmed winners event, nothing beyond the URL and the yearly cadence. That does not mean the program is smaller. Newsrooms don't always publish operational detail the way an alt-weekly with four decades of "Best of" branding does. It does mean a business planning outreach across all three should expect three different levels of information to work from, not one shared script.

Why a business might enter all three anyway

Different readerships. Different judges, arguably. Different institutional weight. A restaurant that wins Best of Denver gets Westword's specific alt-weekly audience. A win on Top of the Town carries 5280's glossy-magazine cachet. Colorado's Best Denver Metro adds a statewide nonprofit newsroom's name to the mix, an audience that may trust The Colorado Sun's civic reporting more than either of the other two brands. Three wins, three different claims, none of them interchangeable in a press release.

Mechanics: what's confirmed, and what's a genuine blank

Two facts carry the entire confirmed record: Colorado's Best Denver Metro runs every year, and it lives at coloradosun.com/colorados-best-denver-metro. Everything past that, category names, a vote cap, whether nomination happens before voting, a specific close date, has no public statement behind it.

A table this thin next to Best of Denver's 43-edition history says something about where this program sits in its own life cycle: early, most likely. That's not a knock. It's a reason to treat the live page as the sole authority once a cycle actually opens, rather than borrowing assumptions from either of Denver's older ballots.

From Denver to Thornton: the metro this sub-edition actually covers

Denver anchors the region, but the metro area sprawls well past the city limits. Aurora sits east, big enough on its own that a business there might not think of itself as "Denver" at all. Lakewood and Arvada hold the western and northwestern suburbs. Westminster and Thornton run along the north side toward Boulder County's edge, and Centennial and Highlands Ranch fill out the fast-growing south metro corridor.

None of that list is a published eligibility rule for Colorado's Best Denver Metro specifically. It is the common shape of the metro area, offered so a business can judge roughly whether it fits before checking the live page for the actual answer. A downtown Denver restaurant and a Highlands Ranch dentist's office are both plausibly "Denver metro" by any ordinary definition, even though the two would rarely cross paths day to day.

That size cuts both ways for a campaign. A Denver-area business has a bigger pool of potential voters than a Grand Junction business chasing the Western Slope edition, but it is also competing against a much larger field of other Denver nominees, and doing so across three separate ballots, not one.

Running a Denver Metro campaign across three overlapping ballots

Point real customers at coloradosun.com/colorados-best-denver-metro, and update that link the moment the page reveals its actual structure for the cycle. That is the honest starting point given how little is public. Pretending otherwise sets a nominee up to promise something The Colorado Sun hasn't actually stated.

"Nominated for Colorado's Best Denver Metro" is defensible the instant a listing is genuinely live. "Winner" isn't, not without a citable Colorado Sun publication behind it. That standard matters more here than on the Western Slope edition, since a Denver business making that claim is doing so in front of readers who might also be watching its Best of Denver or Top of the Town result the same season.

A business weighing multiple readers-choice entries at once, or Colorado's sport fan-vote ballots like Colorado Football Player of the Week and Colorado Football Offensive Player of the Week, should treat each as its own campaign with its own link and its own claim, not one blanket "vote for us" message. General mechanics that apply to any online contest vote live at how online contest votes work, and award-style vote campaign planning covers the readers-choice format specifically. Is buying votes legal answers the legal question, and it's worth reading first, before any budget goes toward Denver's three overlapping ballots.