Asbury Park Press Readers' Choice: How Voting Works & How to Win

Three ballots, one shore, and app.com is only one of them

app.com. That's Asbury Park Press's own domain, and it hosts a Gannett-run readers' choice ballot covering Monmouth and Ocean Counties. It is not the only game on the Jersey Shore. A business owner who assumes "Asbury Park Press" and "the local readers' choice contest" are one single thing is missing two other programs operating in the same geography right now.

Regional Media runs a separate Best of Jersey Shore Contest at bestofjerseyshore.com. Asbury Park Press itself co-sponsors a third program, Ocean County Community's Choice Awards, but that one runs on the YourChoiceAwards platform at yourchoiceawards.com/ocean/, a different underlying system than app.com's own ballot.

Getting the domain right matters more here than in most markets, because a supporter clicking the wrong link doesn't just miss the ballot, they end up voting in an entirely different contest with a different set of nominees.

Three Jersey Shore ballots, side by side

Confusing these three costs a campaign real votes. Each has its own domain, its own operator, and, as far as the confirmed record shows, no shared nominee pool between them.

Why the co-sponsorship makes this trickier than it looks

Asbury Park Press's name shows up twice in this market, once as the sole operator of the app.com ballot, and again as a co-sponsor of the separately-platformed Ocean County Community's Choice Awards. Seeing "Asbury Park Press" in a program's branding doesn't confirm which of the two it actually is; the domain is the only reliable tell.

A business chasing local recognition could reasonably target all three in the same year, but each needs its own tracked link and its own reminder message. Copy-pasting one program's URL into a post meant for another sends supporters nowhere useful; see the Best of Jersey Shore Contest guide for that program's own separate mechanics in full.

Monmouth's inland towns and Ocean's boardwalk economy don't behave the same way

Red Bank and Freehold sit well inland in Monmouth County, drawing a steadier, less seasonal customer base than the shore towns further south. Toms River and the boardwalk-adjacent parts of Ocean County live and die by summer tourism, and a business there sees a completely different voter pool in August than in February.

Asbury Park itself and Long Branch sit right at that inland-shore boundary, pulling both year-round locals and seasonal visitors depending on the month. Point Pleasant and Manasquan lean harder into the beach-town rhythm, where a July campaign reaches far more potential voters than the identical push run in November.

Lakewood's rapid population growth over the past decade adds another wrinkle that none of the three ballots' public mechanics account for explicitly. A business there competes on the same app.com page as an Asbury Park boutique, even though the two towns' customer bases look almost nothing alike.

What a business can honestly say once app.com posts results

Nominated is not the same word as won, and this market's three overlapping ballots make that distinction easy to lose. Until Asbury Park Press actually publishes a result on app.com, "nominated" is the accurate description of a business's status there, regardless of how strong a campaign felt on the ground.

A specific results archive or standing leaderboard for the app.com program isn't publicly documented. A "we won" claim should cite the exact year and category app.com confirms, not a general "Jersey Shore's best" line with nothing attached; that kind of bare claim risks overstating something Gannett never actually published in that form.

The same discipline applies across programs. A strong showing on Ocean County Community's Choice Awards says nothing about how a business fares on app.com's separate ballot, or on Best of Jersey Shore Contest; three different voter pools produce three independent results, not one shared score.

Building a campaign without conflating the three ballots

Pick the specific program, get the specific link, and say so explicitly in every reminder. "Vote for us on the Jersey Shore" is not specific enough in a market running three separate ballots under overlapping branding; a supporter needs the app.com URL by name, not a vague pointer at "Asbury Park Press."

Timing should track the shore's own calendar. A push that lands during peak summer tourism reaches a larger, more transient audience than the same push run in a quiet winter month, particularly for businesses near the boardwalk in Ocean County.

A vote-promotion service can help route real supporters to the exact app.com listing and keep the reminder cadence consistent through the cycle. It can't guarantee an outcome once other nominated businesses and their own networks show up to vote. See how online contest votes work for the general mechanics, is buying votes legal before committing budget, and award-style vote campaigns for pacing advice that applies directly to a readers'-choice push like this one. The Jersey Shore also runs its own high school fan-vote pages on a related but separate track; see Asbury Park Press High School Athlete of the Week and Courier-Post South Jersey Girls Basketball Player of the Week for how that sport-side model differs from a business ballot like this one.