Advertising on this site

We welcome and encourage advertising here. Income from advertising ensures that access to site content will always remain free.

There are two styles of advertisements.

300x300 pixels

900x120 pixels

The ads will be interspersed between article summaries on the front page. There can be up to six of these advertisements on the page. The image will be linked to either a larger version of the advertisement, your web page or a full-page ad or brochure as mentioned below.

Advertising Rates - Weekly
Advertisement with link to an external web site only	$150
Advertisement with a link to an ad page or brochure on the Oberon Matters site	$200
Strip ad (900x120) placed at the top of the front page with external link only	$200
Strip ad placed at the top of the front page with a link to an ad page or brochure on the Oberon Matters site	$250
Strip ad at the top of all pages on the site	$600
Discount for commitment to 1 month (4 weeks) - 10%
Discount for commitment to 3 months (13 weeks) - 25%
Discount for commitment to 6 months (26 weeks) - 50%

GST does not apply to these prices until enough money comes in to justify (and legally mandate) registering for GST.

A full page advertisement can be a single image or contain up to 1,000 words and two photos. A brochure (similar to an insert in a printed publication) can be any size and must be in PDF format. In both cases a fee of $50 per week will apply in addition to the cost of the display advertisements that link to it.

What a full page advertisement with text might look like.

Things you need to know:

Deadline for submitting artwork is 1pm on Tuesdays. Invoices will be issued on the 1st and 15th of each month and are payable immediately. If you have a problem with either of these then
Each ad will have a link to either your web site, a larger and more detailed copy of your advertisement, a full-page ad or a brochure.
Artwork should be submitted as JPG image files or in PDF format. We can create the advertisements from the content of the larger ads.
Preferred image sizes are:
Square in-page ad - 300x300 pixels
Rectangular in-page ad - 900x120 pixels
Full size ad for linking - 1000x1400 pixels
Ads with text should be provided as MS Word files (or equivalent) plus any images required
Competing products or services will not be advertised near each other on the same page.
Advertisements attacking or criticising competitors will not be accepted, neither will any ads for illegal products, gambling or anything which might expose Oberon Matters to legal action.
If requested, clickable telephone numbers can be included in advertisements.
Please
Also, be aware of Oberon Matters' position of total neutrality.

Visitor statistics
July 2, 2026

Here is what has happened around this site over the last three months

Month	Unique visitors	Most read page in the month
April	8,533	The craft shop moves and having moved, sells on
May	10,231	Review: "AI Snake Oil" by Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor
June	15,656	Some good news for a change (2024!). This hit the top spot in the last two days of the month, edging out This week's Moron Alert which had been at the top since the day it was published. Strange days indeed.

The number of unique visitors during June reported by the server log analysis software was 22,692. This was adjusted downwards by the 7,036 attempts to access the Wordpress administrator login page. Just as well I don't use Wordpress, isn't it?

I have access to three ways of counting visitors:

AWstats is a program accessed through the cPanel site management system at the web hosting site. It seems to be highly regarded.
Weblog Expert runs on my computer using data from visitor logs downloaded from the web server. It has a bug which causes it to give absurd results for certain counts. I have been using it for years but it's no longer supported by the developer, and as it seems unreliable anyway I won't be using it in the future.
A system with the rather generic name of Analog Stats, also accessed through cPanel. The results are a bit of a dog's breakfast, but as the developer's web site isn't secure (HTTP instead of HTTPS) and also causes Norton 360 to throw a fit about the danger of going there because of a possible virus it looks like another one to be avoided.

What all three have in common is that they all show traffic increasing month by month. The numbers aren't all the same because they all use slightly different ways of gathering and processing the data but they roughly agree. A big number of visitors come here each month.

"Unique visitors" counts IP addresses that have connected to the site at least once during the month. It doesn't include search engines, but even if it did Google and Bing (who index the site at least once a week) would only be counted as one visitor each. Put another way, it is the lowest estimate of the number of visits to the site during the month.

See also: What do those statistics mean?