The biggest "Thank You"

December 19, 2024

This site started as an experiment in February 2024, based on the need for a locally-focussed news outlet dealing with news about Oberon and its immediate surrounds. Promotion of the site was going to be through personal contact and various places on Facebook and other social media sites.

The experiment was a success, with site visitors increasing month by month. Following the final edition for 2024 on December 19 there have been 296 articles published on the site. (You can see then all through the Site History page.)

Here are the statistics for the year:

Month	Unique visitors	Most read page in the month
February	919	What's On Around Oberon
March	596	What's On Around Oberon
April	698	What's On Around Oberon
May	842	Meet the candidates
June	884	What's On Around Oberon
July	1121	Late, Late at the Malachi
August	1519	What's happening at (to?) the Oberon RSL Club?
September	1469	Meet the candidates
October	1714	Sad and sorry Sodwalls Road
November	1497	A tie: Oberon Sports Complex construction moves along Cricket comes back to O'Connell
December	1084 Only three updates and everyone's on holidays	Moron Alert!

"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. It is the equivalent of "Circulation" for print media.

The response to the site has been very encouraging. Obviously there is a need in the community for a news outlet that concentrates on what is happening in and around the town without a whole lot of pages of material that are either irrelevant or can be found in other publications. It's a lot of work, but most worthwhile things are.

There were plans to produce a printed newspaper reflecting the content of the web site. It was hoped that the first printed paper would come out early in 2025, and work was done on costing and other concerns.

Unfortunately, a print competitor surfaced in late 2024 offering an inferior product (three pages of Oberon news a fortnight against a proposed 8-12 pages a week for Oberon Matters) but with a significant financial advantage. As the competitor would be adding Oberon coverage to a quite large already existing circulation, someone with experience in estimating printing costs suggested that the cost for the competitor to enter the Oberon market would be about one sixth of what Oberon Matters would have to pay for printing and distribution. They will also soak up advertising revenue as apparently they can afford to pay someone to sell space. Disappointingly, the competitor has the support and backing of Oberon Council.

Plans for a print edition have been put on hold. One day, maybe.

Now on to the next year.

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