News organizations which provide valuable information and services to the community, need the support of the community in return.
We are often asked why we set up the Daily Star here on Tamborine Mountain. Our answer is that while Boonah and Beaudesert both had full service newspapers, Tamborine Mountain did not - even though the community was larger than both of the other two centres.
We asked ourselves why in a community full of intelligent, thoughtful and well traveled people, why was there no weekly political reportage, no weekly local issues reporting and no serious attempt to analyse the complex day-to-day issues that face our community.
We thought it would be a worthwhile use of our time to see if the community actually wanted more and would be prepared to support us if we built it. That was the experimental thinking that started the Tamborine Mountain Daily Star.
On a technical level, we built the web publishing engine with our sister company Info-Onscreen Communications.
We enlisted the help of some very clever programmers from Australia, the US and UK. That initial process took several months and the technical development of the site continues even today.
After a couple of months of full time publishing, we did our preliminary market testing late last year to gauge the acceptance of the Daily Star amongst the Tamborine Mountain business community.
We received a lot of positive feedback about the Daily Star news site. However, some still doubted we could actually do it. Some others thought we fail commercially within the first few months like so many other had before. Such rumors are still swirling about the place. So we took up the challenge.
Our response was to provide a demonstration of commitment and an ability to stay the course and keep on adding value to community. The daily feedback about the quality of the site convinces us we have achieved our goals from a purely news content perspective. We also demonstrated we could build an audience.
We have been publishing now since August last year and our audience has grown rapidly.
We had just 320 people visit our site in August. By September that had grown to 1,761 and more than doubled in October 2010.
Since October our readership has grown by 20.5% per month including the two months of January and February when we did not publish because we were updating the site's technology.
Month on month growth for our active publishing months was nearly 30%.
Around 40% of people stay on our site for between 3 and 90 minutes and on average people read 8 articles when they visit.
On the commercial side, we have taken a policy that we will provide a complete listing service for every business on Tamborine Mountain.
That is a simple community service.
For those who want to stand out from the crowd and convert casual browsers into customers, there are Premium or paid-for listings as well. These Premium Listings are mini websites which the business can put all the information about their offerings.
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| Cedar Creek Estate is our first major local advertiser. Click the Ad and see how well it works! |
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After many months of people asking how to advertise on the Daily Star, that advertising service is now available. Every page has one or more Daily Star CLICK ADs on it. Every page will have a sponsor.
When users click on a Daily Star CLICK AD they are taken to a details page where the full offer can be displayed.
This consists of a larger version of the CLICK AD and a whole webpage where the full details of the event or the offer can be spelled out. So two ads for the less than half the price of one ad elsewhere.
So to sum up, we believe we have demonstrated our commitment to bringing Tamborine Mountain the kind of quality coverage, stories and features a community like this deserves.
We have business plans that will allow us to expand these services once we have advertising support of the businesses on Tamborine Mountain.
This will include the publishing of a fortnightly tabloid paper that features breaking news, tourism information and the best stories from the online news site.
A Printed version of the
Tamborine Mountain Daily Star is ready to go
So we ask you to give us a fair hearing when we call. Look at how the Tamborine Mountain Daily Star can help your business with advertising and listings on our site.
Without advertising, we either have to charge subscriptions or look for a another way of funding the services we provide.
We ask you to consider setting aside a percentage of your marketing budget to a local organisation that will plough that advertising revenue back into the community; bringing new jobs and a new industry to Tamborine Mountain.
And in return we will work tirelessly to give you an online and printed news publication that you can be proud to show your friends.