UPDATED 4.30PM: Kinglake Ranges News continues as Murrindindi Shire’s number one online news site with over two million ‘hits’ in 2019.
According to AWStats The Local Paper acheived 2,264 unique visitors in March. Kinglake Ranges News acheived 9,556 unique visitors as of 28 March. A difference of 7,292 ‘unique hits’.
If the “statistics are believable” as stated by Long in his article “35-year local track record: 15,156 real ‘reads’ every week” then why not publish the screenshots of this data? We have published ours. Why won’t they?
If Long truly believed their own statistics they too would simply take screenshots of them and publish them to discredit our own. Why don’t they?
We call on The Local Paper to publish the same unedited screenshots that Kinglake Ranges News published.
None of our data was edited or changed – they are just republished screenshots – so one can only wonder why competitors refuse to do the same.
More people read Kinglake Ranges News online daily (average over 100 per day) than read The Local Paper between 1 to 28 March 2019, even using thier own published data.
We’ve been #1 since launching in June 2017 and Alexandra Newspapers, publishers of The Yea Chronicle and Alexandra Standard continue rapidly increasing their online market share – reducing our own – whilst The Local Paper rapidly loses what little online market share it had.
According to SimilarWeb – which uses Google Analytics data – just 86 people visited The Local Paper in the last 28 days (to 28 March), whilst over 5,000 visited Kinglake Ranges News and over 2,600 visited Alexandra Newspapers in the same period.
In the competition for readers “eyeballs”, Kinglake Ranges News has 64 per cent whilst Alexandra Newspapers has 33 per cent. That’s 97 per cent of the local media audience.
Two per cent goes to the community-based Mountain Monthly and one per cent to The Local Paper.
With just one per cent of online readership for the 28 days to Thursday 28 March UTC/GMT The Local Paper hasn’t even achieved 100 viewers for the last 28 days. The not-for-profit Mountain Monthly achieving almost double the readership of The Local Paper online.
“The Local Paper is now operating at its largest-size ever, with weekly issues consistently exceeding 100 pages. Local businesses and organisations trust us because we have a decades-long track record of energetic award-winning reporting, and active community service,” Mr Long claimed.
It’s not stated that much of that weekly printed content is re-published from the Melbourne Observer. In recent editions one can see the cover price ($2.95) of the inserted Melbourne Observer.
Nothing to do with the Kinglake Ranges or surrounding districts. (Pages 30-87 of the edition dated 13 March 2019 is simply the Melbourne Observer inserted with page re-numbering).
Unlike our competitiors, we don’t worry about local council, businesses or government pulling their advertising and costing us revenue. We only carry generic, automatically generated, google ads that do not influence our reporting.
Competitors who publish – and rely on for revenue – council and other government advertising are careful not to upset them, lest they lose advertising revenue or have ‘ads pulled’.
In early April we’ll publish a full readership report for the first three months of 2019 when the data is released by providers.
No data has been edited, manipulated or changed and does not include ‘hits’ from any computer, phone or source that Kinglake Ranges News uses to produce the site. Nor are auto-generated ‘bots’ included in the data.
We have requested on several occasions in the past for the editor of The Local Paper to provide their data and offered our own. He has refused to do so on several occasions. If provided, we will publish the competitor’s data unedited.
Data is supplied by independent third-parties and is not edited, manipulated or changed in any way by Kinglake Ranges News. This includes our systems, servers and bots being blocked from any statistical count.
Google Anayltics blocks sites if one clicks on their own site to increase statistics or clicks on ads to increase revenue. On one occassion only to test our ads were working we were blocked by Google for seven days for clicking on our own ad once, yes, once.
Murrindindi Shire’s #1 online news site 2017-19.
We lead. They copy.
NEWS ISN’T NEWS UNLESS IT’S KINGLAKE RANGES NEWS
