CLIFTON SPRINGS, N.Y., June 14 -- A new study confirms that community newspaper web sites from New York to California are enjoying explosive growth, according to Our-Hometown.com ( http://www.our-hometown.com ), an Internet services firm supplying turnkey web sites and news conversion services to weekly newspapers.
A recent two-year Web traffic study by Our-Hometown.com showed a steady upward trend for all 21 studied Our-Hometown.com client sites. Most sites in the study started their web presence in the first half of 2000 during the peak of the Nasdaq stock market boom in Internet stocks. Even though the market is down 90% or more in some Nasdaq stocks, these community newspapers' investment in the web is paying off with rapid growth.
Total page views for all 21 sites in June 2000 were under 100,000; by May of 2002, that figure had shot up to over 2,500,000. Page Views from search engine spider programs were filtered out of the numbers.
Detailed graphs by publisher are available at: http://www.our-hometown.com/Study6-02 for each newspaper in the study.
The Herald of Randolph, Vermont (http://www.rherald.com), a 6,000 circulation paid weekly that serves a rural population area of under 20,000, has had a steady accelerating increase in monthly traffic: in June 2000, the Herald's web site received under 2,000 page views; in May 2002, the site had just under 80,000 page views.
The Wave of Long Island, Far Rockaway, NY located in the NYC Borough of Queens (http://www.rockawave.com) with a 13,000 paid circulation weekly saw its numbers grow from about 25,000 to 250,000 page views per month over the 2 year study period. The Wave serves a metro community with a population of about 130,000.
These frugal community newspapers make money by putting the same display ads they run in the print edition on the web. Readers of the web site see preview versions of these ads next to the news. They click for the full size version if they are interested. Advertisers report doing business because of the web ads.
In addition, classified ad orders and print subscriptions provide significant new revenue.
The most successful websites follow the model suggested by Our-Hometown.com: 1.) make most if not all of the content from the print edition available online for free (for now), 2.) add "Breaking News" stories during the week and 3.) promote in print.
In most cases, Our-Hometown.com converts the files the newspapers create for the print edition and puts everything on the web site each week for weekly publications. The newspapers add a few stories during the week to keep the site changing. Our-Hometown.com handles promotion on search engines.
ABOUT OUR-HOMETOWN.COM
Since 1996, a vision for community newspapers on the web that recognizes and helps the publisher leverage the value of the unique content they generate has propelled Our-Hometown.com to its position as the leading provider of industrial strength software, services and web sites for community newspapers.
Our-Hometown.com provides technology that includes a means of incorporating display ads run in print into the newspaper's web site, a intuitive browser-based WYSIWYG editing tool, and an "AS IS" batch news conversion service accepts news in any format (QuarkXpress, Adobe Pagemaker, Adobe InDesign, Multi-Ad Creator, etc.).
For more information about Our-Hometown.com, its client sites or its services,
contact Steve Larson at (315) 462-7013 or scl@our-hometown.com, or log on
to http://www.our-hometown.com.
CONTACT:
Steve Larson
Our-Hometown.com
(315) 462-7013
scl@our-hometown.com
http://www.our-hometown.com