Advertise on CI

CI was established in February 2010 and in the last 12 months has logged over 480,000 visits, viewing more than 2 million pages.

How to advertise on CI

For assistance in placing an ad, contact Arabella on 0419 566 081 email or Tim on 0405 564 206 email, and we’ll help you plan a campaign that is the right value for your business or event. Click this link to see CI’s advertising rates to connect to our community, in Castlemaine and beyond.

There are two options for the banner ads you see on the right of every page: Premium, on the top of the page and Standard which is below the latest classifieds section. Both run for two months from date of payment. They are cycled regularly – the bottom banner of each section is moved to the top. These banner ads are 310 x 102 pixels in size. Supply your own artwork (40KB jpeg) or CI can create it for you, including animated ads.

Have your ad seen more than 8,000 times a day – that’s currently how many times our pages are called up daily … and your ad will be on every page.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the art of getting your web site to rank high in search results. Links are one of the key factors in SEO – especially links from a high ranking site with allot of traffic. CI now ranks high in a Google search. The Google-bot, a program that goes to each page and takes a snap-shot for the Google search engine, follows links around the web. When the search engine decides your ranking it factors in the ranking of the sites the links come from. Your ad on CI with its link, will increase the ranking of your site in search results and increase Google-bot traffic.

New to the banners are ‘deep banner‘ ads. They are two, three or four normal banners deep (204, 306, and 408 pixels deep, and 310 pixels wide).

We also have the new ‘slice’ ad on the home page since the site redesign. These are 690 x 130 pixels and are available for weekly periods.

Every ad is also a hyperlink to your web site or can be set so that clicking on it creates an automatically addressed email for your customer to send you.

CI also offers self-serve advertising via the Classifieds. It’s easy! Upload your own text and images, pay and manage your ad online. Take advantage of our very affordable rates. The classifieds page enjoys more than 1000 readers a month, and you can see the number of times your ad is opened. If you take the paid option, your ad will appear at the top of the page and you can load your own images into it.

How many people will see your ad? – traffic on CI’s website.

We analyse our web traffic by looking at: visits, page views, and sites.

A visit is a half hour session from one IP address (one computer or network). CI’s average daily visits = 1800.

Page views are how many CI pages are called up from our server. Our current average daily page views =  10,220.  This is how many times our banner ads are seen,  on average,  every day.

Sites are the individual IP addresses (one computer or a network portal) that have logged on to CI. We use this as an estimate of how many readers CI has each month. CI is enjoying phenomenal growth – illustrated by the number of sites (at least one person) logging on to CI per month - reaching 16,695 in November 2011.

Whatever metric you choose, the number of people logging on to CI, how often they log on, and how much they look at is increasing.   Present your product, service, or event to our growing community of readers.

What is CI about?

CI has a focus on local issues and community as well as an eye to national and world news. Our underlying guidelines include: ethical journalism, community building, sustainable use of our planet’s resources, and care for the environment. See our Corporate Social Responsibility page.

CI has many of the sections you would expect in a traditional newspaper. We also publish great photos and multimedia content.

It’s not all serious: CI has a fun and satiric streak, with a wicked range of fiction and satire that has brought readers flocking in. And we’re now publishing great local and farther-afield writers.

We are looking at the relationship between communities, stories, news, and their place in our culture. CI is cutting-edge in the evolution of new online media.

On the 500+ mailing list are mostly the 20-40-year old age group, but it’s not limited to them. Readers are, of course, computer literate, curious about their world, questioning, and not prepared to accept news at face value. They are interested in the arts and care deeply for the environment, family, and children – judging by the number of visits these stories receive.