WHY ADVERTISE IN THE ALICE SPRINGS NEWS?

alicenews@ozemail.com.au


RATES - all plus GST

We publish Thursdays.
Booking / cancellation deadline for display advertising: 5pm Fridays prior.
Classified advertising deadline: 5pm Mondays prior.
Single column centimetre advertising rates. 12 month contracts. Billed monthly.
Tabloid. 7 columns.
One full page is 266 column centimetres.
Page width: 262 mm
Column width: 34 mm
Column depth: 377 mm
Column space: 3 mm
Preferred art work: PDFs of no less than 160 dpi. All colours CMYK.
Mono ads all in black (no CMYK nor RGB).

Full colour loading $350.00
Spot colour loading $130.00


Casual rate
 $8.27
500 col/cm
 $7.70
1000 col/cm
 $7.40
2500 col/cm
 $7.20
5000 col/cm
 $7.00
7500 col/cm
 $6.80

Inserts (in bundles of 100) $750.00 for full run.
Classified adverts: $12.00 for up to 20 words. $1 per additional 4 words.
Payment for non-account holders: Visa, Mastercard, American Express, cash, cheque (subject to clearance) or direct debit in advance to National Bank BSB 085995 ACCOUNT 680427437.


WEB SITE

8cm x 10cm advert on our web site (www.alicespringsnews.com.au) home page (with a hot link to your web site, if you wish): $40 - $100 + GST a week. Ours is one of the oldest newspaper web sites in Australia (established 1997), with a story archive of about 1.5 million words. We're an acclaimed source of information about Central Australia for tourists, business people, researchers and academics the world over. In a typical month we get 287,000 hits and 78,600 pages are viewed by nearly 12,000 people.


OUR CITY

Alice Springs, population 27,000, is world famous as the capital of Australia's Outback, its pristine scenery, and a lifestyle enhanced by lots of space, freedom of movement, sparse traffic, zero pollution, and excellent weather for nine months of the year (and if you like it hot come in summer).
We have the world's oldest living culture, in recent years manifested in the Aboriginal art movement, achieving oustanding recognition and sales of paintings and sculptures around the globe.
The legendary cattle men pioneered white settlement in the region on holdings the size of small countries.
Alice Springs has Australia's highest per-capita number of university graduates outside Canberra.
We have a young population with an income well above the Australian average.
Our main industries are tourism and mining, earning roughly $1 billion a year between them - and growing.

AVERAGE TOTAL INCOME IN 2003    $37,728

WEEKLY HOUSEHOLD INCOME in 2001 (TOTAL 8195 HOUSEHOLDS)
$1-$199
 325
$200-$299 291
$300-$399 345
$400-$499 364
$500-$599 446
$600-$699 435
$700-$799 393
$800-$999 826
$1000-$1199 801
$1200-$1499 847
$1500-$1999 1277
$2000 or +
816


PERCENTAGE BY AGE GROUP - at 30 June 2004
0 to 14 years
25.6
15 to 24 years
15.9
25 to 34 years
17.2
35 to 44 years
16.7
45 to 54 years
12.9
55 to 64 years
7.2
65 to 74 years 2.9 2.9
75 to 84 years 1.2 1.2
85 years and over 0.4 0.4


BUILDING APPROVALS
Year ended 30 June 2004    $51.4m

NEW MOTOR VEHICLE SALES (units)
Year ended 30 June 2004    1446

VALUE OF TOURISM (ALICE SPRINGS & AYERS ROCK RESORT)
Estimate for 2005    $485m

VALUE OF MINING IN CENTRAL AUSTRALIA
Estimate for 2006    $500m

VALUE OF AGRICULTURAL PRODUCTION
Year ended 30 June 2001    $69.7m


READERSHIP

The Alice Springs News's audited circulation is 11,500, far greater than the audited circulation of the Centralian Advocate, who chose to rely instead on readership surveys by Roy Morgan. However, Advocate owner News Limited's  top-level management has described the Roy Morgan surveys as "hopelessly flawed".
The Advocate makes claims of superior readership numbers by frequently publishing full page advertisements, some claiming no-one else comes close. On August 29, 2006, quoting Roy Morgan, the Advocate claimed that "87% of people in Alice Springs aged 14 and over read the Centralian Advocate every Tuesday and Friday".
However, our research over more than a decade shows significantly fewer people buy the Tuesday Advocate, which raises doubts about Roy Morgan's findings, or about the way they are being used by the Advocate.
There is apparently an attempt to conceal the difference between the Tuesday and the Friday sales.
The argument of the Alice Springs News is now getting support from none other than News Limited itself, the owners of the Advocate.
Its stable mate, the Perth Sunday Times, on November 19, 2006, described Roy Morgan's data as "hopelessly flawed".
News Limited Chief Executive John Hartigan, to whom the Advocate no doubt answers, was quoted by the Times as calling for a “whole of industry approach”, to “expedite plans to develop a new [readership survey] system” because of “volatile fluctuations [in Roy Morgan surveys] for which there is no adequate explanation”.
And Ish Davies, the managing director of The Sunday Times, is quoted as saying:  “The current results are just completely unacceptable."
Says the report: "The Sunday Times will be trading on the strength of its new ABC audit quarterly circulation figure."
The Alice Springs News is happy to agree with News Limited's strategy.
We'll keep reminding our readers that our audited circulation is 50% greater than that of the Advocate.
Specifically, the circulation of the Alice Springs News is 11,500.
This is certified by the Circulations Audit Board (CAB) which conducts two surveys a year.
We understand that its sister organization, the Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC), quotes the Advocate circulation as around 7000.
The latest ABC figures for the Advocate we have available show a significant decline in a short period:-
31/12/03    7533
30/06/04    7451
31/12/04    7402
30/06/05    7198
The readership of the Alice Springs News is the subject of ongoing random telephone surveys started in 1997 and conducted by contractors to the Alice Springs News.
This is the way they do it:-
They make sure they are talking to an adult.
They log the person's name, phone number and address, and the answers to the following four questions:-
Do you receive the Alice Springs News (Yes or no.)
What do you like or dislike about the Alice Springs News (prompting a deliberative answer such as "great political coverage" or "you are the paper dealing with the hard questions", indicating the person reads the Alice Springs News. The great majority of comments are positive.)
Do you buy Tuesday's Advocate? (Yes or no.)
Do you buy Friday's Advocate? (Yes or no.)
We process the figures to determine the percentage of the respondents who get the News, read the News and who buy both Tuesday's and Friday's Advocates.
An average of 91.9% of respondents READ the Alice Springs News and just 71.5% buy BOTH weekly Advocates.
We're happy to email you a copy of the survey summary.
For privacy reasons we don't send out the running sheets containing the raw data, but we give bona-fide enquirers access to them if requested.