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Hello Mountain Home,
It’s been a minute since we’ve had a chance to sit down and catch up with each other. This past month has been hectic with our official launch, but we made it to our first month anniversary.
Apologies for the lack of stories yesterday, but I needed the evening to take in the diagnosis from my latest routine eye examination. It had some serious implications for my future as a writer and photographer.
I’ll share more on what’s happening sometime in the future.
For now, the Observer is back in the saddle with a great story about Gabrielle Slaughter and her high-end boutique store, Louie and Roy. Check it out if you have a few minutes. It’s well worth the read and is further evidence of the remarkable Renaissance occurring in our little slice of heaven.
To celebrate our one-month anniversary together, I wanted to share some statistics about what we achieved over the holiday season because of your generous help and support.
To start, the Mountain Home Observer reached 32,031 people on Facebook over our first month. That’s a huge number that rivals and outperforms some of the big players in our neck of the Ozarks. We now have people from all over the world and country reading about our small community here in Arkansas.
Our website traffic is just as impressive for our first month, with 17,810 page views from 10,249 users.
Our top three stories received over 5,000 views combined.
These numbers are far above what Alison and I thought we would achieve in our first month. We’re humbled that our community has embraced our style of journalism. Thank you!
We still have a long way to go, though, and we’ve been working tirelessly behind the scenes to not only produce a daily product but to create an even better media outlet for our community.
As of now, we’re currently working with our first advertiser to onboard their ads onto our website. We’ve also restarted the on-boarding process for daily comics onto our website after a delay with the publisher we are going with set us back last month.
For print, the hunt is still on for an affordable solution that will not force us to charge higher prices for a weekly paper. COVID-19 and everything that came with it has taken its toll on our economy, and prices have risen because of it.
It will take some time to find a solution, but I am confident we can find it.
Our cell phone app is still in the works and is coming along. After some research, we’ve decided to hire some help getting our apps through Apple’s and Google’s approval process.
This year will be an exciting time for Mountain Home and the surrounding areas, and we genuinely look forward to covering as much as humanly possible in the coming weeks and months.
Thank you again for your support, and we hope to see you out in town soon.
Chris Fulton
Owner, Mountain Home Observer
