Advertise with us
The Ophir is free to read because advertising pays for it, not because it is cheap to produce. If your business serves Bathurst, Orange or the district around them, this page is the whole arrangement: what you can buy, what we will not sell, and the rates. If you would sooner just ask, the advertising enquiry form is here.
Who reads it
People keeping track of what is actually decided in the Central West: the councils, the energy build, the mines, development, health, the university and the district economy, each story carrying the document it came from. A lot of business out here still runs on knowing who is reliable, and this is a readership that checks. On our own traffic we claim nothing we cannot show you. Ask, and the answer will be the real one.
Two ways to advertise
Clearly labelled display advertising. A marked slot, well away from the journalism, carrying your words as you wrote them. It is not built to resemble a story, and it has no bearing on what we cover or what we conclude.
Sponsored editorial. An article we research, write and check to the same standard as everything else here, wearing its label wherever it appears. Claims in it stay tied to a source, and we will not print something about your business, or a competitor's, that we cannot stand up. It works when there is something to report: a service the district did not have, a job you have finished, something you know that a reader would be glad to learn. It does not work as a list of adjectives.
What the standard actually looks like
Telling you a paid piece is held to the same standard as the reporting is worth nothing unless you can see the standard. We have not sold a sponsored piece yet, so there is no sponsored example to show you. These are our own reporting, and they are the bar a paid piece is written to:
- The $391m attached to Dubbo's Serengeti Resort is a 20-year projection, not a price tag. 15 quotations, each traceable to one of the 4 primary sources listed on it.
- Five offences are rising across Bathurst and Orange. Not one of them is rising in both. 13 quotations, each traceable to one of the 3 primary sources listed on it.
- The REZ’s first wires are up. So are the First Nations Fund’s numbers, and they stop at 60 per cent. 14 quotations, each traceable to one of the 2 primary sources listed on it.
That is what a data-led piece buys: primary documents read end to end, every figure and quotation traceable to the source it came from, and a question a reader actually has, answered in the first screen. If what you want is a page of adjectives, we are the wrong site and the rates below will look expensive.
What we will not do
What you are buying access to is the fact that The Ophir is not for sale, so that is the thing we keep. No invented or paid-positive reviews. No product-flogging, no outrage bait. The byline is not available at any price: an arrangement gets a labelled placement and stops there. A brief that needs us to overstate, mislead or leave a commercial interest unsaid is declined politely. In a district this size that would be found out, and it would be your name attached to it.
Disclosure, every time
Where there is a commercial relationship, we say so plainly, right where the reader meets it. That is a protection for the advertiser first. A plug that a reader works out for themselves discredits the business in it more than the paper carrying it. Consumer law requires the disclosure, and it would be our practice without that.
Rates and how to enquire
Sponsored editorial starts at $450, sits around $600 in most cases, and starts at $150 for not-for-profits and community organisations. A piece built on a real dataset, with an authored chart and a methodology note, starts at $1,100, because it is a good deal more work.
Display is the cheaper way in: from $80 a month, usually near $120, three months at a time. The Ophir is new and its readership is being built, so we are not going to pretend a box here reaches the district yet. The rate is on the page so you know it when it does.
| Page views from a search engine | 0 |
|---|---|
| All Australian page views | 3 |
| A reasonable reader estimate | 0 to 0 |
| About, per week | 0 search-referred views |
Measured over the 30 days to 2026-10-02, from our own server-side logs. These count views of stories, not of our tip form, advertise page or colophon. They are page views, not people: we run no cookies and no client-side script, so unique visitors cannot be counted and we will not quote you a number we cannot stand behind. The lower figure is the floor we are confident in. The range subtracts an estimate of our own visits, measured against staged mastheads nobody can reach.
The floor is on the page so nobody spends a week finding it out. What it pays for is the reading and the checking behind a piece, and a page that is still answering somebody's question in two years. A rate low enough to be an impulse would bring us the requests we turn down, and turning them down is easier when the price was never the reason.
Asking commits you to nothing. Use the advertising enquiry form, tell us about the business and roughly what you have in mind, and we will come back to you.
How the site is put together, and what gets checked, is at how this site works.