As of Monday, November 8, 2010, Ambergris Today takes a giant leap forward in providing a new and better service by making the switch from a weekly newsprint to a Daily Online news service. We are very excited with the launch of our NEW Website that will be a daily source of news and entertainment for our readers both locally and now even broader international audience.



With this new initiative, we are no longer printing newspapers on Thursdays and all of our services will be offered online. Our blogspot will no longer be used for daily posts - everything is going into our news section of the new ambergris today site. Thus I would like to make a formal request that you stop all copy and pasting of our online content to your website/news service. As you can see we will now start depending on online visits and hits to make an income from our advertisers and we cannot allow other sites to copy our content and have them receives the hits instead of us. You may share our headlines and a picture (only) if you like but with a direct link to the particular story or feature in our website for your visitors to be able to access the entire article. If you are interested in sharing the full article we can allow you to do so at a nominal fee which can be agreed upon by both parties.



Ambergris Today wishes to keep a good relationship with other websites, but I hope that you understand that we have to take this action in order for our new service to be successful.

They are also claiming over a million hits a day.

hardy har har

when they count a million hits, they are MAYBE counting in all the images also. load a page. the page is one hit. each image on the page is a hit. load one page, with 20 pics, get 21 hits

or its just total BS

Alexa is the neilsen rating service for the net. the best one anyway

looking them up there, i see:
http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/http%3A%2F%2Fambergristoday.com

number 3,000,000_+

san pedro sun

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/http%3A%2F%2Fsanpedrosun.com


number 1,400,000

the Sun is twice as busy

more or less. thats a ranking, not a total visitors thing. but there is a traffic tab button on the stat page for each domain, but you have to be at a certainlevel of traffic before they keep track.

AmbergrisCaye.com gets like 10-15,000 unique hosts, users, (if they come on twice in a day the other times are not in this number) per day.

we are rated like #133,000 in alexa:
http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/http%3A%2F%2Fambergriscaye.com , as the busiest and most visited website on Belize. so no WAY the Ambergris Today is getting a million unique VISITORS per day.

This means The San Pedro Sun is the only printed Newspaper again?

yessir

If I were them I would ask anyone who post my news have to put hyperlink or where is reference instead stop people sharing news.
They should realize if more people forward news from their web site, they will gain more rate from alexa, isn't?

thats kinda what they asked....

You may share our headlines and a picture (only) if you like but with a direct link to the particular story or feature in our website

not totally unreasonable i suppose.

Thats what I've been doing at San Pedro Daily except now I must eliminate the text.

exactly. kinda makes it boring. VERY limited. but it's their business.

its the million hits a day that gets me. especially now that image intensive sites chop up a huge graphic into a bazillion small sections and they load like a mosaic. then you can have thousands of small pieces of the image load for each page. one html page loads, thousand(s) of images. total hits for one viewing by one person, thousand(s) plus one. someone goes to 5 pages, you can have tens of thousands of 'total hits' for one person reading the paper once.

"Unique hosts per day" is the preferred statistic. How many individual computers connect to your site in one 24 hour period.

Thats how San Pedro Daily is rated..and has a much higher count that Ambergris Today....

Love Dorian, Love the paper. My question is... how the paper can realistically keep the same income from advertisements and classifieds online? Wasnt that their selling point?(a weekly paper everyone on the island reads) Now there will be one print paper.
Online? how many blogs and message boards now? and stopping Marty from reporting?
I just dont get it

Seems like a death knell to me.

Personally, I think something vital in the experience of "reading the news" is lost when the printed paper goes by the wayside. Mind you, I'm not shunning new technology. I'm also very familiar with the hassles that are involved in the printing world. And certainly Ambergris Today is not alone in their decision. Putting out a printed paper in todays day/age must be daunting (all across the US printed newspapers have been dropping like flies for the last decade.)

...I read an interesting interview that poignantly illustrated the demise of the printed paper... It was with a business owner in San Francisco. The particular business was not a new stand or bookstore, but greasy spoon diner that always drew a crowd for Sunday brunch. "We used to have STACKS of the sunday paper on all the tables" he said... "Each one would be read and re-read, passed around and at the end of the day there would be a huge pile... Now there are hardly any." I guess an iPad allows more room on our table...

...looking forward to the daily news Dorian, but sad to see the printed version go.

Well, I hope it works out for them. I still like to handle a physical newspaper, turn the pages, smooth the paper, use it to wrap stuff in... etc.

I guess my question is if you publish something online how can you keep anyone from sharing it? The text is certainly not sold but only shared. When you print a paper you can not control how many times the paper is shared or read by others. We all search the internet looking for things to share. Dont see how this can work for them. I will continue to cut and paste and publish on line anything I feel is significant from any site I find. If they dont want people reading and sharing the stuff they need to make theirs a paid site or somehow control access. See how much business they get then. LOL. It would have been better to make the paper better. If people dont read it in print they certainly wont read it on line.

I am a huge fan of the printed word. Magazine sales have consistently gone up despite the fact that much of the content can now be viewed on line. There is something about holding the paper, smelling the ads and leafing through the pages that I for one am not planning to let go.

I wish the Ambergris Today good luck in their bold move, but I am sad that we are back down to only one newsprint each week that focuses on San Pedro. I have loved the San Pedro Sun since day one (Coconut Wireless days) and I continue to look forward to receiving my copy fresh and crisp, hot off the presses each thursday - despite the fact that I may have already read the "news" on line during the week.

I'm sad about the change too. I watch when I am out and about, in a restaurant or local pub when the paper hits the pavement. One of the things I see is local Belizeans avidly enjoying reading the paper. As much as I love my internet connections, in a third world country it is elitist to think everyone has access to news via electronics. I think there is something wrong when they don't get it that news is supposed to be for ALL of the people.

I suspect that the change is an effort to try and become somewhat profitable. I can't believe that if the paper was making money they would have made this drastic change. What is puzzling to me is that they would say they are getting so many hits. Maybe they simply don't understand the statistics. I wish them luck but suspect that this is the beginning of the end.

Sitting on the loo with a laptop just doesn't have the same "feel" to it.

You know, I have seen entities here putting up sites on facebook and web sites. They really don't understand the media and the statistics. There is a local business supported site on facebook that always prints chipper upbeat PR comments. Last that I looked, they had big number of business related "friends" and almost no personal "friends". Obviously everybody saw through it, unfriended them, and they are now "preaching to the choir". Funny!

I'm an old newspaper and magazine reporter, editor and publisher, and I especially love the newspaper business -- there's nothing else like it in the world -- but IMO printed newspapers are on their way to extinction. It may take a couple more decades, but eventually they will go the way of the telegram and will exist only in electronic form. More's the pity.

--Lan Sluder

Not yet, know what you mean but something about holding it in your hand and turning the pages. I think its going to be alive for a while yet.
Cant see hitting the dog with my lap top either.

GwenA, some of us aren't in facebook enough to separate out our personal and business friends. i don't think anyone even in my family is listed as a personal friend. If you have a page there but don't spend a lot of time in there you don't get so fluent in the facebook setups.

It doesn't necessarily mean the entity doesn't have many personal friends!

Whether they do or not, they don't understand the media. Facebook is interactive. Whenever anybody says anything to them, they don't get it. They like it if everybody says yippee, and how sweet and wonderful. But if someone says, I don't agree or makes one of our usual wry comments...they get defensive. This just doest go with their attempts at PR. They don't get the LOL atmosphere of the media.
Friend is a generic term on Facebook...either you are one or not. Just to be friended to a commercial enterprise is just to be connected to them.

Just to put it another way, the commercial entities on Facebook that are successful around here are fun and useful...advertising a party, or furthering an ongoing cause, or providing news. If they are just trying to attract new tourists (without providing a service that is helpful) they really aren't in keeping with the media. Most of us are bored with their intent after the next " it's wonderful day in Paradise schpiel". But if Elbert puts up a beautiful personal photograph...he produced..we are in awe!

one can pretty well understand the media without choosing to actively participate a lot. there is only so much time in the day...

what you say is very true.

I bet the new website is cool. should be up soon... I saw the layout briefly when it was almost up. LOOKS NICE. they are working away to get it up this morning I think....

I agree with Lan, printed newspapers are dead in the long run.

... ipads work great on the loo.

I can't line my birdcage with an ipad!

More Power to Ambergris Today!! =)

It's Alive!!!! Looks impressive!

Congratulations to the Ambergris Today staff for their hard work!

http://ambergristoday.com/

Lans right, of course, and many folks in this world who are not connected or just not reading news online will be cut off from written news.I have seen two month old newspapers treasured and passed around in an African village.

I love the new lay-out. It looks great! But I am afraid that Dorian has made a fatal mistake though. AC Today online gets its hits through the printed newspaper and quotes in cyberspace. He wants to eliminate both! The no-quote policy can't be enforced unless he has already made deals with Google (cache) and web archive .org, to name just two - can name a bunch more... The printed matter could have been reduced (to save money) to a news guide or something that makes you check out the site. Plus the advertisement revenues are much less online than printed. Love the Ambergris Today team to death, and hope that I am totally wrong!!!
Short

I wish Dorian good luck,even though I will certainly will miss the ambergris today coming out every Thursday.A lot of their hits was generated the by printed paper and a lot of the local population don't have access to a computer. I agree with short that most of their revenues are generated by the newspaper and not online so I hope that they can survive.

Ambergris Today Now Provides Daily News Service

Regarding the story on Mya and Larry Johnson - I find it interesting that they have the same photos on TMZ.com, which I presume that they bought from Dorian as he is referenced, but yet with TMZ you can download the original, and on ambergristoday.com they've posted their name all over it. I doubly find it interesting that while they are uptight about using their content without reference, they used Wikipedia without reference.

Finally - the site looks great but I personally feel that in absence of an actual newspaper, a website should look and feel like a newspaper - not MySpace.