Babblin' Brooks: Extending beyond the city limits

Sometimes, an answer can be so simple.

Not too long ago, I was griping to my wife, Sarah, about how I do not think some people realize how much of a reach the Comanche Times has, especially when it comes to advertising.

“Well, tell them,” she said.

“What a brilliant idea,” I thought. “Why didn’t I think of that.”

Obviously, our largest subscriber base is in Comanche. Duncan easily comes second, then other parts of the county and Jefferson County are right there together.

That’s not the limit of our reach, however. We have subscribers all over Oklahoma and beyond from Washington state to Georgia. That does not include online-only subscriptions.

You will notice two graphs with this column. The first is a map of the United States from last Wednesday. The shaded states are the ones where people were from that read at least one article on the Comanche Times website. Notice there are 48 shaded states with only Vermont and Mississippi not included and we have newspaper subscribers in Mississippi.

That is not an anomaly, it is about average at any given time. We have had all 50 shaded before and I don’t recall ever being below 44 in the past year that we’ve had the new web service that keeps track of those statistics. Most of the time it is in the upper 40s.

That 1,494 number you see at the bottom is not the number of readers we have had total in the United States in the past 30 days. It is the numbers from Oklahoma for the past 30 days. Adding Texas readers alone would push the number to well over 2,100.

We get some big numbers from Texas. Texas readers have even outnumbered Oklahoma readers at some points.

The second graph shows the most-read articles for the past 30 days with numbers in the hundreds. I have intentionally blurred out the names of the articles because I don’t want any feelings to get hurt. We’ve had several articles climb in the 800s and beyond. The stories we did on Katey Jo Gordon participating in and winning the Ultimate Cowboy Showdown TV show went into the thousands.

The first story we did on her lingered in the top five stories read on our website for about three months straight. Our story in June on the unsolved murder of Mary Pewitt is doing the same thing. The small story we did on the large number of quarantined students from Comanche High School last year had over 20,000 views.

Besides people who buy yearly paid online subscriptions, people can sign up for a free one-month trial subscription on our website, www.comancheok.net. They can get digital copies of the newspaper regardless of where they are in the world. I know off the top of my head we have at least one reader in the Middle East that gets his newspaper digitally.

People who buy a regular newspaper subscription also get a free digital subscription. On vacation and want to know what has happened since you’ve been gone? Sign in to your online account and see what everybody else back home received in the mail that week.

What does all this mean? It means the Comanche Times is a great way to reach people locally and nationally.

We have several options for advertisers on our website in addition to those in print. Advertisers can purchase a small square ad. A banner ad across the top is slightly more. We have video advertising capabilities as well. This way business owners can make sure that people are thoroughly familiar with their business.

Local newspapers are not the dinosaurs some may think we are. We provide an important service to the community, providing information that you can’t find by just using a search engine or social media.

How can the community support its local newspaper? By buying newspapers off the news racks, subscribing or advertising.

We are proud to be in Comanche and serving the needs of the community.

We thank you for your support. We encourage you not to only support us but other local businesses. These are the businesses that support the school, your kids’ ball teams, that employ local people and are the community leaders and community cheerleaders.