While Magnetic Island appears to be suffering from an indifferent tourist season the same could not be said for magnetictimes.com where we broke 50,000 online visitors for the first time in one month: May 2005.

The record number of website visitors which brought us an average of 1,714 per day and 53,145 for the month and an average of nearly 30,000 hits per day is, we think, due to the rapidly growing interest in independent local news and the accumulative effect of having all our 1100 archived articles out there in cyberspace and accessible from search engines.

And now the benefits of our traffic is starting to rub off on advertisers. Just weeks ago Island restauranteur, Wayne Schellhorn sold his Noodies Mexican Restaurant in Horseshoe Bay through the Magnetic Times, "Island Businesses for Sale" section. He told Magnetic Times, "It is a great way to sell a business as it puts you in direct contact with a purchaser which gives you the ability to highlight the positives of your business without the potential of an agent suggesting a range of other businesses apart from your own.".

Clearly the benefits of selling direct through the website without an agent's commission is also very attractive. And it wasn't as though the new owners of Noodies were the only interested parties. "I had strong interest from Belgium and Holland from people who fell in love with Magnetic Island from a visit and searched the net but found the business after it had gone under contract," said Wayne Schellhorn.

Figures from Tourism Queensland show that by the end of 2004, 70% of all international visitors to Australia used the net to find information about their trip. 80% of the visitors to Queensland sought information about their destination before leaving home and of these the net proved to be the most popular source - in front of travel agents and books and guides.

Apart from having been here before, listed as their first source of information about Queensland, Australian domestic visitors rated the Internet second most used information source about their destination.

As a website with independent news and information about Magnetic Island, our vision to post the stories of living on our World Heritage Island to the world's people whose heritage it is also, gathers more momentum through the web every day. In our third year of pioneering web-based news in the north we are clearly having an impact with readers from all over Australia and the world responding to stories with their own comments daily. This has obvious benefits for advertisers with magnetictimes.com being very well placed as the biggest source of information about Magnetic to help advertisers reach their target market.

For more information about advertising with the local online news magazine, that draws all those with an interest in Magnetic with a world-wide readership of 50,000 per month, click here.