''The Hoopla'' was an Australian

news News is information about current events. This may be provided through many different Media (communication), media: word of mouth, printing, Mail, postal systems, broadcasting, Telecommunications, electronic communication, or through the te ...

and opinion website founded by

Wendy Harmer Wendy Gai Harmer (born Wendy Brown, 10 October 1955) is an Australian author, children's writer, journalist, playwright, dramatist, radio show host, comedian, and television personality. Early life and education Harmer was born in Yarram, the ...

and Jane Waterhouse, active from 2011 to 2015. In almost four years, ''The Hoopla'' published 5000 articles from 300 writers.

History

''The Hoopla'' was launched in mid-2011 to present "news through the eyes of women" to women over 35 whose children were grown, or who had never had children. At the time, many websites targeted towards women were parenting websites. A sister website, Birdee, was aimed at younger women. Citing a lack of advertising revenue as advertisers were reluctant to spend money targeting over-50s, the website introduced a hard

paywall A paywall is a method of restricting access to content (media), content, with a purchase or a subscription business model, paid subscription, especially news. Beginning in the mid-2010s, newspapers started implementing paywalls on their website ...

in April 2014 making articles accessible to subscribers only. This saw subscriptions plateau and visits slump. The paywall was later softened in October 2014 and subscriptions began growing by 20% month to month to 5000 overall. On 23 March 2015, Wendy Harmer announced in a post at website that ''The Hoopla'' would cease publication, citing increased competition from big players and her desire to pay contributors fairly. The website's previously published articles are available through the

Wayback Machine The Wayback Machine is a digital archive of the World Wide Web founded by Internet Archive, an American nonprofit organization based in San Francisco, California. Launched for public access in 2001, the service allows users to go "back in ...

References

External links

Official Website
Australian news websites Women's magazines published in Australia News magazines published in Australia Magazines established in 2011 Magazines disestablished in 2015 Defunct magazines published in Australia Defunct Australian websites {{news-website-stub