Court documents obtained on March 8, 2016, showed that the now-defunct The Real Singapore (TRS) website was ascertained, in the course of investigations against TRS, to have raked in close to half a million dollars in the span of one and a half years.

According to advertising material produced by the Japanese-born TRS administrator Ai Takagi, 23, who is an Australian citizen, the vast majority of visitors to the TRS website -- over 95% of all visitors -- were from Singapore.

More popular than mainstream news sites

Takagi had relied on information obtained from a web analytics company, which stated that the TRS website was, at one point, ranked as the 35th most popular website amongst Internet users in Singapore.

It was more popular than the websites of The Straits Times (ranked 36th), Channel NewsAsia (ranked 41st), Stomp (ranked 58th), and Today Online (ranked 100th).

As at Feb. 17, 2015, the TRS website had more than 140,000 unique visitors per day and almost 2.6 million unique visitors per month. As at 17 February 2015, the TRS website had in excess of 360,000 daily pageviews and almost 13 million monthly pageviews.

Takagi had prepared advertising presentation

In the course of investigations, a presentation entitled, “Advertising with TheRealSingapore.com”, which was prepared by Takagi sometime in 2013, was also recovered.

In this presentation, Takagi highlights key site statistics for the TRS website and specifically highlights numerous options for advertisement placement on the TRS website, together with the cost associated for each option.

In addition, in the presentation, Takagi offered to work together with advertisers to provide advertorials, for publication as articles, during peak hours on the TRS website.

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