New Entrant to the Obituary Market

Well, an interesting development in the niche market of Australian online death notices, funeral notices and obituaries today.

The emergence of an Australian website claiming, among other things,

There is no other place where obituary notices can be viewed hours after they appear in newspapers; no other place where notices from more than one city can be viewed without moving from one newspaper or one web-site to another.

Well, these guys are either blatantly lying or totally stupid if they don’t realise that the http://www.obits.com.au/ website has been operating for 10 months now. More often than not our notices appear hours BEFORE they appear in newspapers. Why? Because we don’t have to wait for them to be published – funeral directors submit them directly ONLINE or via fax. We don’t have to wait for them to be published before we add them to our website, because they are ORIGINAL notices, supplied WITH the family’s consent.

The posting of Obituary and Funeral Notices on the Internet is a completely new development.

Well, no it isn’t. Obits has been doing it for 10 months, and the newspapers a lot longer still. The industry is HUGE in the States, and they have been doing it for years.

We are the front-runner in this whole market. Establishing a thoroughly reputable and ethical business such as this is an expensive exercise which is very unlikely to be repeated.

How can you claim to be a “front-runner” when there is already an established business in your market? How can you claim to be “reputable and ethical” when you are placing notices online without the knowledge or consent of the families whose loved one has passed? How can you risk causing further distress to a grieving family and still claim to be “reputable and ethical”?

Obviously, I support the concept of online notices, and the value of the information remaining online forever, for future generations. But “reputable and ethical” businesses are built by earning the trust and respect of the community you are working in. In the Australian funeral industry this takes time. Whilst you might provide a service for the masses, at what cost?

Potentially causing distress to grieving families, and then offering to hook them up with a grief counsellor nearby does not seem “ethical” to me. How can you claim “Our staff are specially trained to make the grieving process very much easier to bear” whilst totally dismissing the fact that you could be causing more grief in the first place. And to have a notice removed from the site – the funeral director has to fax through a request.

And the general manager’s response “I’m not doing anything illegal – it’s public information”. Sure, but I wonder whether cutting and pasting someone else’s efforts would be considered legal? Certainly not “ethical”.

And I have to ask myself, why are there virtually no notices from WA if the notices appear hours after they appear in print? Probably because these notices are not accessible online – they can’t be copied and pasted.