Los Angeles, USA - Can you believe GodTube.com?
First, the upstart Christian video site became the nation's fastest-growing Web property for August, according to ComScore's Media Metrix. Its 1.7 million unique visitors represented a 973 percent increase in traffic over the previous month. In September, the number of visitors leveled off, but the length of the average user's stay nearly doubled to 7.7 minutes, ComScore said.
Then last week, GodTube became the first religious Web site to offer the hot-ticket social media trinity: user-generated video (a la YouTube), social networking (a la MySpace and Facebook) and live Webcasting (a la Stickam.com). GodTube's claim that it has become the most-trafficked Christian Web site is trumped only by a second boast: that by the sheer volume of video watched by its users - 1.5 million hours last month - it is now the world's largest broadcaster of Christian video.
Similar efforts from Judaism and Islam have launched recently, and more are cropping up. But GodTube seems to have friends in especially high places.
GodTube's partners include, as chief executive Chris Wyatt puts it, "the who's who" of U.S. Christianity.
"Everyone's onboard," he said, "the premier ministries, megachurches and Christian retailers." Although GodTube, based in Plano, Texas, has yet to release the complete list of its more than 50 major business partners, they include such powerhouses as the 10,000-member Crystal Cathedral in Orange County, Calif., the late Rev. Jerry Falwell's Liberty University in Virginia and leading Christian publisher Thomas Nelson Inc. of Nashville.
Despite its partnerships with non-profit religious organizations, GodTube is not a church. It is a media company with a thoroughly planned business model that includes selling religious and secular advertising, charging subscription fees to ministries that want to broadcast more frequently and selling anonymous demographic data, allowing marketers and media producers a clearer picture of who's watching.
Indeed, as broadband Internet becomes more widely available in the U.S. and worldwide, entrepreneurs are finding that the business of online religion is a lucrative one.
"We're very much a for-profit organization," said Reza Aslan, a religious scholar at University of California, Santa Barbara, and media analyst who is an executive officer at Mecca.com, a growing online community for Muslims.
Mecca.com, Aslan said, will focus its commercial efforts on Haaj tourism - pilgrimages to Mecca - and selling branded products such as Saudi Arabia's Mecca-Cola.
Religion on the Internet is nothing new. Churches have been using e-mail and bulletin-board services for more than a decade, and sacred texts have long been accessible online. But with a sleek, youth-friendly interface and more interactive video technology than you can shake a crook at, GodTube is trying to take networked religion to the next level.