ABC News Radio IT was carrying a report yesterday that Religious
Websites are now challenging the more traditional high traffic sites
dealing in sport and porn. The report cited examples such as Beliefnet.com and the Interview with God website (which have both been reviewed by Catholic
Telecommunications News in recent months) which have phenomenal traffic through
them. The Interview with God website is reputed to be attracting a quarter of a
million visits per month. What is perhaps even better news is that it is not
just traffic to the sites but they are generating significant revenue through
advertising and outperforming other sectors financially. The statistics for
both Catholic Telecommunication News and our related Discussion Board indicate
a similar highly pleasing trend. There seem to be cyber communities of believers
emerging that are functioning in many ways like traditional parishes except for
the physical contact.
The report would seem to have some substance judging by other indicators. Last
month the Zenit News Agency in a concerted drive added another 30,000
email recipients of its daily news bulletins. The growth in popularity of this
Catholic Telecommunications News Service and our related discussion board is
another indicator.
Up until midnight last night (31 January) there were 1.5 million hits to the
Catholic Telecommunications news service in January and in total people spent
4,259.69 hours reading the news on our website.
This figure would vastly understate the actual hours people
are spending with us as it cannot measure the time spent by those who are
reading the email version and it cannot measure the time spent by people
reading feature articles and opinion pieces which are hosted on different
services and merely referred to by our service. The Catholic Telecommunications
discussion board has likewise been experiencing spectacular growth since it was
set up less than 12 months ago. Like most organisations it only has a small
core group of active participants but the statistics are indicating that
perhaps they represent only as much as 10% of those who are using the service.
The attached graph indicates the continued rise in visitors to the discussion
board over the last 12 months.
Just out of interest: last month the most visited news story on our website was
"Vatican says Bishops cannot require priests to use altar girls"
which ran on 4th January. The second most visited story was headlined "Bathersby
tells New Age nuns to put house in order" and published on 10th
January. Surprisingly the third most visited story was one from 11 July last
year: "Bob Dylan says Pope gig was his favourite".
The graph below shows the trend of total hours spent reading the news on our
website over the last three weeks.