Spiritual holidays and heavy coverage of religion-related news drove a sizable jump in traffic to religion Web sites last month, according to a report on Web traffic released Tuesday.
And three newcomers among the month's 50 top U.S. Web sites featured the same joke page, said the Jupiter Media Metrix Internet ratings report for March.
Overall use of the Web and other digital media - instant messaging, file-sharing, gaming, proprietary online networks like AOL - continued to grow steadily, rising 1.9 percent from 112 million users in February to 114.1 million in March, the report said.
Easter and Passover celebrations helped spark a 54 percent increase in visits to religion Web sites between February and March, with traffic rising from 4.2 percent to 6.4 percent of the overall online population in the U.S.
"While religion sites have grown steadily over the past year, the surge in visitors in March 2002 was quite significant, with traffic to the category double what it was just six months ago," Jupiter Media Metrix analyst Stephen Kim said in a news release.
The increase comes amid heavy news coverage of sexual abuse allegations against Catholic priests, combat in the Holy Land of the Middle East, and the religion-spiked Afghan war.
Big gainers in the religion category were led by Christianitytoday.com, up 71.4 percent, while visits to Christianbook.com rose 43.6 percent. Catholic.org took 28.7 percent more traffic and Jewishworldreview.org's rose 27.3 percent. List newcomer Wuzupgod.com's 652,000 visit count was second only to the 890,000 to Christianbook.com, Jupiter Media Metrix said.
Three of the newcomer sites - Dtig.de, Tekzoned.com and Jaybill.com - drew much of their traffic with the same joke page asking visitors what was wrong with a photo of a room. After several seconds pass, unsuspecting viewers see a screaming head replace the photo.
March's top newcomer, Spicycomet.com, attracted 4.3 million visitors with a deep discount on its software that converts any video or audio file on a PC to DVD-compatible format, the report said.
Overall Eonline.com showed the greatest growth - 63 percent - thanks to interest in the Academy Awards, while the NCAA Basketball tournament pushed a 53 percent rise in traffic to Sportsline.com. Trip Network properties showed the third-largest growth with a 49 percent rise in unique visits.