Top-Secret Mormon Web Traffic Stats Revealed!!
Check out the official December 2010 web analytics that LDS Inc. doesn’t want you to see:
How many people visit Church sites? The family of official Church sites (LDS.org, Mormon.org, FamilySearch.org, etc.), gets about seven million unique visitors per month.
What are the biggest Church sites? FamilySearch.org is our biggest site with about 3.5 million visitors a month. The LDS.org home page gets about 2.5 million visitors a month. The Gospel Library, which has current and past magazine articles, gets about 1 million visitors each month.
How many websites does the Church operate? The Church operates over 100 different websites. We have about 65 international sites for countries around the world, plus more than 50 other official Church sites (and the number keeps growing).
What are the top international sites? Brazil’s site is our biggest international site with almost 40,000 visitors each month. It is followed by Argentina, Mexico, Japan, and Germany.
Why does LDS HQ want to prevent these stats from seeing the light of day?
1) Unlike this ballyhooed LDS stat, these web stats are accurate.
2) Unlike this announcement, publishing these stats would not generate useful buzz.
3) The international numbers have got to be a huge disappointment.* They would seem to suggest that we’re already much bigger than the membership of the church outside the U.S. (“we” being the disaffected Mormon underground). Think about that and then think about how you’d explain such a frankly pathetic outcome to the folks paying tithing to build chapels and temples overseas.
View/download the source doc here.
* “Brazil boasts more than a million members, the world’s third-largest Mormon population, after the United States and Mexico. It has 27 missions, more than any country outside the U.S. About 10 percent of the faith’s 52,000 missionaries are called to Brazil.”
Views: 5397
Many countries in which the Church has had a lot of growth are third world, like those in Central America and Africa. Church members there are less likely to have Internet access.
Your observation sounds right, but it’s orthogonal to the point Figure 2 makes regarding the almost total failure of the international proselyting program to create demand for localized LDS offerings.
Bear in mind, that the Church is now correlated. That means that it has lost the ability to adapt to national audiences. If you open the Church’s print publications, you will have the token minority, you know the same black singer of the MoTab twice a year and, may be, one international family.
Other than that, it’s all America all the time. American people, American clothing, American furniture, American phones, American make up, and bonnets galore.
While some of that makes sense because internationals want to join an American religion, you do need to adapt to the needs and interests of your audience.
Speaking of audiences, according to Boyd Packer, Mormon editors should not think about their readers but about pleasing their superiors:
If everybody does that then the quality of the Church’s product will decline. You can observe the consequences of that management model all over the Mormon Church.
I think it’s hilarious that the peak of web traffic for LDS.org is Sunday morning. All those last minute talk writers looking for quotes make are making the site hoppin’.
The problem with the “much ballyhooed LDS stat” is that membership rates in the Mormon church include children born “under the covenant” and children of existing adult members. Take into account the rate at which the average Mormon family produces offspring and this is a number entirely different from the number of bodies actually filling the pews on a weekly basis.
The Deseret News link was priceless. It ends with Scott Trotter saying, “We are not interested in growth for the sake of numbers.” This in an article with the headline “14 million Mormons and counting.”
Exactly. It’s not “14 million and counting” … it’s “The Final Countdown (w/ kazoo)”:
Ha, that is a great video!
Well, consider that a Mental Health Break à la Andrew Sullivan.
Well-deserved after our discussion about Mormon Times on that other thread. Re MT, as far as I can tell, the inmates are running the asylum at this point.
All apologies to Dr. B., Brother Spackman and the More Good Foundation.
Did you capture that stats before the take down? It appears that blog didn’t have permission to post all of the stats.
Where hard facts about Mormonism are concerned, my rule of thumb is: download always, post when they go missing, and ask forgiveness later. Permission or not, the stats are golden. It’ll be interesting to revisit this topic a year or two from now. Or maybe not. I suspect that this could well be the last time we’ll ever see in-house stats re official LDS web traffic, in which case I’ll have to rely on third parties and the comparison will come with all kinds of caveats. In the meantime, enjoy the peek at an initial baseline.
What a silly waste of time! Why not spend your time and energy doing good, working righteousness, doing acts of charity and kindness to your fellow man? What good are you doing by trying to embarrass the Church? Do the millions of people who have benefited from Church humanitarian assistance in the past ten years give a hoot about the Church’s web traffic?
Certainly you could focus your energy on something more positive!
#6 KJC said: The problem with the “much ballyhooed LDS stat” is that membership rates in the Mormon church include children born “under the covenant” and children of existing adult members.
I was surprised to learn that the church counts babies who have been blessed and named into its total membership statistics. When I consented to having my daughter blessed and named in the LDS church (she was dedicated at my local Protestant congregation as well), no one told me beforehand that this meant she’d be officially counted as a full-fledged member until she was at least 18. I assumed the count doesn’t start until they get baptized at age 8. My husband wasn’t even aware of it, so I don’t blame him.
I’m not completely sure what I’m going to do next time we have a kid. I dislike the idea of them being counted as members from the cradle, but it would break my husband’s heart if I said “no” on a blessing and naming ceremony.
spamlds — what a silly waste of time, commenting on websites you find uninteresting! There must be thousands of them on the Internet! Don’t you have anything constructive or useful you could be doing instead?
And, in general, if you don’t get the point of a website, it’s common courtesy to start by reading the FAQ before jumping in on a random thread with questions that have already been answered.
spamlds,
By their own account the church has only spent about $8 per member per year on humanitarian aid, a pittance compared to its spending on church buildings and investing in profit-making ventures.
this stuff is fascinating. i f8cking love the internet
In country’s where members speaks other than English language it is logical that number of lds.org and other such web page users will be small, since most of those web pages are in english or language they don’t understand. about half of Church membership lives outside US and I believe many don’t have or don’t use Internet for web surfing.
Internet usage in Latvia doesn’t lag all that far behind the US, maybe 15% gap.
Admittedly, instead of 75% for US or 60% for Latvia, the percentage for Brazil is only 40%. Even so, if LDS statistics are accurate, there should be over 400,000 Mormons online in that country.
Either the Brazilian LDS membership statistics are inflated or less than 10% of Brazilian members (with Internet access) are using the Portuguese web pages available at LDS.org.
Or, the Church has proselytized the poor and uneducated in Brazil, and not attracted the Brazilian middle class. I have no idea what the case might be — just throwing out possibilities.
Game on. I just left a message for a gal who was born in Brazil around the same time I showed up with my missionary tags. What do you think, Sabrina? Are Brazilian Mormons mostly poor and uneducated?
P.S. Not a dig, Alan, I’m seriously curious if she’ll show up. She’s got good taste in Brazilian music but maybe y’all can talk to her about the religion thing.
Or maybe this isn’t in good taste. Whatever. I’ve taken a liking to Forró universitário.
Or maybe it’s just because I sell accordions in real life.
The start of Chinese New Year is just around the corner here in my corner of the world, so you’re gonna have to put up with this and one more video clip to mark the occasion.
Perhaps the most selvagem of them all, Caetano Veloso.
ETA: Nothing’s been redacted, so my rambling is still preserved for posterity, but at least it’s not spread across three comments with embedded videos.
It seems like the US and Japanese websites both get in the neighborhood of one hit per active member per month. I’d guess that would be lower in emerging or developing nations.
Alan,
Brazil boasts the 5th largest internet traffic in the world. 54% (82 million) of its population access the internet on a regular basis, of which 87% access it weekly. (F/Nazca, Ibope Nielsen polls for 2010)
Based on the 2000 national census, only around 26% of officially recorded Latter-day Saints identified themselves as Mormons. We’re are currently waiting publication of the 2010 census!
Official LDS records for Brazil claim 1.1 million members. If we extrapolate Census projections, we’d get roughly 300,000 active members (who, at a minimum, would self-identify as Mormons). If we extrapolate from national polls, we’d expect some 150,000 internet users among active LDS, which would place the current Brazilian visits to official LDS websites at around 25% of the expected target audience.
I don’t think this means there are actually only 40,000 active LDS here in Brazil, but it does give us some idea of *how* active Brazilian LDS are, i.e. how engaged and participant in the Mormon community, how interested in and devoted to the institution, etc.
You have alluded to the “third-world” factor for which we must correct. Although it is true that conversion rates are significantly higher among the poorer segments of society, active membership in the LDS Church is a costly business. Tithing aside, there are many money-intensive aspects to being an active LDS, not the least of which are clothing (expensive for a tropical weather), transportation (especially since Sunday public transportation are notoriously less reliable), time consuming (which translates into less free time, of which poorer urban people already have less), and education intensive (which is needed to thrive in the Mormon culture, and is costly).
Although you’re right the Church attracts a lot more the poor rather than the middle-class, it retains asymmetrically more middle-class than the poor. If anything, the Church in Brazil has a “wealthier” bias as a cross-section of the overall Brazilian social structure.
Which makes the original post’s point even more poignant, at least here in Brazil!
It seems that the LDS church could learn a lesson from the pragmatism Brigham Young when he sent aid to beleaguered handcart companies saying, “Prayer is good, but when baked potatoes and milk are needed, prayer will not supply their place.” Religion may be good, but when potatoes and milk are needed, religion will not supply their place.
Marcello, thanks very much for that info!