Web users, in general, want fresh content, therefore it is typically the new sites or new postings on the site that get the most traffic. LDS.org is no different and, not surprisingly, traffic spikes around General Conference time as members are hungry to feast upon the latest words from our living prophets. In the weeks after conference, archived talks remain among the most popular items on LDS.org. Through the end of October, there were over 1.2 million downloads of October 2008 General Conference talks.
In this instance “downloads” has a specific meaning, which I will explain, but you will see that the 1.2 million figure is actually a conservation estimate. By download, I don’t necessarily mean that the talk was saved to the user’s hard-drive, merely that the talk was read, watched or listened to. I have de-duplicated the figures, meaning that if the same person downloaded the same content multiple times, I only count it once. I also wanted to include the numbers from people watching archived content on the Move player, the new interactive video player the Church is using. Since the Move player is tracked differently, I had to do some additional finagling, but again, I erred on the conservative side and simply took unique visitors to the page. Bottom line, the actual number of archived talks read/listened to/watched is probably much higher than my 1.2 million, conservative estimate.
In the charts below, you will see various breakouts of the 1.2 million downloads of October 2008 General Conference archived content. The numbers are through the end of October.
Summary By Format: Read/Watch/Listen
| Oct 08 Gen Conf Archive Dnlds thru 10/31 | ||
| Format | Downloads | % |
| Read | 502,799 | 40.6% |
| Watch | 429,648 | 34.7% |
| Listen | 306,063 | 24.7% |
| Total | 1,238,510 | 100.0% |
Summary By Technology
| Oct 08 Gen Conf Archive Dnlds thru 10/31 | ||
| Format | Downloads | % |
| Read | 502,799 | 40.6% |
| Watch Move Player | 392,295 | 31.7% |
| Listen MP3 | 225,114 | 18.2% |
| Listen 300K | 60,532 | 4.9% |
| Listen QuickTime | 20,417 | 1.6% |
| Watch QuickTime | 19,050 | 1.5% |
| Watch Windows Media | 14,732 | 1.2% |
| Watch ASX 300k | 3,571 | 0.3% |
| Total | 1,238,510 | 100.0% |
Summary By Session
| Oct 08 Gen Conf Archive Downloads through 10/31 | ||
| Session | Downloads | % |
| General Relief Society Meeting | 53,006 | 4.3% |
| Saturday Morning Session | 262,461 | 21.2% |
| Saturday Afternoon Session | 183,567 | 14.8% |
| Priesthood Session | 110,659 | 8.9% |
| Sunday Morning Session | 126,775 | 10.2% |
| Sunday Afternoon Session | 109,747 | 8.9% |
| Unknown (all Move Player archive views) | 392,295 | 31.7% |
| Total | 1,238,510 | 100.0% |
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{ 10 comments… read them below or add one }
Is there any movement for the move player to support linux? I know I’m in a small minority, but it would be nice to have it supported natively. I haven’t got the work-around to install firefox (with required plugins) under wine to work just yet with the lds.org content. Anyway, if you have any input into what platforms Move Networks decides to support here’s at least one vote for linux support.
I found it interesting that the most popular session downloaded was the Saturday morning session. Do you have a guess as to why? I have two theories … either a) it’s the one most missed by the general public due to conflict in schedules or otherwise and so folks are catching up on what they missed or b) those who are going back and listening to Conference start out by downloading the Saturday morning session first, followed by the afternoon, etc. I’m interested to know what you think. Thanks.
Is there a further analysis by language? I’m also curious if there are statistics for live views.
Cody: I thought the same thing about the Saturday morning session – people wanting to catch-up.
Cody,
Those are our two theories as well. I think it’s probably a combination of both.
Tim,
Maybe I can do another post with the live statistics we have for General Conference streaming. With regard to archive language views, English, Spanish, and Portuguese (in that order) are most popular. That should be no surprise, but the fourth most popular language may be surprising; it’s American Sign Language. Fifth is Japanese and sixth is French. Let me know if there is a particular language you are interested in.
I agree with Jay about Linux support. Audio (and of course text) is no problem with Linux, but once you start requiring third-party software that doesn’t work on Linux the video becomes problematic.
I’m still waiting for the CDs I ordered. I’m wondering if I should have just burned conference to CD rather than sending in the order.
Any idea how much longer it will be until they arrive? I’m on the subscription plan (I thought it would speed things up).
I applaud the improvements made to the General Conference mp3s. Higher resolution album artwork, talk title is the track title, and better overall ID3 tags. It’s much less work for me to clean up now when I add it to my listening library.
Thank you!
Good, shipping at the end of November now.
I’m wondering how many less people downloaded from the Church website since it was so amazingly easy to get the videos of the talks through itunes. That’s what I did this time.