LDS Media Talk

I’ve been thinking about the audience of this blog.  Whether you are a public speaker, author, or Web site developer, it’s a good idea to know your audience.  I know our intended audience is LDS parents and youth, but without some research, I don’t know if that is the actual audience coming to the blog and reading it.

Web Analytics
Visitor tracking through Web analytics can tell us a lot about the audience of LDS Media Talk, but not everything.  Through Web analytics, I know how many people come to the site, where they are from, how long they stay, what articles they view, etc. but I don’t know if they are members of the LDS Church or not, nor do I know if they are parents or youth or neither.

Visitors to the Site
About 5,000 visitors come to the blog each month (4,854 in the month of November) plus there are over 1,100 people that subscribe to the RSS feed of the blog.  During November, there averaged about 200 people a day coming to the blog.

Time on Site
Looking at the last month of data, the average person spends about a minute and a half on the site. As you can see in the graph above, there seems to be an upward trend, which indicates we might be doing better at providing content people like to see.  I certainly hope that’s the case.

Geo-Segmentation
Web analytics data tells us that we have visitors from about 100 countries throughout the world and all 50 states in the US.  A majority of the US visitors are from Utah, followed by California, then Arizona, Idaho and Texas (as can be seen in the green heat map).

Audience Participation
The Web analytics data helps us in indispensible ways to know our audience, how frequently they read the blog, and where they are from.  But despite all this great Web analytics data, we still don’t know for sure if we are reaching our intended audience, LDS parents and youth.  So I thought I’d just come out and ask.  Below you will see a survey (if you don’t see it in your RSS reader or email, then go to the actual blog Web site and you will see it).  Please fill out the survey and soon we will know our audience better.  Thanks.

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According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, more than half of US adults play video games, and about 20% play every day or almost every day. 81% of US adults ages 18-29 said they are video gamers, while only 23% of respondents 65 and older said the same. Only slightly more males (55%) than females (50%) are gamers.

There are no significant differences due to household income, and the more the education, the higher the level of video game playing. English-speaking Hispanics are more likely to be gamers than whites or blacks, and urban and suburban dwellers are a little more likely to play than rural folks.

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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

Summary By Technology

Summary By Session

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Consistent with this Blog’s goal of discussing topics relevant to LDS parents and youth, as well as considering my professional field of Web analytics, I’d like to talk today about the growth of Facebook and how it relates to LDS families.  Facebook.com is one of the world’s most popular Web sites, particularly among youth and young adults, and has been a frequent topic of discussion at this blog (see What are social networks?, Watch Out Google, Here Comes Facebook, and 12 Ways to Share the Gospel on the Internet).

The Stats
According to comScore, Facebook recently took over MySpace as the leading social networking site, attracting 132 million visitors world-wide in June 2008.  In the US, Facebook’s popularity still trails MySpace, though Hitwise reports that Facebook saw a 40% growth in US market share over the last year while MySpace’s share declined.  Alexa reports that Facebook is 5th most popular Web site in the world behind Yahoo!, Google, YouTube and Windows Live.  Facebook has particularly high usage among teens and young adults; according to a 2006 study, Facebook was named the second most popular thing among undergraduate college students, and only ranked lower than the iPod.

What this Means for Parents and Leaders of Youth
Chances are that if you are a parent of a teenage or a youth leader, you are probably less technically savvy than the youth you work with.  Many parents and youth leaders I have spoken with don’t really understand what Facebook is and most have never visited the Web site.  I’m not advocating spying on your kids (I’ll leave that up to your own discretion) but I do think parents and leaders should visit Facebook and see what the youth are doing online. You will probably be surprised at what you find; pleasantly surprised in some instances, unpleasantly surprised in other cases.

My wife and I have worked with the youth in Church callings for years.  We love staying in contact with these youth that we came to care about so much and Facebook provides a great way to do just that.  It is so satisfying to see the youth that we remember as Deacons and Teachers, Beehives and Miamaids, growing up, entering college, going on missions, and marrying in the temple.  On the flip side, it is saddening to see the poor choices some of the youth are making, as reflected in the things they write on Facebook and the pictures they post.  

Like the Internet in general, there is much good and much evil easily available on social media Web sites such as Facebook.  Church leaders have stated that the Internet is a great tool for hastening the work of the Lord, but they have also repeatedly counseled members to avoid evils that are available on the Web.  Elder L. Edward Brown of the Seventy taught:  ”You have access through the Internet to resources one cannot begin to imagine. However, lurking there as well is a sinister evil, as deadly as a rapidly growing cancer…Self-discipline is required relative to the materials you choose to read and the videos you may select to view.” (”Bring Your Mission Home with You,” Ensign, Dec. 2000, 18).

Join In
I believe that by joining in this online social network, we parents and leaders can help, guide and protect the youth.  To sign up for a free Facebook account, simply go to Facebook.com and fill out the form on the home page. Once you’re in, browse around, see what it’s all about, and request friendships with your youth, family and other friends.  To learn more about how to create an account and connect with friends, check out A beginner’s guide to Facebook, or this Videos Series, “How to Use Facebook”, by eHow.com.

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87% of parents of teenagers are online–that’s 17% more than average adults. And those parents check up on and regulate their teens’ media use, not just in terms of the Internet, but with television and video games as well. Family rules on such media use lean slightly more towards the content of the media rather than the time spent with the media device.

Teens and their parents use the Internet, cell phones, iPods, digital cameras, and other technology devices in a similar way, but teens (89%) are more likely than their parents (71%) to say that this technology made their lives easier.

While a majority of parents with online teens still believe the Internet is a beneficial factor in their children’s lives, there has been a decrease since 2004 in the number of parents who believe the Internet is a good thing for their children. However, there has not been a corresponding increase in parents who think the Internet has been a bad thing for their children; they are simply neutral about whether their children have been positively affected by the internet.

Source: Parent and Teenager Internet Use by Pew/Internet

For related information, you may want to check out the Pew Internet & American Life Project for boatloads of data about who uses the Internet and how.

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Being a parent means that using the Internet is becoming increasingly helpful. According to three separate studies, over 85% of parents are now online. (Sources: Pew Internet & American Life Project survey in late 2006, US Department of Commerce study in October 2007, and Experian Consumer Research consumer survey in spring 2007.)

Percent who went online at home or at some other location:

• 94% of women who expect to have their first or second child in the next year
• 85% of parents with at least one child in the household

Compare that with

• 73% in family households without children
• 59% among non-family households

Mothers are part of an adult female Internet user population that is predicted to grow from 80.9 million in 2008 to 91.3 million in 2012. Adult females already outnumber adult males in both the general population and the Internet user population.

Read more about what moms do online at eMarketer.com

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More tidbits from the Web 2.0 Expo:

Percent of connected consumers who use the feature frequently:

• 95% watch a video online
• 85% browse by most popular
• 75% read blogs
• 66% use social networks
• 56% subscribe to RSS
• 40% post or comment to blogs
• 35% access mobile data services
• 35% use tag clouds

The Internet’s reach exceeds TV’s from 7am to 8pm.

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According to recent estimates there were 6.6 billion people in the world in 2007. Of that number, 1.15 billion (17.5%) were regular Internet users. By 2012, eMarketer projects that over 1.7 billion people worldwide (24.5%) will access the Internet at least once a month.

This year will see China overtake the United States as the most populous Internet nation in the world and the Asia-Pacific region will top 500 million Internet users.

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You may be interested in the following from VentureBeat by Eric Eldon:

Religious-themed social networks may be among the more under-appreciated of web sites.

Today, Comscore released numbers showing GodTube, a YouTube for Christians, to be the fastest growing site on the internet in August. It grew 973 percent and ranked among the top 1000 web properties by unique visitors — the same month it officially launched, as Mashable’s Kristen Nicole points out.

GodTube lets users, preferably Christians, upload, share and comment on videos.

Meanwhile, JewTube — yes, a YouTube for Jews — is facing a trademark lawsuit from Google.

We noticed the growth of religious social networks back in August, especially the fast growth of two Facebook applications, Bible Verses and Daily Bible Verse.

Today, we checked back in with Adoholic, our data source. Both apps have more than doubled their number of total users. But only a few thousand Facebook users are active with Daily Bible Verse daily, and only around 25,000 are active on Bible Verses.

Both apps allow user to prominently feature Bible Verses on their profile pages: If the measure of success is souls saved not user engaged, these apps are headed down the right path.

Daily Bible Verse, owned by a Christian social network called MyChurch.org, recently announced it had over more than 10,000 churches on its network.

Other funded religious social networks include CircleBuilder, a site designed more broadly for faith-based groups , and Oikos. As one Oikos developer said last month: “We’ve harnessed the power of Web 2.0 to create a Flash-based environment that has never been seen before in the Christian community.”

Question is, will MC Hammer get into the religious act with his new startup, the forthcoming DanceJam? After all, this author saw him perform a Christian concert (that included “Can’t Touch This”) at a revival service in Albany, Oregon, in 2001.

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Take a look at Time magazine’s  top 100 Web sites in the world. I wasn’t aware of some of them.

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