LDS Media Talk

Blogs are mainstream media. About 30 million US Internet users (14% of the Internet population) have a blog they update at least once a month. That number is expected to grow by 25% in 4 years.
 

Even more important than the number of bloggers, is the number of blog readers. eMarketer estimates that this year, 96.6 million US Internet users will read a blog at least once per month. By 2013, 128.2 million people, or 58% of all US Internet users, will do the same.

Blog sites now touch tens of millions of people in the US.

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ComScore reported that the total Internet audience worldwide (aged 15+ from home and work computers) surpassed one billion visitors in December 2008. Where do they come from?

• Asia-Pacific accounts for 41% of the users.
• Europe: 28%
• North America: 18%
• Latin America: 7%
• Middle East and Africa: 5%

With a world population of 6.7 billion, that means that 1 out of every 6.7 people on the planet use the Internet.

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According to Nielsen Online, YouTube is the 5th most popular Web brand in the USA.

YouTube is growing fast. They had over 83 million unique visitors in February. Credit Suisse estimates that 41% of all US video streams will go through YouTube in 2009 and the site will see 375 million unique viewers worldwide. That must mean big profits for YouTube, right?

Wrong. YouTube’s expenses for bandwidth, content licensing agreements, and hardware alone , and other expenses will reach over $600 million in 2009, while their income is estimated to be somewhere between $90 and $500 million.

That means that YouTube has to find a way to bring in more money, either with licensed content (like TV shows) or required ads.

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According to a survey by the Center for the Digital Future at USC, a majority of US users say the Internet has made them more productive, and that number is increasing every year. In the year 2000, 57% said the Internet had improved their productivity “a lot” or “somewhat.” That number jumped to 71% in 2007.

According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, 28% of Americans have Internet access at work. The majority of those are aged 30-49, are college graduates, and earn more than $75,000 a year. A Nielsen Online survey (see results below) found that they averaged 67 online sessions and spent approximately 89 hours online per month. They visited 131 different domains, viewing each site for a minute, on average.

Are all those 131 Web sites really work related? Is there a downside to all this Internet activity? What do you see as the impact of the Internet on your work?

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Note this chart from the Pew Internet & American Life Project:

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The Gospel Art Picture Kit is a great resource for family home evening lessons, primary talks and many other gospel teaching and scripture story telling moments.  The online Gospel Art Picture Kit can be found in the Family Home Evening section of the Home & Family section of LDS.org.  A hard copy of the kit can be purchased through the Church Distribution Center Web site, ldscatalog.com (the boxed Gospel Art Picture Kit is only $30).  The boxed kit contained 160 pictures, and most of them are also available to view and print for free from the Web site.  The Web site images.lds.org has a link to the Gospel Art Picture Kit as well as links to many other Church-related image libraries. You can also google “Gospel Art Picture Kit”;  the first result is for the online kit and the second result is the link to purchase the actual kit.

Rebecca Lyn Casper, a project coordinator interning in the Church Audio/Visual department, recently did an analysis of the pictures in the online gospel art kit. She found that the New Testament pictures are the most popular, comprising 36% of the total views of gospel art pictures.  The most popular of the all the pictures was “John the Baptist Baptizing Jesus” with over 23,000 page views during the year 2008.  Below is a chart of the top 10 most popular pictures in the gospel art kit.

Though Larry Richman blogged about pictures on Church Web sites a couple of years ago, it was only recently that I learned that the Gospel Art Picture Kit was available online, and only today did I learn about images.lds.org. I wonder how many of you were aware of these resources? And if you have used them, what could we at the Church do to improve them? Your thoughts are appreciated.

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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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