Page 1 of 1

Church Technology Statistics

Posted: Fri Jul 16, 2010 6:55 am
by sean.whittier
I am writing a talk with the theme of the rapid change going on in the world. I would love to include in this some of the church's technical statistics, such as geneology records database size, online users, or anything else that shows how the church has embraced technology and is using it to accomplish some of it's goals. Do any of you have this information, or know where I could find it?

Posted: Sat Jul 17, 2010 11:36 am
by jeffvand
Hey Sean. Welcome to LDS Tech. I don't have any good stats for you, but am also very interested in this stuff. If you find anything, can you post it on this thread so we can all see it?

Thanks!

Posted: Sat Jul 17, 2010 11:59 am
by JamesAnderson
Here are some things I have heard at different times.

New FamilySearch has over 760,000 registered users. That figure comes from Elder Allan Packer of the Seventy, you can hear this one and more at lds.org, go to Serving in the Church, then Family History, and look for the talk given April 26th. It's in video format, .wmv.

FamilySearch Indexing said a couple weeks ago they are on track for having 200 million names indexed by the end of the year, about the end of June they said that about 345,000 indexers have done just over 100 million names so far this year.

lds.org gets about a million unique visitors a month. mormon.org has been increasing in traffic even before the rollout Thursday of the new version, no firm figures but that is also in the hundreds of thousands, and both sites are among the top sites among religious pages on the Internet.

I have come across some interesting Facebook stats too, if anyone is interested.

Posted: Sat Jul 17, 2010 12:06 pm
by jeffvand
Great stats James! I would be very interested in the facebook stats as well. I love to see how the church is using technology...

A million UNIQUE visitors a month to lds.org... wow... that is absolutely incredible.

It just occurred to me that you could to to http://alexa.com to find out some more web stats that might be helpful, although the church's web presence is so fragmented (lots of different sites) that I don't think it will give a true representation of the impact.

Posted: Sat Jul 17, 2010 4:11 pm
by JamesAnderson
Alexa is only part of the universe of stats gatherers, because they only track hits from people using their toolbars and other things and don't get the entire picture. You pretty much have to get the stats from the horse's mouth to know what they really are for a given website. The Indexing and lds.org stats came to me that way in various presentations.

In fact I've heard that usually most of the traffic spikes lds.org has are on Saturday nights, and this is noticeable even on the Alexa stats. Sunday morning sees a secondary spike, and on General Conference weekends there are a lot of people coming to the site to listen to or download Conference.

For Facebook stats, lds.org has over 300,000 fans, and there are pages for each of the magazines, the Youtube channel, and others. Some of them list the other pages on the left and you can see the number of fans each page has at the moment by visiting those pages.

Mormon Channel has 43,100 fans as of this moment. Among religious broadcasters that have a Facebook page, it is in third place for stations, and third place for owners. The top two stations as far as far as Facebook fan totals go right now are owned by the same party, and the reason it's third place for stations is one group owner owns a number of stations that each has their own Facebook pages. Many of the rest in that programming genre are either just getting started themselves. or there are other reasons why the fan base count is not as big as would otherwise be expected, and some of these are very widely known of in the broadcasting industry.