Interesting stats on lds.org usage, etc.

[JamesAnderson]

I found this page last night, on a large commercial site that has some free tools that are used by alot of people. Has some very interesting statistics on lds.org, as well as links to similar pages for the other Church internet sites.

http://www.alexa.com/data/details/main?q=&url=lds.org

There's a graph of traffic patterns and usage of the site, and it is interesting to note when the spikes are, right around General Conference. They even have what percentage of users use the beta.tech.lds.org page.

The site ranks websites and their popularity in a manner similar to how Amazon ranks sales of books and CDs, etc., and they have millions of websites listed there, and you'll note how high most Church websites are in relation to the rest of the web.

[thedqs]

Interesting. I ran a comparison on it against BYU's site and they seem to follow the same line. I don't think there is a connection but still it is very interesting.

[HaleDN]

The traffic stats that Alexa is displaying doesn't correspond to the actual traffic numbers that the sites receive. It only tracks people that have the Alexa toolbar installed in their browser. (Personally, I wouldn't want a toolbar sending so much traffic stats to a web site, no matter their good itentions)

From the Alexa site help docs:

Question
How are Alexa's traffic rankings determined?

Answer
Alexa's traffic rankings are based on the usage patterns of Alexa Toolbar users over a rolling 3 month period. A site's ranking is based on a combined measure of reach and pageviews. Reach is determined by the number of unique Alexa users who visit a site on a given day. Pageviews are the total number of Alexa user URL requests for a site. However, multiple requests for the same URL on the same day by the same user are counted as a single pageview. The site with the highest combination of users and pageviews is ranked #1.

Alexa's traffic rankings are for top level domains only (e.g. domain.com). We do not provide separate rankings for subpages within a domain (e.g. http://www.domain.com/subpage.html) or subdomains (e.g. subdomain.domain.com) unless we are able to automatically identify them as personal home pages or blogs, like those hosted on Geocities and Tripod. If a site is identified as a personal home page or blog, its traffic ranking will have an asterisk (*) next to it: Personal Page Avg. Traffic Rank: 3,456*. Personal pages are ranked on the same scale as a regular domain, so a personal page ranked 3,456* is the 3,456th most popular page among Alexa users.

For more detailed information about Alexa's traffic rankings, please visit About the Alexa Traffic Rankings.

[russellhltn]

The traffic stats that Alexa is displaying doesn't correspond to the actual traffic numbers that the sites receive. It only tracks people that have the Alexa toolbar installed in their browser.

And if you check out LDSWorld which is listed there, it's one of those ... I don't know what to call them. It's not what I consider a real site. It just trying to profit on a URL. It doesn't belong in the same league as lds.org or BYU, etc.

[michaelcox]

And if you check out LDSWorld which is listed there, it's one of those ... I don't know what to call them. It's not what I consider a real site. It just trying to profit on a URL. It doesn't belong in the same league as lds.org or BYU, etc.

But LDSWorld.com used to be an official Church Website, IIRC. The Church stopped it several years ago and then let the registration expire.

[greenwoodkl]

Was it an official Church website? I thought it was some branch of Deseret Book or Covenant or one of the other LDS-related organizations out there. I recall I was a member of that website at one point a long time ago and used to frequent the site.