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Web watcher comScore Inc. has reported that last month, the new site GodTube.com saw traffic climb 973% -- growth unprecedented in the web's history. GodTube welcomed 1.7 million unique visitors between its official August 8 launch and month's end, debuting in comScore's list of top 1,000 internet properties.Owned and operated by Big Jump Media, Inc., GodTube is exactly what you might guess -- a Christian alternative to Google (NASDAQ: GOOG)'s YouTube. Similar to its secular counterpart, GodTube visitors can upload, view and comment on sermons, music videos and performances, testimonials, skits and sketches, rants, raves and what have you. In six weeks, it has accumulated more than 20,000 user-submitted clips and streamed more than 800,000 hours of video.
It's fascinating that here we are nearly two decades into the internet, and only now does a dominant faith-oriented web destination start to take shape. Sure, denominations and sects have their own predominant web resources -- some even run dynamic, regularly updated web portals. But your web search for religion will mostly yield a lot of domain squatting (www.religion.com, www.god.org) and last century's web design (www.jesuschrist.com, www.yhwh.com).
But the opportunity has surely always been there. Since the heyday of Usenet, determined faithful have been debating and witnessing, huddling together on message boards or tugging back and forth on Wikipedia entries.
Just to give you an idea of how often web-going Americans reach to religion, consider these figures from Google. Shown here are the relative volumes of searches for "God," "Jesus," "church" and "Britney Spears," the latter our control for this experiment, chosen since she's the most veteran resident of Lycos' weekly list of 50 most searched people, places and things:
But for occasional spikes, Miss Britney typically places lower than the first three terms, giving some perspective on how in demand she really is (or isn't). Good on GodTube's backers -- who include Norm Miller, chairman of privately-held Interstate Batteries -- for answering that demand for faith with YouTube's viral recipe.
How long can GodTube maintain this growth? That's a question for its users. As is the case with YouTube and other startup smashes like eBay (NASDAQ: EBAY) and News Corp (NYSE: NWS)'s MySpace, GodTube is just a meeting place, tasking its unpaid community with the bother of generating content, not to mention policing its appropriateness for the site, which is likely to be an enduring issue of contention. Even before admonishing copyright infringement (of which there is plenty -- in my short browse of GodTube, I found clips from CNN, the BBC, and Ellen), the site's user agreement requires that you post nothing that "is contrary to the evangelization of Jesus Christ and His teachings, or constitutes blasphemy, or is otherwise offensive to our online Christian community."
Not something I'd want to adjudicate -- hope they stock up on Aleve.
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