It's been almost a year since anyone, to my knowledge, has been silly enough to try ranking the popularity of the various COG-related websites. To tell the truth, that was me then too, just before I pulled the plug on the old website.
Okay, so call me crazy, but here's the current list from No.1 down, using the services of Alexa.com. Stats were sampled November 20, PM NZST. Beside the website name is the current 3-month ranking, and in brackets the ranking on November 19 last year (rounded to the nearest thousand.) To state the obvious, the lower the number the better the ranking. And, good grief, is it just me who's disturbed to see who Alexa has as the big enchilada?
01 RCG (Pack) 87,517 (125k)
02 UCG 107,423 (73k)
03 Good News (UCG) 161,876 (110k)
04 Born to Win (Dart) 163,410 (NA)
05 Real Truth (Pack) 173,739 (635k)
06 Trumpet (Flurry) 174,179 (298k)
07 WCG (Tkach) 183,529 (86k)
08 Bible Study 205,410 (124k)
09 Reluctant Messenger 223,244 (189k)
10 Beyond Today (UCG) 259,007 (NEW)
11 Tomorrow's World (LCG) 277,266 (250k)
12 CBCG (Coulter) 374,673 (577k)
13 AW Blog (hey, that's us!) 486,180 (NEW)
14 COGwriter (Thiel) 537,292 (575k)
15 Key of David (Flurry) 556,799 (936k)
16 CGG (Ritenbaugh) 713,755 (287k)
17 CCG (Cox) 752,166 (632k)
18 ICG (Armstrong) 772,562 (1574k)
19 PCG (Flurry) 952,958 (1010k)
20 Vision (Hulme) 972,049 (1675k)
21 ASK (Martin) 1,016,661 (553k)
22 The Journal 1,053,687 (709k)
23 PTM (Albrecht) 1,113,268 (375k)
24 LCG (Meredith) 1,203,741 (210k)
25 GTA (Armstrong) 1,247,213 (570k)
Poor old Rod! Outgunned again by the wiley Packatollah. And as for Greg Albrecht, he really should give up all the self promotion (check out the amazing greg-o-rama currently featuring on his site... eeeech!) and take up a nice retirement hobby.
16 comments:
Those are somewhat misleading when comparing rcg to ucg. It appears all his traffic gets reported under his one site while ucg sites hold 2 of the top 3 and 3 of the top 10 positions
xcg ranking?
It's either because all those stricter LCG brethren can't download the latest & greatest (corrected) Pack 'n Plenty doctrines fast enough, or Alexa has fallen victim to some serious spyware. What happened to Dr. Bob?
I thought his site was much higher than that ranking.
Personally, I choose the UCG sites because they tend to lower my blood pressure and LDL levels as well. =)
lj
Here's one to watch: http://www.accog.net/
Former WCG minister Daryl Henson bought a chunk of land in Kenab, Utah, and platted it out to sell to disaffected WCG members. They have recently incorporated as a township and see themselves as a community of believers.
Another former WCG pastor describes Henson's vision as a "staging place for the Place of Safety."
Well, now we know how to boost Alexa ratings. You simply have your son-in-law write an outrageous article advocating the restriction of free speech.
BB
Douglas, XCG registered at 1,297,966 - ahead of CGI, The Painful Truth (website), CG7, Kubik and World News & Prophecy. I cut it off at 25 to keep it manageable. The figures don't measure INFLUENCE, and in my view XCG ranks right up there in those stakes.
Those little Google ads must work wonders. I think that's how you explain Restored reaching the top.
RCG mini-banner ads show up on my www.cg pages every now and again.
I'm wondering how hard it is to fudge Alexa ratings. Alexa only sees a "random" sample of site hits from their Alexa software that is installed on many PCs. If RCG has most or all of its members install Alexa software, wouldn't that skew the figures? Also, I got the impression one time looking at the RCG site and listening to a few of David Pack's sermons that they have a vary large volume of literature that is frequently updated. If their own members download every item, and download it again every time it is updated, that would tend to produce a misleading number of hits. Self-generated hits do not count the same in measuring influence as hits from outside.
I doubt all 500 of their members could generate that much traffic. From what I read Alexa rankings are a guess at best.
Well I got 5500 hits on the article An Open Letter to the Teens at Restored Church of God, after it appeared on WhatReallyHappened.com, so that had to "help" promote the gospel of Dave. Over the next month all one had to do was search "RCG, blog" and see that thousands of blogs had picked up the Anti Blogging article and gone to read the ridiculous for themselves. I saw it in Russian, German and French too. Dave prolly can't imagine how many hits he gets from people checking out if he really says the dumb stuff he does in sermons and articles.
If I am not mistaken, Alexa software is only on about 1% of computers that use the Intenet. They generate their statistics by extrapolating their data to the other users. In effect, they can estimate the number of hits for a site from the whole Internet by multiplying the number of hits they register from the 1% of users that have Alexa software by a factor of 100.
If 50% of RCG members have Alexa on their computer, this would cause the estimated traffic from those members to be overstated by a factor of 50 in the calculation of the ratings. For example, 20,000 hits from their members would look like 1,000,000 hits in the rankings.
Dennis,
I'm glad you got so many hits on your article, and sincerely hope that most of that was within your targetted audience. I really wish we could do more for kids that are growing up in these cults.
So much of our identity and potential in later life stems from our formative years. Churches that deliberately make nerds and pariahs out of otherwise normal teenagers have no idea the damage they are doing, and the future limitations they are placing on their young people.
I've toyed with several ideas as to how we could do more to assist the cult kids. One possibility would be a special "underground" website which any of the kids in the ACOGs could visit to obtain some objective and realistic persectives. Charity could be part of it, too. The charity would be devoted to getting the kids some decent contemporary clothing, music, and jewelry. Naturally they couldn't wear the stuff at home or to sabbath services, but it could be secreted away at school. Kids can be fairly creative that way. Perhaps if the objectives of such an anti-cult website were explained, sponsorships from stores where all the cool kids shop could be obtained. Old Navy seems to be pretty big in my part of the country.
Knowing that such activities were ongoing would make certain megalomaniacs we all know realize their own powerlessness.
BB
BB
What a great and thoughtful idea! It would not take long for COG teens to find the site because kids by nature are wanting to know what else is going on and tend to be in compliant mode, but not set into church as adults would be. That's an amazing idea!!!! "COG Teen Underground..Yes, I tend to Want to Have a Voice!"
byker bob,
please let us know when the charity side of your proposal is up and running. You do need to follow through. Otherwise even those who agree generally with you will tend to think that your comments are feigned concern for kids but in reality are just an opportunity to attack the cogs.
Mom, was that you? (just kidding there, anonymous)
As of right now this is pre-embryonic at best, but based on my own WCG youth, I had considered this idea on several occasions, and just wanted to bounce it off the readership here. It is a way, imo, of accomplishing some good. Depending on the response level, it is also a project that could become rather expensive, which would tend to suggest it could best be handled as a group effort with checks and balances established to ensure that 100% of the donations made it to the kids.
One of the current charities in which I participate helps fund a school in our county for homeless children. A recent activity, put on by a friend/business associate, raised $12,000 for this school. That's certainly a respectable sum, but for the application involving ACOG kids, it'd only buy 240 of them $50 worth of clothing.
One also has to wonder what would happen if some scamming elder announced in sabbath services that he'd discovered a great new website where the brethren could obtain some new clothes for their children.
BB (who did not just fall off the turnip truck!)
I've toyed with several ideas as to how we could do more to assist the cult kids. One possibility would be a special "underground" website which any of the kids in the ACOGs could visit to obtain some objective and realistic persectives. Charity could be part of it, too. The charity would be devoted to getting the kids some decent contemporary clothing, music, and jewelry.
Byker Bob,
This is an admirable suggestion. However, I can't think of a way to implement it because such a project would be an invitation to career criminals and psychopaths who would take advantage of the Charity. It also wouldn't be long that the cultmeisters of the church of gods would attack such a website and find a way to obliterate it. I would know. I suffered such an outrage about a year ago myself.
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