Nearly all for-profit web sites run by Christian groups have gone belly up-or soon will. The best-endowed Protestant site devoured $111,000 a day until it used up $30 million, and then it folded after just nine months’ existence. A site hoping to become a general Internet portal for Catholics has been unable to find a way to attract enough customers or investment capital. Its future looks less than promising.
Most for-profit sites make their money by selling banner ads. The ads depend on the all-important “click-through rate.” If a site has few visitors and if only a small proportion of them “click through,” advertisers do not get to pitch their wares to enough people to justify the cost of the ads. Sites that began with fanfare and with banner ads from prominent corporations now find themselves garnering fewer ads and less money per ad. The consequence is that the for-profit model just is not working out for religious groups.
There remain thousands of non-profit Christian web sites, but few of them get more than a trickle of visitors. They are mainly mom-and-pop affairs that bring in little money and must be classified as labors of love. They are run by amateurs and look amateurish, though the visitors they do get seem devoted to them. This is as true of the Catholic as of the Protestant sites.
A few non-profit sites have substantial content, attractive interfaces, and a relatively large number of “hits,” but their apparent success can be misleading-the big fish, small pond problem. There are more than sixty million Catholics in the U.S., but it would be difficult to establish that more than six hundred thousand of them-one percent-spend much time or money at Catholic web sites. Such small market penetration does not qualify an industry as a success.
Smith Barney television commercials used to say, “We make money the old-fashioned way: We earn it.” In apologetics, it appears that we still make converts the old fashioned way: through the printed-rather than the electronic-word. This is not to discount the Internet. It has proven to be a fine way to disseminate large amounts of searchable information quickly. The problem is that a book still trumps a computer. More people come to the faith by turning pages than by clicking mice.
That said, it might appear odd that Catholic Answers has undertaken a major revision and expansion of its web site, www.catholic.com. The new version, which will take several more months to complete, will offer not just a more serviceable and attractive interface but a vastly increased amount of data, including, eventually, all the back issues of This Rock and Be magazines. We expect that, with sufficient promotion, there will be as many as half a million regular visitors each month.
If that number were compared to the total number of Catholics in the U.S., we might despair, but the purpose of the site will be to educate those who will go on to educate-and to convert-others. That means success will be measured not in dollars (the site will carry no banner ads) but in intellectual and moral influence. The aim will not be to turn a profit but to turn hearts, which is far more important anyway than the bottom line.