Vatican's Newest Web Offering Going Strong

Launched last June with the first ever papal tweet, the Vatican’s news.va portal is gaining traction. 

St. Francis de Sales is the patron saint of journalists and writers, and his Jan. 24 feast day is also the Church’s World Communications Day, marked annually with a special papal message (which this year focused on the importance of cultivating interior silence to be able to communicate effectively) and a press conference.
 
This year’s was complete with spumante, chocolates and Italian panettone cake, and a special Mass for journalists.
 
There were two big announcements: The Pontifical Council for Social Communications unveiled a more colorful, revamped website — pccsva.org — and the council’s president, Italian Archbishop Claudio Celli, touted the success of the Vatican’s news portal — news.va. 

The archbishop said the news site on average draws between 8,000 to 10,000 hits a day. Peak periods like Christmas saw 16,000 hits in one day, he said. People from some 180 countries are visiting the site with the United States topping the list: about 27 percent of all visitors are connecting from the United States, followed by Italy, Germany, Spain, Canada and Brazil.
 
The site is also relatively “sticky” with people remaining on the site about two minutes on average. About 53 percent of its traffic is made up of unique visitors while 47 percent are regulars, he said.
 
Something that was surprising, he said, was how much traffic was being generated by social networks. The majority of visitors — 65 percent — came to the site via Facebook.