By Tyson Thorne
As 2018 comes to a close we at Think-Biblically.com pause to reflect on the way God has blessed us, and how we can do better in the future. This year we had our 5th birthday and celebrated over 800 posts on the website. When examining the metrics for the year, we learned some valuable lessons and a little bit more about our gentle readers. For example, the 6th most read post isn't even a post, it's our statement of faith. That tells me that our audience is savy who make sure that what they read agrees with the Word of God.
The top five posts of all time are:
True Liberty (twice as many reads as the second most popular article)
5 Forms of Prayer (This was a series, but the link will allow you to download a PDF document that has the content of that series in a single document.)
The top five posts of this year are:
Timelines (I predict this will become one of the most read articles of all time, like True Liberty)
One fact that is immediately apparent to me when examining the lists above is that our readers are very interested in political stories. I find this interesting because we've purposefully avoided commenting on political events unless it specifically intersects with the Bible in some way. This hasn't been easy; anyone who knows me knows that I pay close attention to politics and am very interested in discussing those matters. While we want to always keep our focus on the Bible and teaching people ways to connect with God, look for occasional out-of-cycle posts (meaning an article that doesn't publish during our normal Tuesday through Thursday cycle) that will cover politics or other matters.
Another statistic that stood out to me is that the "Bible in Media" articles are read more frequently than our introductions to books of the Bible or our Names of God series. Both of these series are personal projects for me, but rest assured we will go back to a less structured article base soon. Once the Old Testament books all have an introduction we'll take a break from those and write intros for the New Testament books later. Regarding the Names of God series, we have potentially another 60 names that we can go through. At one article per week, that takes us into 2020. If these articles don't pick up in popularity soon we will table the rest of the list for another time.
Though none of our review articles make the Most Read lists, we're going to try and do more of these in 2019 and see if that's something useful to our readers. If not we'll phase them out in 2020. We're also looking at launching a video channel in 2019. The problem with this is Think-Biblically.com relies entirely on volunteers. We have no paid staff because we don't have an income. We are committed to not having advertising on our site and to not moving to a two-tiered website where we have a premium member offering. The video channel will likely participate in the platforms advertiser program, something beyond our control, but we do not expect significant revenue from an ad placed before or after our videos. Any income from that will go to funding the website and new videos. We are not in this for the money.
That said, we will be turning some of our articles and research into books, books that will be sold on Amazon for Kindle and possibly other platforms (like Nook or Windows Reader or PDF). We're looking into a possible deal with a Christian publishing house that may offer printed versions of those books as well. The money made from these endeavors will largely go into funding the site, though the money paid to non-Think-Biblically staff will be used by those people however they choose.
Finally, we thank our readers for making this site a success. We honestly would not do any of this if it were not for each and every one of you. We hope for your continued readership and we would also love to hear from you. If you have an idea for a story you want us to cover, or a question you would like answered please email us at "info at think-biblically dot com" or join our Facebook group and interact with us there.
May God continue to bless you in 2019. Onward and upward!
