Visits to the Seventh-day Adventist Web site increased by more than 120 percent during the Adventist World Session in Toronto, Canada, from June 29 to July 8.  The unprecedented jump in traffic to the site, coming from more than 130 countries, demonstrates both the effectiveness of the Internet as a news delivery system and the intense interest generated around the world by the Adventist Session, says John Beckett, assistant director in the General Conference Communication department and site Webmaster.

“This was the first Session where the Internet was used extensively to deliver constantly updated news and images to a global audience,” says Beckett.  “Our goal was to make the Session as accessible as possible, to as many people as possible.”

While typical weekly usage of the www.adventist.org site before the Session opened was around 11,000 visitors, average weekly usage increased to more than 25,000 visitors during the Session. Beckett says that the heaviest traffic was on Friday nights and Saturday afternoons, and he estimates that more than half of those who accessed the site came from North America.

In addition to the Web site, Session news was electronically distributed through daily E-mail bulletins to a mailing list of between 10,000 and 13,000 members.  This mailing list grew by more than 3,000 subscribers during the two weeks spanning the Session.

“Although it is too soon to know for sure,” adds Beckett, “early indications are that weekly usage of the www.adventist.org Web site will remain permanently higher than its previous average of around 11,000 visitors per week.” (See www.adventist.org for graphs of Web site usage during the General Conference Session 2000.)