Posted on Aug 1, 2011
As a new and so far low-key endeavour, the Open English Bible is slowly attracting readers and helpers. Although we can’t tell exactly how the OEB is being used, the statistics from the openenglishbible.org site can give us a feel.
In the last month, the website had 812 visits from 630 visitors, which were overwhelmingly new visitors.
About 350 of them checked out the OEB on the online reader, there were 245 downloads of the pdf for offline reading.
Interestingly, there appears to be roughly the same interest in the Commonwealth spelling version (pdf) as the US one (pdf), with about 100 downloads of the Commonwealth spelling version against 150 of the US version.
Visitors came from all over the world - the US unsurprisingly as the largest, but the top ten were: USA, Russia, then India, Philippines, Canada, Nigeria, Australia, Brazil, Indonesia and Pakistan. It is great to see the spread of interest: there were visitors from over 103 countries (though the UK was lagging behind at number 17 - come on guys!)
Although people who run well used websites will think these figures a low starting point, every download of the OEB is very gratifying and humbling. The figures are also rising steadily, month on month. We are also slowly attracting visitors and friends at our facebook page.
As we move towards improving the OEB New Testament language, and adding more books from the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible, we will be also moving towards more aggressively marketing the OEB. When that happens we can expect a large increase in the readership. It will be interesting to see how these early statistics match up when that happens.