Vatican says website gets up to 10,000 hits a day

(January 27, 2012) The Vatican's news website is getting between 8,000 and 10,000 hits a day with peaks of up to 16,000 hits over Christmas, according to the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Social Communications. The website (www.news.va) which brings together all the Vatican's official communications and news from the Catholic Church around the world was launched in June. Council president Archbishop Claudio Maria Celli observed that the average time visitors spent on the site in English, Italian and Spanish was around two minutes, which he said showed that those consulting it were not doing so "by mistake" but were reading some of its contents. Some 27 percent were from the United States, followed by Italy, Germany and Spain. There were also many visitors from Canada, Brazil, Mexico and Argentina. Archbishop Celli said most of the visits to the website were through social media networks, with 65 percent from Facebook and 30 percent from Twitter.