The True State Of Chareidi Internet Media In Israel After The Ban Part I

After Chareidi media was largely banned by chareidi Gedolim is Israel, I thought it would be a good idea to further research what exactly happened to the ones that remained open.

In the first post in this series, I'll focus on the website which was the main reason behind the ban:

Bechadrei Chareidim

The main reason behind the ban, Bechadrei Chareidim continues to defy it. Guy Cohen, the CEO, claims that traffic is up 30% since the ban.

Lets see if this works out.

Here's Google's traffic stats:

The last section squared in red is the growth since the ban. Traffic does indeed seem to be up significantly.
Interestingly, more than a third of their visitor are from the US.

Some stats:

Traffic statistics

All traffic statistics are estimates.

	Worldwide
Unique visitors (estimated cookies)	290 K
Unique visitors (users)	130 K
Reach	0.0%
Page views	17 M
Total visits	1.5 M
Avg visits per visitor	11
Avg time on site	14:20

I fond it amazing how obsessed such a relative small amount of visitors (130K) can create so many pageviews (17 Million).

Alexa ranks it in the top 200 Israeli websites. According to Alexa, nearly half of their visitors are from the US. However, Alexa is known to be slanted towards US sites (and, presumably visitors as well).

Compete, amazingly, claims the growth to be exactly 30%, although it doesn't seem to have comprehensive data.

Verdict:

Bechadrei Chareidim is growing fast, and it seem that they only have the ban to thank; for the added exposure and for the closing of some competition.

Next Up for scrutiny: Rotter.net