Category: YMX

Less than a week away until I head down to Atlanta for the National Youth Workers Convention. Among the myriad of things I’m excited about (having a booth for YMX, seeing dozens of friends, fantastic time of worship and renewal, a road trip with Todd, making new friends) I am also pumped about an opportunity I have to lead a discussion at one of the Late Night Options.

My topic… I hope some people even show up… has a nerdy title but is actually going to be quite relevant to youth workers as they learn to get better at interacting with their students using the internet and internet devices.

Here are 3 reasons I think my 1 hour session is worth coming to

1. Most youth ministries are not doing a good job interacting with their students on students internet turf.
2. Most youth pastors, as savvy as they are, have no idea how to use Web 2.0 utilities.
3. Most youth pastors need more information to convince their bosses that internet ministry can be an effective means of reaching the students of their communities. If nothing else, using some web 2.0 tools will make their communications with students more effective and faster.

If you are planning to attend, you can RSVP here. All of the notes, videos, and other stuff will appear right here on my blog.

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Yesterday the display arrived for YMX.This is the backdrop for our booth at the NYWC in Atlanta.

This thing is sweet, it’s 8 feet tall and 9 feet wide and (so far) looks good. The only problem is that I ordered it from a printer in California and the shipment arrived from Beijing, China. You’ve got to love outsourcing sometimes.

Yesterday I posted about all that I liked about the new website, gospel.com. Well, the love is obviously two-way as YMX was very well-featured on the debut day of Gospel.com. We appeared as a "featured ministry" on the main page and here on the ministries page.

Gospel.com launches later this afternoon. It’s so new that I can’t even find a logo for it indexed on Google yet. But this afternoon Brian Tol and his team are promising that one of the coolest Christian websites on the planet will launch.

OK, so it’s not Google

Let’s get that clear. It’s not one of the coolest websites on the planet. But it is going to be a very valuable resource for believers as they will finally have a place where they can easily find trusted content. See, one major problem with the internet for believers is that there is almost no way to gauge good content from good search engine rankings. When you search the internet… you have to sort through a bunch of junk to get a few good things and that’s a waste of time.

So let’s say I want to find an article about "financial planning for Christians." Like 75% of all web searches I head over to Google. When you do that search, as you know, you’ll get 1,670,000 responses. The problem? How do I know the difference between good advice and crap advice? With the way that Google currently works there is no way to determine the difference between some "Christian financial planner" and his advertising and a legitimately good article with advice. (ala Dave Ramsey) Unless you are looking for Dave Ramsey you are just as likely to read bad advice as you are good advice. This is a problem Gospel.com addresses.

Here’s what I like about Gospel.com. When you search a topic there it isn’t a level playing field.
When you search for the topic "financial planning" at Gospel.com you’ll find articles from solid biblically-based resources. How can I say that? How can you know that? Well, the only content you’ll find on Gospel.com is content from Gospel Communication Alliance members. This means that the content that is available on Gospel.com is content that is from a ministry/alliance member who has agreed to be held accountable for content and only publishes content that fits within the evangelical doctrinal statement of the Alliance.

In other words, Gospel.com will make it easier for you to sort the good content from the blog posts and advertising content. And as a side benefit… the good content will get better indexed on Google… thus raising the good contents search ranking on Google, Yahoo, MSN, and the others.

Let’s be clear though: Gospel.com is not some cheesy "alternative" internet world. That simply isn’t the intention of the site at all. It’s not a copy of something else like GodTube is a blatant rip-off of YouTube. This is, pretty much, a brand new brainchild. In other words… instead of copying this idea and making it "Christian" a bunch of creative and forward thinking Christians invented something that is very cool and useful. It’s actually a valuable resource that I am looking forward to using. And with something like 6 million people already going to the site every month (with it not even open) I think Gospel.com is going to make a significant impact quickly.

So, this is my ringing endorsement for Gospel.com. Go there, bookmark it, make it your homepage, love it, use it, tell your friends about it, comment about it, bookmark articles on Digg… on and on.

Did I mention the best part of all? No ads. (Plenty of links though, but no advertising so far.)

One thing I love about having Patti as a business partner is her willingness to run with crazy ideas. So, over the last few weeks we’ve kicked around ideas.

When news of Facebook’s new ad utility broke, we jumped on it. We searched out a few dozen terms that we thought could be useful sites to go with Social Ads. We were pleasantly surprised how many domains were available, but they are going fast.

Here are 3 domains (so far) that we’re hoping to see site developers create awesome sites on in the next few weeks:

socialadswidget.com
socialadsmanager.com
socialadswork.com (link soon)

So, if you know a developer looking to create some utilities that work with Facebook’s new ad features, let us know! We’re not interested in turning these sites into "ad farms" but we’d love to see someone with an entrepreneurial spirit present a compelling idea and help connect advertisers to members.

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This is shameless self-promotion. But I was looking through our subscription list for the YMX newsletter and I realized something:

There are no local subscribers to the weekly newsletter!

That means that none of the folks in my local network gets the newsletter. It means none of my Light Force small group leaders get the newsletter. It means none of the volunteer youth workers at the local church in our area get the newsletter.

A couple reasons to subscribe right now:

1. It’s free. No strings attached. Don’t like it… dump it.
2. It’s useful. Each week we produce a newsletter that is designed to equip volunteers and paid youth ministry staff. If nothing else… it give the link to this weeks free resource.

I mentioned it was free right?

I’m into dorky stats… so this will only be interesting to me.

Here’s an interesting trend about Mac vs. PC users at Youth Ministry Exchange. (PC is the larger number)

• Jan-May 2007: (90% vs. 10%)
• June-August 2007: (85.5% vs. 14.5%)
• September-today: (84.5% vs. 15.5%)

So, Mac is gaining on PC among YMX users, the growth has just stalled.

Here’s an interesting trend about the 3 ost popular web browsers used to access the site. (Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Safari.. combining Mac + PC numbers)

• Jan-May 2007 (46-48-4)
• June-August 2007 (47-44-5)
• September-today (55-36-7)

So, more and more YMX users are actually switching back to Internet Explorer.

There are more stats that I could share to bore you to death. But the point here is that the trends are not what you would think they would be. Based on the advertising and the hype that is out there it would be easy to determine that Mac has taken a bigger chunk of the users from PC… but that trend doesn’t hold true among YMX users. A 5% increase is significant, but not a shift.

Likewise, the shift away from Firefox and back to Internet Explorer (and the 3% increase in Safari users) is surprising. (Shocking, really.)

Snapshot stats… (year to date)
Dial-up users: 5%
Absolutely unique IPs accessing the site: 55k
Average pageviews by a visitor per session: 10
Average time per visitor: 10:55

All stats are provided by Google Analytics. All are based on pageviews.

As I made mention of the other day, Youth Ministry Exchange is raising it’s rate. Part of the rate change is that we offered existing members a small window where they could get 3 years of our service at a great price.

A little side benefit of this has been an amazing side discussion that has caught fire about the very nature of our online community. It’s quite fascinating to hear why different people use our site, what they expect from the site, as well as their assumptions about how the site operates.

My one hope is that we are as transparent as we can possibly be.

Last night Patti and I revealed our secret plan to destroy the planet by raising the subscription rates at Youth Ministry Exchange from $5 per year to $12 per year.

The vast majority of our users will be fine with the increase… after all, $1/month is pretty cheap for something a typical user will use every day. (We’re even offering a special for current members to make it more affordable.) But then there are (will be) those who just disagree on more fundamental terms.

Community is free, why should I pay to be on a forum?
Is community free? Is your church providing community for free? Is your public library? Is your community where you live free? When you share community with friends, does it cost the host to have a house or get snacks? The reality is that running YMX isn’t any more free than any other community in the world. Running the site to the standards our subscribers expect is expensive. Offering a stable online community isn’t free. It costs hours of labor, professional designers and developers help, top-notch web hosting, and loads of other costs. None of which is free.

Everything on the internet should be free, why isn’t YMX?
I call this the "google-ization" of the internet. Next time you are enjoying something free at one of google’s sites (I’m a huge Google fan for this reason!) ask yourself, "Why is google’s stock over $550 per share?" Google spends billions of dollars to provide stuff on the internet for free and makes huge profits. We don’t have the advertising engine that Google has at YMX to offset business expenses. YMX users are notoriously cheap. They don’t click on income producing ads, they won’t use the site’s store to make purchases, but yet the site should be free? Smelling salt time!

I thought YMX was a ministry, how can you act like a business and ask people to pay?
That’s where there is some legitimate misunderstanding. YMX has always been a business. We are an LLC and not a charity meaning that all income is taxable to us and that we don’t accept donations. People put up capital to launch the business and continue to invest in the business. Why are they doing that? At the very least they would like their capital back… but the assumption in investing in a company is that you will yield a return on that investment. It is a ministry… but it is also a business. This is similar to Youth Specialties, Group, and Simply Youth Ministry. They are all for-profit ministries.

Aren’t you just trying to get rich?
Check out my new car! Actually, I just bought Kristen a new gold rake for all the money that is rolling in. She just couldn’t get it into our mailbox fast enough. In reality, we’re just happy to see the site break even. Last year we took a pretty good hit. A couple things strike me about YMX in comparison to other online communities in "ministry world." We have no offices and no full time staff! When you compare what we are able to do with no full time staff and no offices you realize that YMX is a movement of God and not some brilliant marketing plan to get rich. We simply said "yes" to God at the right moment and He has done the rest.

Here’s my take on it, this will end my rant about this
You get what you pay for in life. I can tell the difference between a Bible Study I pull off of Pastor2Youth.com and one I buy from Group Publishers. In the same regard, I hope that those who come to YMX will say the same thing in comparing to us having a "free forum" on one of the many link farm sites out there. YMX is a stable and growing community firmly comfortable with it’s goal to encourage youth workers.

Patti and I aren’t in this to get rich.
(Anyone who has met us would know that) If we were, the site would be set up completely differently… we do know how to run a company, you know? Patti and I are doing everything we can to increase other streams of revenue for the company to not have to pass along all of the expenses to subscribers. (Advertising, web hosting, taking the site to NYWC, launching new sites and partnerships under development)

But Patti and I aren’t in this to lose money either. We’ve invested too much to be in it to lose money.

Stepping off my ranting box.