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In July 2009, the Scientology.org web site broke through the 20K visits barrier. Scientology.org is shown as the 19,899th most visited web site by the status keeping web site, Alexa.com. At http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/scientology.org it says the visits to Scientology.org are up 299% over a three month period. When Anonymous created a denial of service attack on Scientology.org, that web traffic was less than today’s web traffic.
The increase in web popularity is most obviously caused by the Church of Scientology’s television advertisement campaign. But a number of things were put into place before the ad campaign began. One of these was video at the Church’s home page, instead of a standard web page. Another was an account at Youtube.com, with a number of videos. And the Church has done volunteer work at international disaster sites for some years.
As they say in Hollywood, any publicity is good publicity. The Church’s exposure has been enhanced by websites who are dedicated to exposing the organization, and newpapers running articles in series about the Church. This has helped produce a public awareness of the Church and the existence of its philosophy. While the recent advertising campaign doesn’t mention critic’s efforts, it builds on earlier exposure.