Where Do U.S. Anglicans Get Anglican News?

Last week was an important week in the life of Anglicans in the United States, and American Anglicans of the Episcopalian variety and the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA) variety used a number of websites to track the news from the historic meeting of Primates at Canterbury Cathedral in England.

The heads of the 37 of the 38 provinces of the Anglican Communion were joined by Archbishop Foley Beach, the head of the ACNA. The meeting began on Monday and there was a partial media blackout due to no press conferences being held until Friday and the lack of availablity of the primates during the meeting. Information leaked out in drips and drabs and Anglicans and Episcopalians received what news and conjecture that was released through a variety of sources.

The principle sources for reporting on the meeting for the United States were EpiscopalChurch.org, Episcopal Cafe, Virtue Online, Anglican's Online and Stand Firm in Faith. It may be too early to say which was the go to site, but here are the stats according to site metrics from Alexa.com as I write:

EpiscopalChurch.org's worldwide rank is 93,868. It's national ranking is 16,300.

Episcopal Cafe's worldwide rank is 176,909, with a national ranking of 32,992.

Virtue Online's rank worldwide is 349,069. It's national ranking is 59,184.

Anglican's Online ranks 413,758 worldwide and 127,986 in the United States.

Stand Firm's worldwide rank is 564,827. It's national ranking is 109,191.

So, two liberal sites were more popular than Virtue Online, and three liberal sites were more popular than Stand Firm. Interestingly, today, the traffic to the liberal sites were all increasing while the traffic to Virtue Online was down and the traffic to Stand Firm was dramatically down.

Alexa.com explains their ranking system, saying, "The rank is calculated using a combination of average daily visitors to this site and pageviews on this site over the past 3 months. The site with the highest combination of visitors and pageviews is ranked #1."