March 2017 has turned out to be the biggest months for the dhamma teachings on the BSWA’s online platforms with 460,226 views/downloads across all platforms. The BSWA’s Youtube channel came in with 73% of the traffic with 337,949 views, and the two podcasts (the main BSWA Podcast, and the Deeper Dhamma podcast) came in with the remaining 27% or 122,277 downloads – a new monthly record for both podcasts!) This is an incredible result and demonstrates the growing popularity and interest in Buddhist teachings all around the world.
It got me thinking about where the BSWA’s channels rate in terms english-language Buddhist channels online. So I did some searches for “buddhist channel” and “buddhism channel”, and looked up some of the channels that I thought would be most popular. By comparing the number of subscribers and total number of downloads on various Buddhist Youtube channels I found that there were no english-language Buddhist channels on Youtube that were even particularly close to having the same number of subscribers and total downloads as the BSWA’s Youtube channel. So it seems that the BSWA has the most popular Buddhist youtube channel (in the english-speaking) world! Please let me know if I’m wrong!
Finding accurate information on how popular podcasts are is very difficult because there are so many platforms, and the channels don’t always present their statistics. Last year (2016) Podbean awarded the Buddhist Society of WA an award for getting in the top ten most popular podcasts in the religion and spirituality category – we came in at #5, and our monthly traffic has increased quite substantially since then. I’ve looked around on other podcasting platforms and tried searching for what might be the most popular Buddhist podcast, but I can’t definitely find a more popular Buddhist podcast. So it seems we’ve got the most popular Buddhist podcast too!
This is a great achievement by everyone who has contributed to the success of the Buddhist Society of Western Australia’s online platforms, including all the donors, volunteers and the teachers!
It’s worth noting that our traffic is continuing to grow, as is our overall audience. BSWA volunteers are presently working on initiatives to increase traffic even further in future, including translating talks into other languages, and creating better learning resources for beginning Buddhists. With the support of our donors we are very likely to see even more record breaking increases in the size of our audiences over the coming months and years.