YouVersion.com and its whole tribe of mobile apps is arguably currently the most widely-available digital Bible in existence on the planet. For this month of January, they’re rallying a campaign with a goal of 1 BILLION MINUTES of Bible reading. At the time of this writing, over 144 million minutes of Bible reading have happened, and the counter is running.
According to this ChristianToday.com article, Bible app users challenged to spend 1 billion minutes reading the Bible, the Billion Minutes challenge was announced on a November webcast.
My own Bible reading pace had it’s inconsistent hiccups. Currently, I’m using the OwnIt365 reading plan. I like the social networking dynamics weaved in with it.
Some random asides about this YouVersion Billion Minute challenge:
- Shouldn’t the URL be youversion.com/1billion instead of youversion.com/billions ?
- Is social media the only way to find out about this Bible reading challenge? I’ve seen a good bit of mention on blogs, Twitter, Facebook, even mainstream media. Could a banner button or link or something on the youversion.com home page add to the participation?
- Do we have to read the Bible using a Youversion-related manner? Could our reading of a printed Bible or via email or via BibleGateway.com count towards the challenge goal?
- If I left a web browser window open to YouVersion.com, will that count towards the goal? Or is it only counting Bible reading on mobile apps? Is it only counting verses that get displayed as the person is scrolling, or is would the clock keep ticking if I just left a screen on 1 Bible passage? Don’t want to game the system, but if it’s being gamed…
- Would an embeddable Billion minute counter widget add to the viralness of this challenge? Is it okay for the challenge counter to be embedded on other websites?
- Is there a way for someone to get a counter for their own Bible reading minutes? Someone might want to know how many minutes they’ve added to the overall Billion Minute challenge.
- In our over-simplified focused fast communication world, it’s not as easy to get fuller context or details. Those would have probably answered most of my questions. If it’s already been blogged somewhere, a link to that on the challenge counter page would be good. So I thought I’d ask out loud in the open here. Maybe one of the YouVersion team people will stop by and answer. 🙂 I don’t have to know, but I am curious.
Comments
9 responses to “Add to the Billion minutes of Bible reading this month”
This post just came across my radar and I’d like to offer a few answers for you.
• The URL slug is /billions because it’s the same page we use to display of ALL of the minutes that users are reading the Bible on mobile apps. We’ve had this page up for over a year and just recently redesigned it for this short term goal. After January is over, we’ll redesign it again to represent either a new global goal or back to track total minutes.
• Social media (sharing in general) is really the only way to find out about the Billion Minute Challenge because we want it to be more human. We want people to tell other people about the importance of Scripture engagement. We could put a banner on the website, but the real goal is Scripture engagement…not necessarily reaching a number.
• Yes, for the minutes to be counted, you have to be reading the Bible on a mobile device in the YouVersion Bible app. That’s how we keep an accurate track of the number of minutes people are engaging with Scripture. We can’t track the time you spend in the Bible outside of YouVersion…yet. 🙂
• We are only tracking time that people read the Bible in our mobile apps. It’s darn near impossible to accurately track if someone is reading the Bible on the website. Also, it’s tough to game the system because the apps are set to time out the counter if there is no activity while the user is on the actual Bible reader in a mobile app. So, that means they either need to be scrolling or interacting with the test every several seconds for it to keep track of the time.
• An embeddable counter would be great! Why didn’t we think of that!?
• There is no way for us to track minutes for each individual user right now. Due to growing privacy concerns about tracking data from mobile apps, we’re approaching that area cautiously. However, it’s definitely our desire to bring an increasingly more personalized Bible reading experience to our apps and website.
I hope that scratches a few itches for you, DJ. Feel free to shoot me an email if you have further questions that you’d like to share with your audience (or just for your own curiosity).
@scott, thank you for the detailed comment! i know your time is valuable. very helpful to know how this challenge work
Ok, I give up. What’s the easter egg here on this page?