Berzin Archives Year End Report 2017

Dr. Alexander Berzin
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2017 has seen enormous growth in the online presence of Berzin Archives. Our 54-member team has been working tirelessly to migrate the material from the old archives section to the new upgraded main sections of our website, studybuddhism.com. We have completed migrating 13 or our 21 languages sections and expanded their content with 1,223 new translations. Over 80% of our 7,200 articles are now available in the new format, structure and design. To make the articles content rich, we have also redesigned all the maps, charts, tables and diagrams, created many new ones, and enhanced numerous articles with illustrative photos.

During the year, we have added 50 new videos and completed 1,332 subtitle translations for our Study Buddhism YouTube channel and embedded many of them into our articles. These subtitle translations include those we prepared for 16 video clips of the Dalai Lama, for which we received permission also to embed them on our website. We have started promoting some of our videos and articles on our Facebook page. Further, we have filmed video interviews with 7 additional Tibetan and Western Buddhist teachers, as well as 13 educational videos on the history of Buddhism.

On the technical side, among other accomplishments, we have:

• Upgraded our server, internal search engine and the html editor that generates the website,

• Automated importing the language sections into the html editor, as well as the redirects for imported languages,

• Located and fixed incorrect or broken redirects, and set up more monitoring tools to detect future errors

• Added a switch language function and content overview for each article

Key performance indicators of the success of our digital project:

• Our website was visited by more than 700,000 unique users over the year, with almost 20% visiting more than 5 times throughout the year, and nearly 10% visiting more than 3 times a month.

• Our Facebook page now has 19,000 followers (an increase of 630%), with our page viewed and engaged with more than 2.9 million times, and our videos viewed for more than the equivalent of 310 days.

• Our YouTube channel now has more than 3,000 followers (an increase of 900%), with its 81 short videos viewed for more than 200,000 minutes. Our Study Buddhism Archive channel has an additional 200 longer videos, with 950 subscribers.

• Our Sound Cloud channel now has 800 followers and more than 550 audio tracks. Over the year, we’ve had 83,000 plays of our tracks, and 5,000 downloads of these tracks. On iTunes, we have an additional 730 audio tracks from the Study Buddhism Archive.

• Our quarterly newsletter now has over 4,500 subscribers. The average percentage of those who open our newsletter emails has been 54.5%, compared to the industry average of 15.72%.

This work of bringing authentic, Buddhist teachings - the ageless wisdom of Tibet - to the world free of charge and free of adverts, could not happen without you. Your donations help us with the costs of running the website, producing new written material and videos, and translating it all into 20 languages. Thank you for your continuing support.

We wish you all a healthy and happy new year.



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