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Friday 11 July 2008

Pack web collapse?

The following observations come from a correspondent and have been slightly edited:

Traffic growth on the Packinator's site is now in the red. If the 30% growth ostensibly represented God Almighty's seal of approval - does the negative growth indicate that approval has been withdrawn? Here we are in the 3rd quarter of 2008 and theRCG.org is still prominently featuring Internet growth through the end of 2007! Gone are ever increasing counters depicting current downloads (AKA hits). Gone are the estimates for 2008 downloads. Gone are are any monthly or quarterly updates bragging about actual numbers being higher than estimated for the year to date. No mention is made of hard numbers because downloads fell through the floor earlier this year and the slide has continued unabated until this day.

The graphics comes from Alexa: click for a larger version. Alexa currently ranks realtruth.org around 355,000 (Quantcast 656,000). The other Pack site, thercg.org, comes in at 214,000 (Quantcast 40,000). How does this compare with, for example, ucg.org ?

Alexa: 132,000
Quantcast: 17,000

(Alexa measures worldwide exposure, Quantcast has a myopic focus on the US market.)

By either measure Big Dave is in humble pie territory. How are the mighty fallen.

19 comments:

Anonymous said...

Mr. Weinland has done us all a favor: He is living proof that false prophets are alive and not so well.

It appears that people are catching on. They may have weathered 1975 which proved beyond a reasonable doubt that Herbert Armstrong was a false prophet, but it takes a Ron Weinland to really bring it home.

David Pack is just another flavor of false prophet who has finally started to benefit from the fallout of the non fulfillment of prophecy and the attendent lack of enthusiasm for sacrifices for something that is going nowhere but down.

Anonymous said...

It must be a truely humbling experiece to see these numbers, when one is the only living Apostle and whose father was the "Greatest Poker Player" who ever lived, and whose uncle was "the most knowledgeable person on the civil war (US) who ever lived". Truely unsettling for "mister" pack.

Anonymous said...

I think it's pretty obvious here what's going on. Just another case of "the women she"


Genesis 6:1 Now it came to pass, when RCG began to multiply on the face of the earth, and hits and counts could be construed as humans,
2 that the Apostle of God saw a daughter of men, that she was indeed pretty spiffy; and he took a wife FOR HIMSELF of all whom he chose....
4 These were GIANTS on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of men and put them on the payroll doubling the income of the Giant. Those were the OVERARCHING, AMAZING, NEVER QUITE LIKE THIS, INCREDIBLE men who were of old, men of renown, in their minds.
5 Then the LORD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only to send it in continually.
6 And the LORD was sorry that He had made the Giant on the earth, and He was grieved in His heart.
7 So the LORD said, "I will lessen the hits of the Giant whom I have created from the face of the earth. Both member and co-worker, creepy thing and time on the air, shall I lessen from among them. for I am sorry that ya'll thought I made them."
8 But Gavin and Dixon found grace in the eyes of the LORD.

Anonymous said...

If you run Ambassador Watch as a search in Yahoo, the RCG home site comes up as the first hit.

Someone in DaveLand had noticed you.

Bill Lussenheide said...

A lot of the RCG action came from purchasing the hits via optimized words or placement, or side bar ads.

Either there has been a big drop in income, a redirection of expenses, or the rate of return of investment vs. conversion on the internet ad campaigns is poor.

Lussenheide

Anonymous said...

It's always interesting how the various COG organizations interpret numerical statistics: when the data indicates climbing numbers, "God is obviously blessing us" becomes the mantra - but when stats clearly indicate decline, then you start hearing sermons about Joshua's small band of soldiers and how God is not limited. Everything is constantly being interpreted in a way that tries to persuade the sheep to keep sending in those tithes and offerings for "God's great globe-girdling Work," i.e., to make sure the aging ministry will be comfortable and secure in retirement.

It's utterly amazing - and quite a monument to human stupidity - that so many folks keep falling victim to this obvious scam.

Anonymous said...

Like everyone else here, I consider him to be just another charlatan. But, there are some factors we may want to consider. He's had to give considerable attention to his personal life here of late with his marriage, for one.

I also suspect that the Weinland fiasco has hurt all of the ACOGs to varying degrees. The Weiner Dude really made all of them appear quite ridiculous, by association. I can just see a number of executives cringing every time Weinland made any sort of public statement.

Though we might want or expect Big Dave to go away, I'm afraid he's probably going to disappoint us all for a number of years yet.

BB

Anonymous said...

With financial the meltdown of the US economy, people have more important distractions than flinging money at these decrepit charalatans

FYI Again said...

Y'gotta wonder what all those poor saps who liquidated their assets for Pack over the past 8 months or so think about watching "The Work" they've sacrificed so much for shriveling in the sun while the "21st Century Apostle" builds expensive monuments to himself.

        AMERICAN KABUKI said...

I've been wondering if it be useful if we published a list of helpful points for those leaving Armstrongism?

I can think of a few, I am sure others have some good rules of thumb?

Anonymous said...

Maybe people out there who are considering switching COG membership have heard how they have to donate all of their assets to the Pack family. That would certainly deter anyone who has common sense from even wanting to check Packs cult out!

So Dave.... You are now building your HQ... with all that extorted money! I guess you are finally saying the lord delays his coming!

Anonymous said...

It comes as no great shock that Ron's wings melted, and as fate would have it - Dave's were melting at the same time. That's what happens when dictators become filled with pride and fly too high.

It has been a while since we have seen the rankings/reach for the COGs. Have there been any other surprises?

The last rankings posted here were from February.
https://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=28426681&postID=2896484148237034971

Anonymous said...

One of my conspiracy theories is that someone gave them false traffic and is now decided to start deflating the figures.

Another is that most of the hits were generated by RCG members. Now that everything has been hocked, they have no computers for downloading Packrat's rants.

More likely is that a few months ago they hit saturation and now it's just natural attrition, aided by collateral damage from Ron's repeat of '72.

Anonymous said...

Some people are still trying to find and support the one true WCG splinter group that they assume must exist. These people are now taking a terrible beating at the hands of all the self-appointed impostors who have set themselves up as false prophets (PCG), stupid prophets (COG-PKG), non-sent apostles (RCOG), presiders (LCG), corrupt politicians (UCG), etc.

After going on and on for so long about how short time is, the PCG and RCOG now want people to hand over all sorts of money to build auditoriums for the honor and glory and profit of worldly entertainers. The WCG also did this sort of thing in the past. Now, smaller groups must again each build their own auditorium to try to impress someone before the end comes.

No wonder that some people are starting to question why they should have to hand over everything they have just to be treated badly by a bunch of greedy liars.

Corky said...

I wonder how many edifices and auditoriums the first century Christians built just before their "last days" of "this generation" during their "short work" when "the end of all things" was "at hand"? Because, after all, they knew "the time was short" and that it was "the last time" and everything "must shortly come to pass".

Get real, wake up, smell the coffee because that was last night's dream - or nightmare, depending on how you look at it.

Mike (Don't Drink the Flavor Aid) said...

I have some additional comments about web traffic to Pack site and those of a couple of other prophets on my blog.

It shows that while Weinland's traffic has dropped off sharply, Pack's traffic did not pick up the slack and has now declined to be the same as that of another prophet whose Internet ad campaign is self funded.

Anonymous said...

the asset sermons banked into the millions and now those assets as well as much of the other income has been pulled out of the net advertising budget.

the next goal is for a big building, and campus for the final years before christs return.

the churchs growth has been static for years, and a new tagline and agenda was needed in order for the revolving door of rcg membership to remain revolving.

it is very important to keep appearances from the outside.... one that appears a vibrant and growing church. once there people dont last long.

Anonymous said...

Last week Dave posted his "June Update" which has now disappeared. Assuming the file was deliberately removed, I wonder what he said that he later thought should remain unsaid?

The only things that come to mind are his gloating about their supercomputer "called a workstation" and that he would need to recruit college staff "from the splinters and from the world".

I'd review it again, but I listened to it on one of my download, listen, delete days.

Anonymous said...

And of course there was a detailed description of The Biography, which will contain much detail, meant to inspire and encourage the flock.

One of the tentative chapter titles mentioned was Mr Pack Learns to Swim.