The Jewish web has being growing fast in the past 5 years, and that includes in the Orthodox sector.
Since I receive many queries from people interested in this sector, I decided to create a list of the top sites in various niches of this market. The list has three purposes:
- To help businesses who are searching for popular sites in this market to advertise on and promote themselves (not that I endorse paid advertising as a sustainable traffic generation strategy)
- To help web publishers working on creating sites similar to these, so that you know what you are up against (not that I recommend banner advertising as the primary way for Jewish websites to make money)
- To provide information for curious readers who want to know more the current state of the Orthodox Jewish web
Before we get down to the list, let’s have a disclaimer: All this data comes from compete.com, which is considered the most accurate web traffic measurement tool. However, it’s certainly not perfectly accurate, especially for non-US traffic, so please consider these figures as rough guide. In addition, if I have missed any major site, I apologize! Please let me know in the comments. I brainstormed a long list of candidates with a group of fellow Jewish bloggers, but we may have overlooked one or two sites.
And now, the DrumRoll, please….
The World’s Most Popular Frum Website
The winner for the World’s most popular Orthodox Jewish Website is either Chabad.org or Israel National News (AKA Arutz Sheva).
Aish.com is a not-so-close third. All three have tremendous amounts of traffic and are far ahead of all the other contenders.
Of course, it should be noted that while all three sites are openly Orthodox, they all target a broad audience, and a significant percentage of their readership is non-Orthodox or non-Jewish.
On other hand, there are several big news sites that get major traffic that is almost exclusively Orthodox Jewish. The Yeshiva World News and Vos iz Neias are neck-in-neck, and both immensely popular with the yeshivish/chareidi audience. Matzav.com is a less popular version of the same. They are all somewhat controversial within that community but are evidently meeting a real market demand, as reflected by their popularity. The Jewish Press is more religiously centrist news outlet. OU.org is not strictly a news site, but it does host the popular Jewish Action magazine.
Moving down the line, we have the next group of contenders: Torah.org, which is a Torah learning content site; OnlySimchas.com, a community site where users announce their celebrations and milestones (it has a younger demographic); and ImaMother.com, a forum that is immensely popular with married Orthodox women.
What’s interesting about these stats is that it does not appear that most of these sites have grown much over the past 12 month. In fact, a slight decline in traffic seems to be more normal.
And no, I don’t have a clue why this is!
Special Bonus Graph!!!
Before I end, I have a special bonus just for you as a way for me to say thanks for being a valued reader of my blog :).
There are three more sites that I want to present. They are the three top Chabad news/community sites. I kept them separate from the top 11 but I thought it would be interesting to include them because they represent a very tight, active Orthodox community, which is highly sought-after by advertisers.
So there it is, folks. The top dogs of the frum Jewish world online!
Now tell me… is this list what you expected?
Is there room for some new players in this niche?
What will the future hold?
Are you doing business and marketing in the Jewish world? Then you belong on this blog! Subscribe here.
Shoshana Raff says
Excellent article, as usual, Naomi. This is very helpful for businesses in the Jewish niche to segmenting and target thier markets. I will forward this to some of my clients, it will help them when deciding to advertise online.
Naomi says
Thanks Shoshana 🙂
judyinjerusalem says
Just wondering why you use Compete.com as opposed to the more standard alexa.com rankings. Are the results the same??
Naomi says
Hi Judy,
I gave some thought to Alexa, but I chose compete for 2 reasons
1. Alexa tells you a rank based on a site’s percentage of the total traffic on the web – it doesn’t tell you how much traffic the site is actually getting
2. Compete is considered more reliable than Alexa by many. My own experience also indicates that it is more reliable.
Thanks for the question
Rachel Stern says
How did you choose which sites are considered Orthodox Jewish Websites? Eleven out of how many websites are the top eleven? What are the other sites which did NOT make it into the top eleven? You give no hard data on how you chose which sites to include in this “research”.
Naomi says
Hi Rachel,
With a group of fellow Jewish bloggers, I brainstormed a list of about 30 candidates. Then I checked the traffic of each of them using compete.com
The top ones are presented here.
Sometimes it is a grey area about whether a site is Orthodox Jewish. For example, a kosher recipe site.
Rachel Stern says
What is the list of thirty sites? What was the criteria used in the selection of those sites?
Naomi says
The only criteria was that we thought them up. This is not a scientific study and I don’t claim that it has statistical significance. It’s just a rough guide.
Like I said in my article, we may have missed some contenders. Can you think of any that we might have missed?
Naomi says
Some of the other sites I checked, included: Naaleh, JewishMom.com, The Lakewood Scoop, YU, WebYeshiva, Shema Yisrael, Frumster, Saw You at Sinai, Baltimore Jewish Life, Mostly Music, Metro Imma, Luach.net, Torah Musings, and many others. I also checked the most popular kosher recipe sites and the big Judaica stores but I decided not to include them here, even though in terms of traffic some could have made the cut.
gonzalo says
SHALOM, please Noami when you mentionned big judaisca stores whose websites have a strong internet traffic were you meaning ARTSCROLL?
Naomi says
Yes. and other megastores like Judaism.com
Libi Astaire says
Thanks Naomi for an interesting post – although I too would be interested in seeing the list of all the contenders. Per your comment about the slight dip in traffic, I wonder if it has to do, at least partially, with the Jewish calendar and the timing of both bein hazmanin vacations, when people may not be logging on so much, and Rosh Hashanah and the yomim tovim in Tishrei. For instance, last year, 5772, Rosh Hashanah began on September 28, while this year it began about 2 weeks earlier – on September 16. It makes sense that last year Chabad would have seen a big increase in mid-September, when they were posting their articles for the yomim tovim (whereas Arutz 7 would show a decline during the same time period, since we were all in shul!). So you might need to extend this year’s graph to see how the sites did this Tishrei, to get a truer comparison with last year.
Myriam @ tof-miriam.org says
Hi Libby (love your books, btw) – I’ve been reading that over the past two years all the major Jewish (not necessarily Orthodox) sites have steadily lost traffic because of a decline in Jewish-related key word demand, with the one notable exception of Chabad.org, which is booming. This started long before any Panda/Penguin related drops. Have no evidence of this myself, mind you, but have read it on reliable news sites more than once – for whatever it is worth.
Chana Ruth Nyamukapa says
Thank you, Naomi. I for one really appreciated this article: not only do I have a direction where to target my marketing efforts, I also learned of new (for me!) websites. Thank you so much!
Naomi says
Thanks Chana Ruth. There are many ways you can leverage the traffic of these sites – though buying advertising is the quickest and easiest way.
Good luck with your marketing!
Myriam says
Naomi, thank you for this fabulous post. It’s a great list, one that is sure to get us thinking about all the other sites we know, and it will be a useful tool to many people who read your post. Just the possibilities of how one could exploit this list are enough to keep one’s mind buzzing at night!
Thanks!
Stephen says
Interesting charts. JewishPress.com is working very hard to make ourselves #1.