Vatican: Website gets up to 10,000 hits a day

The Vatican's news website is getting between 8,000 and 10,000 hits a day with peaks of up to 16,000 hits over Christmas, the head of the Holy See's social media department said on Tuesday. The website, which brings together all the Vatican's official communications and news from the Catholic Church around the world, was launched in June. The data was announced by archbishop Claudio Maria Celli, head of the Pontifical Council for Social Communications at a Vatican press conference. Celli said the average time visitors spent on the site in English, Italian and Spanish was around two minutes, which he said showed that those consulting it were not doing so "by mistake" but were reading some of its continent. Almost a third of visitors -- 27 percent -- were from the United States, followed by browsers from Italy, Germany and Spain. There were also many visitors from Canada, Brazil, Mexico and Argentina. Celli said most the visits to the website were through social media networks -- with 65 percent from Facebook and 30 percent from Twitter.