In Rod Meredith's recent member letter, after he had his expected sex obsessed gay/transgender fit, he made the following comments about LCG's "Internet television" audience.
In addition to working to grow our “Internet Television” audience, we also strive to increase the reach of our various other Internet and social media platforms. For example, many of you know that people nowadays—especially younger people—go to “YouTube” to watch videos and go to “Facebook” to talk to their friends and even to find the news. According to a May 26, 2016 Pew Research Center study titled, “News Use Across Social Media Platforms 2016,” an astounding 62 percent of adults “get news on social media.” The same study reports that this is up from 49 percent in 2012. As this report also notes, “Facebook is by far the largest social networking site reaching 67 percent of U.S. adults.” Similarly, many people now watch video every day on YouTube, which has well over one billion users, with a majority of those visitors coming from outside the United States. Because we must reach the whole world with the true Gospel, we continue to work hard to use all of these platforms and technologies. As of this writing, our English-language Facebook page now has more than 217,000 fans, our Spanish Facebook page has more than 46,000 fans and our French Facebook page has over 118,000 fans. And our English-language YouTube channel passed 12,700 subscribers and more than 6,700,000 views. Our Spanish YouTube channel passed 22,000 subscribers and more than 4,700,000 views. And our French YouTube channel has passed more than 2,400 subscribers and more than 540,000 views. Very importantly, through these efforts we are reaching people whom we may not reach otherwise, and many of those people are reading and “sharing” Tomorrow’s World articles, telecasts, webcasts, commentaries and booklets with their online friends. We sincerely thank God for blessing our Internet “reach” in these ways, but we know that we must reach the whole world, and so I do ask you to keep praying that He gives us much greater growth in the months and years to come.
Meredith was been fed some reports that mentioned that young people now get their news and other information from the internet. Meredith sees the internet use of these kids and their parents as his new platform to exploit. For some silly reason Meredith has been fed a huge line that Youtube is the way to go. Can you imagine a teenager sitting down and watching a 1 1/2 hour sermon by Rod Meredith or a Herbert Armstrong return? No one, not even an adult will sit and watch a 1 1/2 hour sermon made by some incredibly boring and biblically challenged preacher. Heck, even LCG members will not sit and watch these videos!
Youtube, while filled with lots of great videos, finds most of its use from cute dog/cat/baby 3minute videos. The public has no interest in LCG videos. Its only audience is its own members and COG members from other groups who continue to church hop for information as their own churches are imploding.
Even UCG, considered by many to be the more benign of the splinter groups, can't accomplish much of an internet reach. 10-20,000 "like's" on a video does NOT translate into a witness for their god or its message they claim to preach. Graceless legalism sucks, and even the non-churched understand that!
Like most things in the Church of God it is already 10 - 15 years behind the times. In trying to imitate everything that HWA did, they focused upon print magazines, in incredibly boring telecasts, Jelly videos, whitewashed propaganda Feast videos, and spent time and millions of dollars building monuments to themselves instead of "witnessing" to the world.
Not a single Church of God out there has taken their message to the entire world. Even Dave Pack with his superfantabulous website has been unable to do so. Thiel has not, even if he claims a couple thousand members in Africa. James Malm circles the drain due to the incredible anger and venom that drips from his graceless legalism. Gerald Flurry is more concerned about HWA idolatry, Irish dance and finding the Ark of the Covenant that he has lost touch with reality, if he even ever had it.
All of the Churches of God now look to the Internet to resurrect their message. The problem is that the internet has DESTROYED the Church of God and relegated to an insignificant corner of the cyberweb. As more and more web sites pop up with horror stories from these splinter groups of Armstrongism, and the numerous films and movies that have come out about abuse, the COG's sink deeper and deeper into irrelevance.