An Interview with Bible Gateway’s Rachel Barach
We recently interviewed Rachel Barach, senior vice president, Bible Gateway & Olive Tree, for HarperCollins Christian Publishing, and general manager of Bible Gateway. Ms. Barach's answers to our questions provide a fascinating inside view of the development, current operations, and plans of BibleGateway.com – the world's most visited Bible website.
LWF: Thank you for agreeing to be interviewed – we are particularly happy to bring our readers an inside look into the most used Christian website in the world! Our own websites draw hundreds of thousands of hits each year, but they are totally dwarfed by Bible Gateway.com which had 150 million visitors last year alone. What is it like to be the world’s most visited Christian site – the special challenges and opportunities of that role?
Barach: The whole Bible Gateway team is both humbled and exhilarated by the magnitude of what God is doing through Bible Gateway. Our approach is to act as stewards of this resource for the Kingdom, and to serve God and his church as best we can. The opportunity is daunting – to provide God’s Word for free to people at any time and any place around the world, on any device, and in almost any language. We are privileged to get to work on it every day. The challenges are daunting, too – from the underlying technology to the design and user experience, from the care we take in relationship with licensors and content partners to the financial obligations we must meet to keep the service up and running, from the millions of daily emails we send out with Scripture and devotional encouragement to the millions of customer support requests from people who are experiencing everything from small technical glitches to major life crises. We have a small team, and there are myriad details to manage, and millions of people watching and waiting for hope from God’s Word. We are ever in awe of God’s grace as He blesses and multiplies the work of our hands and the intention of our hearts for Bible Gateway.
LWF: Bible Gateway.com was launched in 1993 – 22 years ago. Tell us about some of the major changes that have occurred since then.
Barach: There have been many! First, there are the redesigns, code and technical platform changes, and the never-ending need to keep up with changing technology. There have probably been at least 10 major redesigns over the past 22 years, the development of new tools for searching and studying Scripture, the release of native mobile apps for iOS and Android, and the acquisition of new content – Bible translations, devotionals, and extra-biblical study materials – all of which have contributed to what Bible Gateway is today. In 2008, Bible Gateway also changed ownership, transferring from Gospel Communications to Zondervan Publishing.
LWF: What are some of the milestones of Bible Gateway’s accomplishments that particularly stand out in your mind?
Barach: Our favorite milestones are those related to impact. In 2014, Bible Gateway surpassed 20 million unique monthly visitors to the website (not including the native mobile app visitors), and that was a big celebration for us. We were also very excited when we launched our 200th Bible translation. The more Bibles and languages are represented on Bible Gateway, the closer we’ll be to having something for everyone who needs a dose of Scripture.
LWF: Tell us a bit about your own work and how it fits into the larger picture of Bible Gateway’s goals.
Barach: As the General Manager, my work touches, at least at a high level, on almost every aspect of Bible Gateway. With tremendous help from my incredible team, I oversee the product development and design, our content strategy and objectives, our licensor and content provider relationships, our sales and revenue objectives, and even our marketing and customer support work. I aim to help set the vision for the team and guide and refine their daily work so we are efficiently working together toward our goals. A big goal we are working on right now is to reach more than 125 million unique individuals with the Bible through the Bible Gateway website and apps. It takes everyone on the team to do that – the engineers to insure the website and apps are stable and functional, the content team to make sure people have access to the Scripture and study materials they need, the marketing team to make sure people know about us. We all wear a lot of hats and help each other, and when we achieve accomplishments we have set out for ourselves, we know God has been busy blessing Bible Gateway!
LWF: The Bible Gateway.com website recently got a major revamp with many improvements and new features. Have there been any surprises with the new format – features that have proved less or more popular than expected?
Barach: We use a lot of behavioral data to drive our new design and feature releases, and so there actually haven’t been many surprises. One thing that we have been working to improve is our Reading Plans functionality, allowing visitors to start and end Bible Reading Plans on their own schedule, and to track their progress and get reading reminders. We have been really pleased with the response to the new Reading Plans, and we believe it is helping more people engage with Scripture in a meaningful way – which is direct fulfillment of our mission. We are also pleased by how popular our Audio Bibles are – many people prefer to listen to the Bible being read, and we love that folks can do that on Bible Gateway any time and anywhere.
LWF: Apart from the translations and versions of the Bible, what is the site’s most used feature?
Barach: Far and away the most used feature of the site is Search. We are very proud of the technology we use to power our Bible search engine, and it provides extremely relevant results for people searching for specific topics or verses. Digitization of the Bible means that we can now, in a matter of milliseconds, find any and all verses related to a topic, need, person, or place, in any language or translation. This is how technology unleashes the power of Scripture in new ways – by providing meaningful access even to those not previously familiar with the Bible.
LWF: We love the fact that Bible Gateway users can create an account to save notes, highlighted verses, etc., but this is not required - what kind of percentage of the site visitors use this helpful feature?
Barach: We encourage everyone to set up their own free account on Bible Gateway, because that way they’ll get the most benefit out of using the site by being able to save their own notes, reflections, highlights, and more. It only takes a minute to do and it makes using Bible Gateway a much more personal experience. Every month we see over 1.5 million annotations by people with accounts, and highlighting is by far the most-common kind of annotation.
LWF: Our own sites are getting increasingly more visitors from Africa (especially Nigeria and Kenya), India and, just recently, Russia. What kind of patterns is Bible Gateway seeing in its much larger visitor base?
Barach: People from more than 200 countries come to Bible Gateway to search and read the Bible online. Most of our users live in the USA, the UK, Canada, Australia, Mexico, Philippines, Colombia, Singapore, and South Africa. Over the last five years, we, too, have seen a definite increase of users from India, Kenya, and Nigeria.
LWF: Does Bible Gateway have plans for further new aspects or additional features for its website?
Barach: Absolutely! We never stop working to improve and augment our services. One of our key priorities right now is localization – we hope to provide localized navigation for at least 5 more languages within the next year. Another is mobile app parity with our website. We have some features on the website (Devotionals, for example) that are not yet available in our mobile apps, and we’d like to insure that the experience is the same whether a visitor is accessing from a mobile device or a desktop computer. And of course, we’ll never stop improving our search engine, our Bible passage page experience, and our Bible study resource acquisition. We’ll keep adding content and features to the site for as long as God continues allowing us to work on it. Here’s to the next 22 years!
* For information on using the BibleGateway.com site, see our article STUDYING THE BIBLE THROUGH BIBLEGATEWAY .
We recently interviewed Rachel Barach, senior vice president, Bible Gateway & Olive Tree, for HarperCollins Christian Publishing, and general manager of Bible Gateway. Ms. Barach's answers to our questions provide a fascinating inside view of the development, current operations, and plans of BibleGateway.com – the world's most visited Bible website.
LWF: Thank you for agreeing to be interviewed – we are particularly happy to bring our readers an inside look into the most used Christian website in the world! Our own websites draw hundreds of thousands of hits each year, but they are totally dwarfed by Bible Gateway.com which had 150 million visitors last year alone. What is it like to be the world’s most visited Christian site – the special challenges and opportunities of that role?
Barach: The whole Bible Gateway team is both humbled and exhilarated by the magnitude of what God is doing through Bible Gateway. Our approach is to act as stewards of this resource for the Kingdom, and to serve God and his church as best we can. The opportunity is daunting – to provide God’s Word for free to people at any time and any place around the world, on any device, and in almost any language. We are privileged to get to work on it every day. The challenges are daunting, too – from the underlying technology to the design and user experience, from the care we take in relationship with licensors and content partners to the financial obligations we must meet to keep the service up and running, from the millions of daily emails we send out with Scripture and devotional encouragement to the millions of customer support requests from people who are experiencing everything from small technical glitches to major life crises. We have a small team, and there are myriad details to manage, and millions of people watching and waiting for hope from God’s Word. We are ever in awe of God’s grace as He blesses and multiplies the work of our hands and the intention of our hearts for Bible Gateway.
LWF: Bible Gateway.com was launched in 1993 – 22 years ago. Tell us about some of the major changes that have occurred since then.
Barach: There have been many! First, there are the redesigns, code and technical platform changes, and the never-ending need to keep up with changing technology. There have probably been at least 10 major redesigns over the past 22 years, the development of new tools for searching and studying Scripture, the release of native mobile apps for iOS and Android, and the acquisition of new content – Bible translations, devotionals, and extra-biblical study materials – all of which have contributed to what Bible Gateway is today. In 2008, Bible Gateway also changed ownership, transferring from Gospel Communications to Zondervan Publishing.
LWF: What are some of the milestones of Bible Gateway’s accomplishments that particularly stand out in your mind?
Barach: Our favorite milestones are those related to impact. In 2014, Bible Gateway surpassed 20 million unique monthly visitors to the website (not including the native mobile app visitors), and that was a big celebration for us. We were also very excited when we launched our 200th Bible translation. The more Bibles and languages are represented on Bible Gateway, the closer we’ll be to having something for everyone who needs a dose of Scripture.
LWF: Tell us a bit about your own work and how it fits into the larger picture of Bible Gateway’s goals.
Barach: As the General Manager, my work touches, at least at a high level, on almost every aspect of Bible Gateway. With tremendous help from my incredible team, I oversee the product development and design, our content strategy and objectives, our licensor and content provider relationships, our sales and revenue objectives, and even our marketing and customer support work. I aim to help set the vision for the team and guide and refine their daily work so we are efficiently working together toward our goals. A big goal we are working on right now is to reach more than 125 million unique individuals with the Bible through the Bible Gateway website and apps. It takes everyone on the team to do that – the engineers to insure the website and apps are stable and functional, the content team to make sure people have access to the Scripture and study materials they need, the marketing team to make sure people know about us. We all wear a lot of hats and help each other, and when we achieve accomplishments we have set out for ourselves, we know God has been busy blessing Bible Gateway!
LWF: The Bible Gateway.com website recently got a major revamp with many improvements and new features. Have there been any surprises with the new format – features that have proved less or more popular than expected?
Barach: We use a lot of behavioral data to drive our new design and feature releases, and so there actually haven’t been many surprises. One thing that we have been working to improve is our Reading Plans functionality, allowing visitors to start and end Bible Reading Plans on their own schedule, and to track their progress and get reading reminders. We have been really pleased with the response to the new Reading Plans, and we believe it is helping more people engage with Scripture in a meaningful way – which is direct fulfillment of our mission. We are also pleased by how popular our Audio Bibles are – many people prefer to listen to the Bible being read, and we love that folks can do that on Bible Gateway any time and anywhere.
LWF: Apart from the translations and versions of the Bible, what is the site’s most used feature?
Barach: Far and away the most used feature of the site is Search. We are very proud of the technology we use to power our Bible search engine, and it provides extremely relevant results for people searching for specific topics or verses. Digitization of the Bible means that we can now, in a matter of milliseconds, find any and all verses related to a topic, need, person, or place, in any language or translation. This is how technology unleashes the power of Scripture in new ways – by providing meaningful access even to those not previously familiar with the Bible.
LWF: We love the fact that Bible Gateway users can create an account to save notes, highlighted verses, etc., but this is not required - what kind of percentage of the site visitors use this helpful feature?
Barach: We encourage everyone to set up their own free account on Bible Gateway, because that way they’ll get the most benefit out of using the site by being able to save their own notes, reflections, highlights, and more. It only takes a minute to do and it makes using Bible Gateway a much more personal experience. Every month we see over 1.5 million annotations by people with accounts, and highlighting is by far the most-common kind of annotation.
LWF: Our own sites are getting increasingly more visitors from Africa (especially Nigeria and Kenya), India and, just recently, Russia. What kind of patterns is Bible Gateway seeing in its much larger visitor base?
Barach: People from more than 200 countries come to Bible Gateway to search and read the Bible online. Most of our users live in the USA, the UK, Canada, Australia, Mexico, Philippines, Colombia, Singapore, and South Africa. Over the last five years, we, too, have seen a definite increase of users from India, Kenya, and Nigeria.
LWF: Does Bible Gateway have plans for further new aspects or additional features for its website?
Barach: Absolutely! We never stop working to improve and augment our services. One of our key priorities right now is localization – we hope to provide localized navigation for at least 5 more languages within the next year. Another is mobile app parity with our website. We have some features on the website (Devotionals, for example) that are not yet available in our mobile apps, and we’d like to insure that the experience is the same whether a visitor is accessing from a mobile device or a desktop computer. And of course, we’ll never stop improving our search engine, our Bible passage page experience, and our Bible study resource acquisition. We’ll keep adding content and features to the site for as long as God continues allowing us to work on it. Here’s to the next 22 years!
* For information on using the BibleGateway.com site, see our article STUDYING THE BIBLE THROUGH BIBLEGATEWAY .