GodTube is the brainchild of Chris Wyatt, an excitable 38-year-old student at the Dallas Theological Seminary and former television producer and Internet entrepreneur. In 1999, he says, he “hit a bump in the road, and my mother told me I had to get to know the Lord.” Within six weeks he had found Jesus, and in the years that followed, he tried his hand at various Christian enterprises, including a Christian version of Netflix. After moving to Dallas last year, he started working with a Christian marketing firm. Hoping to demonstrate to his clients, the mostly technophobic leaders of megachurches and ministries, all the cool stuff the Internet could do, he paid $400 for the GodTube name and built the site as a demo. A test version went up in January. The site gets between 50,000 and 60,000 unique users a day and it hasn’t officially launched yet.
GodTube is the best example of a new group of Web sites that aim to do the same things regular Web sites do, but with a Christian (or Christian conservative) point of view. Like the idea of MySpace, but hate the thought of your children as prey? Try Famster, a secure online community for families. Like Wikipedia, but chafe at what you see as its liberal bias? Try Conservapedia. All three sites are brand-new and have some kinks to work out. (There’s no Conservapedia entry for Billy Graham, for example.) But no matter what your religion, you’ll find that banana clip priceless.
