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WORLD REPORTMárcia Ebinger, South American DivisionIn South America,Seventh-day Adventist Web Evangelism RisesFor first time online viewers interactwith pastor during seriesFrom the Seventh-day AdventistChurch’s South Americanheadquarters in Brasilia,South American youth spent eightnights in “Countdown.” The webbasedevangelistic effort ran fromSeptember 20-23 in Portuguese, andfrom September 27-20 in Spanish.Transmitted on esperanca.com.br andesperanzaweb.com, the two events werecoordinated by the Youth MinistriesDepartment of the Seventh-dayAdventist Church in South America,along with the Evangelism, NovoTempo [Hope Channel] Network, andother departments. The initiative madepossible, for the first time, interactionbetween participants and the officialspeaker, Luís Gonçalves.The Public Identifies the TopicsThe general program coordinator,Areli Barbosa, explained youth-targetedevangelism efforts require differentlanguage and music, and anopportunity for interaction betweenparticipants and presenters. “We arekeeping up-to-date on modern mediathat reaches the youth, but the messagewe share is prophetic and biblical, thatis, the same message that has [already]transformed so many lives,” he said.According to Gonçalves, end-timetopics were covered for two main reasons:“People are focused on the Mayancalendar and the possibility of the worldending this year, so it’s time to clarify thefacts. In addition, we had a survey onthe Internet offering various topics. Ofall the options, prophetic subjects stoodout as the public’s preference.”For that matter, those who thinkyouth aren’t interested in last-day eventsare fooling themselves. In a YouthDepartment survey, topics related to theApocalypse and the end of the worldwere voted as being of greatest interestfor Internet presentations. With theseresults in hand, the four topics chosenwere “Signs of the Times,” “If there’s justone God, why so many religions?,” “Theseal of God and the mark of the beast,”and “The enigmatic number 666.”Another important impact of theseries sharing messages of biblicalprophecy was that the hashtag #ContagemRegressivamade it, at variousmoments, onto the Trend Topics Brazil,a real-time list of Twitter’s mostpublishedphrases. “We reached almost2,000 tweets per hour at the start ofthe program, which translates to 1.7million views (the number of timesthose tweets appeared on user timelines)per hour,” said Rogério Ferraz,the program’s technical coordinator.Other numbers also stand out.Over the four nights of programmingin Portuguese, 43,000 computers wereconnected with an estimated public of84,000 users. In Spanish, there were23,000 computers for some 45,000users. These numbers were calculatedwith a sample of Internet users whoresponded to the question “How manypeople are watching the program withyou?” Fifty-two percent watched theseries with one or more companions,while 48 percent watched alone.The average age of those watching“Countdown” in Portuguese wasbetween 25 and 34 years old, and inSpanish the most frequent users werebetween 18 and 24.Ferraz noted the program requireda team of more than 40 professionalswho, as he stated, “worked hard andheld nothing back from making surethat every programming detail wasdone right.”Besides the numbers, another thingthat stands out was the interest manyshowed for learning more about thetopics presented by Gonçcalves, theprogram speaker. Dozens of Internetusers, from South America and around6 Adventist World | December 2012