Wednesday, March 26, 2008

Commercial Genealogy Site statistics

Here are the Reach (unique visitors each day per million Internet users) and Page View (daily per million Internet users) statistics from http://www.alexa.com/ for five commercial genealogy web sites over the last three years -

* http://www.worldvitalrecords.com/ (#10 on Kory Meyerink's Top 50)

* http://www.footnote.com/ (#8)

* http://www.genealogybank.com/ (#41)

* http://www.findmypast.com/ (#50)

* http://www.genealogytoday.com/ (#11)





Since the graphs are somewhat hard to read, I will list the average Reach (per Million Internet users) and page views (per user) for the last three months (plus Ancestry's statistics for comparison purposes )

* http://www.ancestry.com/ -- Reach = 197.5, Page Views = 15.4 per user

* http://www.worldvitalrecords.com/ - Reach = 15.5, Page Views = 6.1 per user

* http://www.footnote.com/ - Reach = 26.0, Page Views = 3.0 per user

* http://www.genealogybank.com/ - Reach = 3.55, Page Views = 5.0 per user

* http://www.findmypast.com/ - Reach = 8.4, Page Views = 5.5 per user

* http://www.genealogytoday.com/ - Reach = 47.0, Page Views = 2.0 per user.

The graphs vividly show the startups for all of these (except Genealogy Today) in 2006 and 2007. WorldVitalRecords, Footnote and FindMyPast had large spikes in the first month of availability.

* http://www.worldvitalrecords.com/ shows a slow and steady increase in Reach over the months - perhaps resulting from the steady daily addition of new online databases.

* http://www.footnote.com/ shows a steady increase in Reach over the months, with several spikes that probably reflect the addition of several large new databases - like the Revolutionary War Pension Files.

* http://www.findmypast.com/ has a very large spike in early 2007 - was that the UK Census records coming available to users? Or the ability to upload user databases and access them for free?

* http://www.genealogybank.com/ shows no large spikes in Reach, a slow growth since inception, and essentially no growth in Reach or Page Views over the last three months.

* http://www.genealogytoday.com Reach surprised me - I didn't know that there were that many unique visitors. They also show significant spikes in each of the last four months. I'm not familiar enough with the offerings to opine about the cause of the spikes.

The total average Reach of these five sites is about 100 - about half of Ancestry's Reach. These "active" commercial competitors have significantly cut into Ancestry's market share over the past two years, but they still have a ways to go to equal or pass them.

The great thing is that they are all adding database content on a regular basis and are competing. Competition is great for genealogy researchers and users of free and commercial online databases and services.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

nice post!
thanks for showing latest Genealogy site statistics

cheers!

Viagra Online said...

Hey Randy!
I can see you did your best in order to explain this stuff, however, it is a bit difficult for me to understand these kind of charts.

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