Wednesday, September 24, 2008

Who's Number 107?

Genealogy web site traffic has been an occasional subject for Genea-Musings (see here and here, for example) and for Kory Meyerink at ProGenealogists.

Sean Sexton writes occasionally on his Sean on Family History blog, and he posted Survey of Family History Sites - August 2008 today. He has done a lot of work to generate this information, which is very revealing to me, especially in the Social Network site listings.

Sean used the web site http://www.compete.com/ to generate the statistics he uses in his Top 160 (or so) genealogy web site list. Here are the top 10 genealogy web sites (ranked by visits per month. "Uniques/mo" are unique visitors per month, and Avg-visits/mo is the average number of visits per unique visitor):

All sites - visits/mo uniques/mo avg-visits/mo

1. ancestry.com - 15.3 million 4.9 million 3.1
2. myfamily.com - 6.66 million 987,000 6.7
3. familysearch.org - 3.02 million 990,000 3.1
4. myheritage.com - 2.47 million 923,000 2.7
5. genealogy.com - 2.19 million 1.16 million 1.9
6. findagrave.com - 1.72 million 643,000 2.7
7. rootsweb.com - 1.43 million 687,000 2.1
8. geni.com - 1.34 million 397,000 3.4
9. footnote.com - 1.03 million 790,000 1.3
10. newspaperarchive.com - 976,000 805,000 1.2

Please go visit Sean's post to see the rest!

I don't see any big surprises in the Top 10. I don't recall MyFamily.com being so high in earlier lists - Meyerink had it at #6.

Dick Eastman's http://www.eogn.com/ (which includes his Eastman's Online Genealogy Newsletter blog) is #50. The recent startup, http://www.itsourtree.com/, is #100.

When Sean breaks the sites down into categories, he uses the total number of visits to the site, not the number of visits to the specific topic - like the family tree or social network part of the site. The statistics for the Social Network sites are interesting - there are many with very few visits.

Sean did not include many blogs in his list, mainly because most blogs use another domain. If he had tested http://www.geneamusings.com/, he would have found that in August this blog had about 6,100 total visits and about 3,500 unique visitors (according to my Google Analytics statistics). That would put it at about #107 or so on the basis of total visits, just after http://www.werelate.org/.

Sean did a great job on this post - it's a keeper for me!

1 comment:

Sean Sexton said...

Thanks Randy. Will definitely include geneamusings.com in next month's results! It also might make sense to average out results from both compete.com and Google analytics. I suspect that we'd see slightly different results, based on how these companies are tracking web traffic. It will also be interesting to track the "rise and fall" of some of the newer Web 2.0 properties--especially in the family/social networking area.