FamilyLink.com Network Traffic Statistics

The FamilyLink.com traffic statistics are a bit different from all other genealogy companies at this time. You'll see what I mean.

FamilyLink.com has permitted Quantcast to directly measure their traffic. Therefore, there are measures for both US and World traffic.

This company started out as WorldVitalRecords.com and that is still their flagship web site for genealogy databases. In spring 2008, they renamed the company FamilyLink.com and started the www.FamilyLink.com web site. For some time, the www.FamilyLink.com web site was for user family trees, but in fall 2008 the trees were moved to www.FamilyHistoryLink.com.

Here is the traffic for the last 12 months for http://www.worldvitalrecords.com/ and http://www.familylink.com/ - for the People measure:


Here is the Visits measure:



Here is the Page Views measure:

I draw two main conclusions from these charts:

* The US market is dominant for these web sites. They started adding more World content in summer 2008.

* The people, visits and page views for www.WorldVitalRecords.com fell off after summer 2008 for some reason.

There is more information on Quantcast that is of interest to us. Here is a list of the five sub-domains currently measured, with a four-month average of global people:

Finally, there is a category called Syndicators. It is here that you see the basis for the traffic claims published by FamilyLink.com for their network:

If you look at the very top line (with the black background) that says FamilyLink.com Network, you see that it states 4.8 million US people and 8.6 million World people (on 1/29/09), and you can see the four-month traffic trend rising. The list below shows that Facebook.com generated 8.1 million of those people with the We're Related application. The rest of the We're Related application sites added another 400,000 people (approximately), and the four "traditional genealogy" sites generated just over 10,000 people on 1/29/09.

The conclusion I draw from this is that FamilyLink.com is banking on the We're Related application to bring in substantial revenue, and that will permit the "traditional genealogy" sites like http://www.familylink.com/, http://www.worldvitalrecords.com/ , http://www.webtree.com/ and http://www.familyhistorylink.com/ to continue to add content and grow. The significant reduction in WorldVitalRecords.com traffic since summer 2008 must be troubling to the company.