Saturday, January 16, 2010

Genealogy Site Traffic Trends - the other FamilyLink Sites

Being a "numbers guy," I am interested in how genealogy information providers stack up against each other, and what the trends are over a period of time. I last looked at genealogy website traffic in January 2009 in a series of posts.

For this series, I am using the Quantcast statistics because they are easily understandable, and free. There are other websites that measure traffic, and their traffic statistics may be different from Quantcast. To simplify things, I will show only the number of Visits - not Persons, Page Views or other statistics available from Quantcast.

FamilyLink.com has seven web sites identified - I discussed FamilyLink.com and WorldVitalRecords.com yesterday. Here are the Traffic charts for the other five FamilyLink.com sites.

The first one is www.GenealogyWise.com (a social networking site announced in July):




The second one is www.WebTree.com (a family tree site, still available, but nothing can be added):



The third one is www.WorldHistory.com (a family tree plus history site, still in beta, but available):



The fourth one is www.BigFamilyPhotos.com (a commercial photo printing site, thank you, Tamura Jones, for the lead!):



The fifth one is www.GenSeek.com (the FHL catalog site plus, not launched yet, but available through Facebook):



The traffic summaries, for the last five months (taken directly from the charts), for all of the FamilyLink.com applications is:

* www.FamilyLink.com - monthly US People = 7.1 million, daily Visits = 508,000
* www.WorldVitalRecords.com - monthly People = 123,800, daily Visits = 7,900
* www.GenealogyWise.com - monthly People = 16,800, daily Visits = 1,200
* www.WebTree.com - monthly People = 2,300, daily Visits = 91
* www.WorldHistory.com - monthly People = 9,500 , daily Visits = 1,100
* www.BigFamilyPhotos.com - monthly People = 1,100, daily Visits = NA
* www.GenSeek.com - monthly People = NA, daily Visits = NA

It looks to me that the GenealogyWise traffic is dropping quickly, the WorldHistory site has potential when it comeso ut of beta and is fully operational, WebTree is pretty much petrified, and GenSeek has significant potential if and when it launches.

WorldVitalRecords has lost traffic over the past year, and has only about 2.2% of the monthly People that Ancestry.com has.

FamilyLink.com is the mystery to me. Surely 7 million US people are NOT checking the web site to see if the tree that they put up on We're Related is up on FamilyLink.com yet. How, and why, does FamilyLink get so much traffic? Do they get a hit every time someone, that has the FamilyLink application on their Facebook page, logs on? That's the only thing I can think of to explain the traffic numbers.

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