Wednesday, January 13, 2010

Genealogy Site Traffic Trends - FamilySearch.org

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.

Today's website is http://www.familysearch.org/- the LDS church genealogy database and information site. Here is the daily traffic estimate for the period 12/06/2008 to 11/30/09:




The average monthly number of U.S. People visiting FamilySearch.org over the past five months was 985,000 people (note that it is about 18% of Ancestry.com's visits). The graph above shows an average number of Daily U.S. Visits to be about 340,000 over the last five months. Note that this data does not include persons visiting from other countries.

Quantcast has statistics for about three years - here is the chart for FamilySearch.org since 02/05/2007:




This chart shows a fairly steady progression upward year-by-year for FamilySearch - the average number of Daily U.S. Visits was about 200,000 for 2007, about 300,000 for 2008, and about 340,000 for 2009.. These increases may reflect the rollout of New FamilySearch and the gradual populating of the Pilot Record Search databases. I'm interested in the variability of the data month-by-month - the dip late in each year is somewhat logical - Christmas comes and people are busy doing family things. Why is there the dip in spring and early summer? Perhaps it is spring coming, and vacations?

One of the more interesting charts that Quantcast provides is the traffic to specific Sub-domains:



The top sub-domains for FamilySearch.org over the past five months are:

* http://www.familysearch.org/ - 100%
* http://new.familysearch.org/ - 21.0%
* http://pilot.familysearch.org/ - 13.5%
* http://wiki.familysearch.org/ - 7.5%
* http://labs.familysearch.org/ - 5.3%
* http://help.familysearch.org/ - 5.0%
* http://search.labs.familysearch.org/ - 4.7%
* http://indexing.familysearch.org/ - 4.1%

Unfortunately, there are not separate sub-domains for the legacy LDS databases (Ancestral File, IGI, Pedigree Resource File, etc) or for the Family History Library. One calculation you can make is that there were about 71,000 visits per day to New FamilySearch each day, about 62,000 visits per day to the Pilot FamilySearch Record Search databases (adding the Pilot and Search.Labs numbers) each day, about 25,000 visits per day to the FamilySearch Wiki, and about 14,000 visits per day to FamilySearch Indexing.

The Genea-Musings post with traffic data for FamilySearch.org in 2008 is here. Last year, Quantcast had traffic data for the separate site, http://www.familysearchindexing.org/. Now, that link goes directly to the http://indexing.familysearch.org/ site and is not measured by Quantcast. That may explain some of the increase in traffic.

What genealogy website do you want to know about next?

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