Tuesday, January 20, 2015

GenealogyInTime Top 100 Genealogy Websites for 2015

GenealogyInTime Magazine (a digital magazine, are you receiving it weekly?) published their Top 100 Genealogy Websites for 2015 over the weekend, and there were some surprises on the list.  Here is the first page of the Top 100 list:


This first page explains the process used by GenealogyInTime, and is their fourth annual survey.  At the bottom of each page are links to the other 8 pages in the Top 100 report.

Here is the top of page 2, which has the list of the Top 100 genealogy websites:



The columns are Rank, Website name, Category, Country, Free or Pay, 2014 Rank, and Address.

I don't know when these rankings were taken, it was probably in the last quarter of 2014, right after Genealogy.com, MyFamily and Mundia were shut down by Ancestry.  But Genealogy.com is still at #8 on the list.  I can't believe that the frozen message boards and the user webpages are all that popular still.

I am not surprised by any of the other websites in the top 10.  It looks like our Australian colleagues are pursuing genealogy on the Aussie Ancestry site bigtime!  Good on them.

You can scroll down the Page 2 listings and find 7 genealogy blogs on the list:

*  #28 (down from #11) Eastman's Online Genealogy Newsletter, written by Dick Eastman
*  #49 (down from #27) About: Genealogy, written by Kimberly Powell (this is listed as "Articles" for some reason)
*  #86 (not ranked in 2014) The Legal Genealogist, written by Judy G. Russell
*  #87 (#87 in 2014) Gould Genealogy, written by Alona Tester
*  #89 (#81 in 2014) Geneabloggers, written by Thomas MacEntee
*  #97 (#63 in 2014) Canada's Anglo-Celtic Connections, written by John D. Reid
*  #99 (not ranked in 2014) Irish Genealogy News, by Claire Santry

Congratulations to these geneabloggers who made the list.  Of course, many of the websites on the Top 100 also have a blog associated with their Internet address, and the blog statistics are incorporated into the website numbers.

Where is Genea-Musings, you might ask?  We made the list the first three years, but have fallen out of the Top 100 this year, and hope to return in 2016.

My thought is that blogs don't receive as much credit as they should - it's unclear to me if RSS feeds "count" in the Alexa ratings, and I'm pretty sure that email subscriptions to blogs do not count in the ratings.  One thing that could help all geneabloggers on the list is to click through from the RSS reader or email and make a comment.

Page 3 provides an interesting analysis of the Top 10 most popular websites in terms of estimated number of daily visitors:


I was shocked to see that the average number of daily visitors for Ancestry.com was only 55,800.  For a website that lists over 2 million subscribers, that is less than 3% of subscribers that visit each day.

The number for FamilySearch, 17,300 daily visitors each day is even more of a surprise, especially since it is free, has records, a tree, education, information, etc.  It seems to me that FamilySearch is out-of-sight, out-of-mind for many genealogists.

Page 4 has a list of the Top 10 Free websites for 2015.

Page 5 has a list of the "Rising Stars" in the Top 25 and in the bottom 75.

Page 6 lists the new websites on the list.  The highest new entry is at #57, FindMyPast Australia.  Further down this page is a table of the holdings of the "Big Three" - Ancestry, MyHeritage and brightsolid.

Page 7 provides a list of the holdings of the Big Three - Ancestry has 13 sites on the list, MyHeritage has 13, and brightsolid has 8.  Further down the page is a table showing the growth of genealogy from 2014 to 2015 - to a total of about 356,000 visits to all genealogy websites (a 4.4% growth, of which the top 10 sites have 151,000, the top 100 have 302,000 daily visits).

Lastly, page 8 lists major takeaways (conclusions) drawn from the list results.

The URL for this post is:  http://www.geneamusings.com/2015/01/genealogyintime-top-100-genealogy.html

Copyright (c) 2015, Randall J. Seaver



4 comments:

Diane Gould Hall said...

I'm not so sure about this review. I'm really glad Geneabloggers and the Legal Genealogist, and Cyndi's List made the top 100. I was surprised that your blog was not on the list. Maybe there should be a top 100 blog list? Is there one?
Well, we all know which sites and blogs are tops on our list.

Dana Leeds said...

Interesting! I was going to ask how much it costs as I hadn't heard of it before. I followed your link, and see it's free! I'll give it a try. Do you find it useful?

Jacqi Stevens said...

Good point on the RSS feed impacting the count. Thought I'd follow your advice and click through :)

I'm not surprised about the count on Genealogy.com. Perhaps the numbers reflect the time period before the shut down. On the other hand, I still receive a good amount of click throughs from posts I had placed on GenForum there, even though the forum is now read-only. So they are still experiencing traffic, though likely via Google search results.

Linda Schreiber said...

And the reason for Genealogy.com being included was also in the article:
"However, it is hard to imagine Ancestry giving up such a brilliant website name as genealogy.com. Most likely, the website will be reconfigured in 2015 into a new format."