Thursday, March 27, 2008

Free Genealogy Database Site Traffic

Here are the Reach (unique visitors each day per million Internet users) and Page View (daily per million Internet users) statistics from http://www.alexa.com/ for five highly-rated free genealogy database web sites over the last three years -

* http://www.FamilySearch.org (#5 on Kory Meyerink's Top 50)
* http://www.FindAGrave.com (#7)
* http://www.EllisIsland.org (#14)
* http://www.Interment.net (#16)
* http://www.USGenNet.org (#17)




Since the graphs are somewhat hard to read, I will list the average Reach (per Million Internet users) and page views (per user) for the last three months (plus Ancestry's statistics for comparison purposes

* www.Ancestry.com -- Reach = 197.5, Page Views = 15.4 per user

* www.FamilySearch.org - Reach = 59.5, Page Views = 7.6 per user

* www.FindAGrave.com - Reach = 43.5, Page Views = 5.0 per user

* www.EllisIsland.org Reach = 6.45, Page Views = 15.3 per user

* www.Interment.net - Reach = 7.1, Page Views = 3.3 per user

* www.USGenNet.org - Reach = 5.65, Page Views = 1.9 per user.

The overall trend for each of these web sites is similar to that of Ancestry - a slow and steady downward trend in Reach and Page Views over the last 3 years, with a plateau of almost constant Reach in the past six months or so.

My opinion is that this downward trend and plateau reflects the static nature of these sites - they are not adding significant content on a regular basis.

The exception to that opinion is www.FamilySearch.org which is adding new content gradually in the Record Search part of the Labs section, and the New FamilySearch testing that is ongoing (which not visible to non-LDS members). When the "rest of the genealogy world" discovers the Record Search databases and is permitted to access New FamilySearch, the total www.FamilySearch.org traffic will go up significantly.

www.Alexa.com provides a breakdown of the sub-domains for each web site - for www.FamilySearch.org the traffic on each sub-domain are (last 3 months):

* http://www.familysearch.org - 85%

* http://new.familysearch.org - 12%

* http://labs.familysearch.org - 1%

* Other subdomains - 1%

I have several more of these analyses to post in the next few days - I'm trying to group them by function (e.g., commercial database, free database, etc.). I anticipate doing this every twelve months or so, unless something really interesting happens (which I anticipate with excitement!).

2 comments:

Kathryn Doyle said...

Hi Randy,

I have to disagree with your conclusion that findagrave.com is a static site. Volunteers are constantly adding memorials (now up to 22 million), photographs and cemetery information. In addition, it is a great way to request and share information.

Kathryn

Louisiana Genealogy Blogs said...

Find A Grave also offers state forums.