16 December 2013

Ancestry: how important for genealogy?

I received a note from Miles Whittingham of genealogyintime.com pointing out an addition to the recent post "How Popular is Genealogy". 

Ancestry.com is #1 in Alexa rank among dedicated genealogy sites and gets about 39,000 visitors a day. That's way ahead of MyHeritage.com at #2 with about 12,000 visitors a day. 

Is Ancestry is the most used site for genealogy. It ranks 691st overall on Alexa. The top ranking sites are (1) google.com, (2) facebook.com, (3) youtube.com. If one in a million searches on google.com is for genealogy that site would rank in the top 25 genealogy sites, if one in 500,000 it would rank tenth. Furthermore, many social media sites are heavily used by our community, (3) Facebook, (11) Twitter, (12) LinkedIn, (28) Pinterest, all of which rank above Ancestry. 

The bottom line is that while Ancestry may be the leader for genealogy websites other than those dedicated to genealogy are a not-to-be-overlooked resource for family history.


2 comments:

turner said...

John, how does Find My Past compare for these figures? Cheers.

Brenda

GeniAus said...

We would be rather foolish to restrict our ancestor hunting to dedicated "genealogy" sites. what of the many wonderful archives sites around the world an in Australia the treasure laden Trove site is a top source for family data.