Insights
There are many insights that can be drawn from the Top 100 list:
• Ancestry.com continues to remain the most popular genealogy website in the world. Ancestry’s rank has grown over the past year. It is now one of the top 1,000 websites in the world. This is a remarkable achievement for any website, which would seem to suggest that genealogy is more than just a hobby. One thing to note is that rootsweb.com was incorporated into the Ancestry website in 2011. If this list had been done a year ago, rootsweb.com would have ranked number 4 on the list.
•Ancestry is certainly a powerhouse in the field of genealogy. They own four of the top ten genealogy websites: Ancestry.com (#1), Genealogy.com (#7), Ancestry.co.uk (#8) and MyFamily (#10). Other Ancestry websites in the Top 100 include Ancestry.ca (#14), Fold3 (#17), Ancestry.com.au (#18), Ancestry.de (#31), FamilyTree Magazine (#36), Jiapu (#37), Mundia (#46), Family Tree Maker (#53), ProGenealogists (#74) and Ancestry.se (#77). In total, Ancestry owns 14 of the Top 100 genealogy websites. They have 1.7 million paid subscribers in total. The company expects to grow 2012 revenue by 15 to 20%, which implies strong growth in the genealogy market for the coming year.
•The second most popular genealogy website is MyHeritage, which has also experienced strong growth in 2011. MyHeritage allows you to share family trees and family photos. The website has 21 million family trees (909 million people) and 137 million family photos. Although the website caters primarily to the US genealogy market, it is a global website. MyHeritage is located in Israel.
•MyHeritage is much larger than it appears because it is accessible from 25 different websites. Each website serves a different country/language. We have listed myheritage.com in the Top 100 List because it is the largest portal of all the MyHeritage websites. Some of the other MyHeritage portals are significant in their own right (as elaborated in the Methodology section, we do not list the other MyHeritage portals because each website in the Top 100 must have at least some unique content to prevent double counting). If the other MyHeritage websites were listed separately, they would rank as follows: myheritage.es (#22, Alexa 54,282); myheritage.de (#28, Alexa 81,586); myheritage.no (#30, Alexa 98,179); myheritage.fr (#40, Alexa 121,296); myheritage.com.br (#43, Alexa 132,835); myheritage.pl (#44, Alexa 133,549); myheritage.it (#60, Alexa 172,674); myheritage.nl (#62, Alexa 180,930) and myheritage.dk (#88, Alexa 292, 928). All the other MyHeritage websites in total double the traffic of the MyHeritage.com website, putting MyHeritage much closer to Ancestry.com.
•The third most popular genealogy website is FamilySearch.org, which contains an impressive collection of ancestral records from around the world. FamilySearch is run by the Mormon Church. In addition to its website, FamilySearch is backed up by more than 4,500 family history centers in 70 different countries. The FamilySearch website has grown rapidly, and it now numbers some 2.58 billion names and 466 million digital images.
•Most of the top genealogy websites are focused on the US market. In fact, 65 of the top 100 genealogy websites are from the United States. This roughly corresponds to the size of the US genealogy market, which is some 60% of the global genealogy market.
•The top 3 non-US genealogy websites (excluding genealogy websites associated with Ancestry) are GeneaNet (#9), GenealogyInTime Magazine (#20) and Sysoon (#25).
•There are 14 UK websites in the Top 100. The three most popular are Ancestry.co.uk (#8), FindMyPast UK (#13), and Genes Reunited (#16).
•Canada has four websites in the Top 100: Ancestry.ca (#14), GenealogyInTime Magazine (#20), Anglo-Celtic Connections (#57) and Automated Genealogy (#98).
•Ireland also has four websites in the Top 100: Roots Ireland (#64), Irish Genealogy (#72), Ireland Genealogy Project (#79) and FindMyPast Ireland (#91).
•The largest category in the Top 100 list are ancestral records. A total of 33 websites or about 1/3 of the Top 100 list focus on ancestral records. The most popular websites in this category are Ancestry.com (#1), FamilySearch.org (#3) and Ancestry.co.uk (#8).
