The following article is from Eastman's Online Genealogy Newsletter and is copyright 1999 by Richard W. Eastman. It is re-published here with the permission of the author. - FamilySearch.org is a Huge Hit As mentioned in last week's newsletter, the LDS Church officially announced its FamilySearch.org web site last Monday. The news media has been full of stories about this huge new genealogy resource on the web. The result was predictable: the site became swamped. FamilySearch.org received up to 40 million hits a day. At times the load peaked at 400 to 500 hits per second. My suspicion is that those numbers reflect only those who actually got through. Many people, myself included, couldn't even reach the site. LavaStorm, the Boston-based developer of the service, reported that in addition to the 40 million hits being recorded at the site, users representing another 60 million hits were failing to connect. "And that's just an estimate," said LavaStorm marketing director Matt Romney. "We haven't really seen this thing hit its potential." LavaStorm claims that FamilySearch already is among the top 10 most popular Web sites in the world, with 400,000 users per day. The following announcement was placed on FamilySearch.org in mid- week: FamilySearch Internet is receiving so many visits that users are temporarily being given access on a rotation basis for 20 minutes at a time. We apologize for this inconvenience. Please look at the message below to determine when you should be able to access the site. Thank you for using FamilySearch.org. Obviously this load is going to subside a bit as the publicity drops off. Many people are anxious to use this new service to look for their ancestors. After the first few weeks of operation, I suspect the load will drop back to 5 to 10 million hits a day, still a large number by anyone's standards. ============================================================ - A Prediction What fascinates me about the huge success of FamilySearch.org is that this site runs as a totally noncommercial service. It is completely free for all users and doesn't even have banner ads to help defray expenses. The only sites on the Internet right now that are more popular are commercial ventures that cram all sorts of advertising into their web pages. That would include AOL at roughly 1.5 million users per day, followed closely by Microsoft. Yahoo! is third with just over 1 million users per day. There is a battle for fourth place, with several companies running around a half-million users per day. Still, FamilySearch.org probably is in the top ten with 400,000 successful users per day. The executives at some of the big media houses are bound to wake up when they see these numbers. Genealogy has always been treated as a backwater activity, gathering little interest from large corporations. Published studies in the past few years have claimed that genealogy is more popular than golf or hunting or tennis. Yet those other activities all have multiple organizations, magazines, television shows and other media events, along with millions of dollars in advertising. Large corporations are eager to attract the notice of golfers, hunters and tennis players. The genealogy world has companies such as Ancestry.com or the genealogy-related division of Mattel. These are big companies by genealogy standards, but they pale in comparison to the companies involved in other personal activities. Now let me make a prediction: I expect to see some new names enter the genealogy world in coming months. I don't know which ones, but I have to believe that executives at Time-Warner, Disney, and their competitors are looking at the numbers being generated by the new non-profit web site from Salt Lake City. They must realize that there is a huge number of people interested in genealogy and that these people constitute a largely untapped marketplace. I wouldn't be surprised to see one or two new genealogy-oriented web sites appear about six months from now, backed by multi- million-dollar corporations. Books, television advertising and even a slick magazine or two at your local newsstand would accompany these sites. The new genealogy sites might have articles on how to do genealogy research, new databases, all sorts of information on ethnic heritage, etc. With their large checkbooks, I suspect these corporations will buy smaller companies that already have established genealogy product lines and then add those products onto the new web sites. Establishment of such sites will only encourage more people to research their heritage, who will add to the genealogical databases available today. I think we will see an upsurge of activity that will be a boon to genealogists everywhere.