Thursday, September 10, 2009

Interest in Vick Research by Country from My Blog and Web Page Statistics

In my Vick One-Name study, I have found that people with the Vick surname live in the following countries (the number is in parentheses):

U.S. (21,140)
Germany (1,702)
England, Wales, and the Isle of Man (1,147)
Canada (336)
Australia (300)
New Zealand (36)
Switzerland (13)
Spain (12)
South Africa (one listing in the telephone book).

No doubt there are other Vicks scattered around the world that I just have not found. For example, I know from his father that at least one Canadian Vick is in Singapore. One of the purposes of creating this blog and the Vick one-name study page was to make contact with others researching the Vick family or the Vick surname -worldwide. Unfortunately, contacts from people outside of the U.S. have been few and far between.

To get an idea of where people live who might have common Vick research interests I looked at the internet addresses of those visiting either this blog or my Vick One-Name study over the last couple of months. I excluded hits from countries where the search term indicated the person was not looking for information on the Vick surname or Vicks (e.g. the person was searching for information about a different surname in a location mentioned on one of the sites).
By country (excluding countries with just one visit) I had the following number of hits (in parentheses):

U.S. (6240)
U.K. (244)
Australia (29)
Germany (22)
Canada (18)
Brazil (18)
Philippines (3)
South Africa (3)
Spain (2)
France (2)
Italy (2)
Netherlands (2)

To get hits per capita I divided the number of hits by the estimated number of Vicks in the country (I just did so for those countries with the largest Vick populations):

UK (0.21) – population is just for England, Wales, and Isle of Man so the rate is off slightly.
Australia (0.10)
Canada (0.05)
U.S. (0.03)
Germany (0.01)

From the hits per capita it is obvious that I am not doing a good job of reaching people in Germany. The low German penetration may be because the two websites are in English (or American English). I will have to think about ways to improve the number of hits from Germany if I am going to make any contacts there. On the other hand I am surprised that the U.S. is not the leading source on a per capita basis. My conception was that Americans were far more interested in their family history than were people in other countries. Perhaps the higher hit rates in the U.K., Australia, and Canada indicate there is material on the sites that is of interest to researchers outside of the U.S. I just hope we can help each other with our mutual research interests.

1 comment:

Forebears said...

Thank you for posting this. There's lots of research in the subject, but getting the hard numbers seems to be rather difficult.