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what-is-gfh-missing-to-retain-experts puts forth the argument we need more experts, and at least several of the answers propose we need more questions. One issue this site has is a chicken and egg issue that the existing reasonably small community of contributors only covers a small portion of the genealogy waterfront. If we aren't naturally hitting particular groups of users, should we try harder to 'target' those groups. Example groups might be:

  • ancestry.com users
  • myheritage.com users
  • werelate.org users
  • familysearch.org users
  • gramps users
  • NEHGS users
  • varous lineage and heritage societies
  • professional genealogy societies

Most of these sites have Q&A of their own and quite a large number of people viewing. The monthly 'people' for some sites above are:

To help calibrate GFH is currently at 120 individuals ie two to four orders of magnitude smaller. To be fair, the above sites have been around for years, have tremendous amounts of content, and many have huge advertising budgets. But it's still worth targeting them. So other calibration points are other SE sites in beta. Salesforce.se is at 1500 individuals at day 135 of beta (ie a few months longer than GFH). Robotics is at 150 individuals at day 51 of beta (ie a few weeks shorter thand GFH). Note I'm using 'individuals' as they measure them at the data gathering site. Avid users and users are slightly different. Individuals includes 'outsiders' who just googled and got the answer they needed.

Attracting just a small portion of the millions of people above would greatly increase our community.

Is there anything in particular we should be doing to target any of these communities or others like them?

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  • You should edit the name of your last bulleted site so that it properly identifies that society. APG is the "Association of Professional Genealogists." See apgen.org. – GeneJ Dec 15 '12 at 13:13
  • @GeneJn - done. thanks. – Duncan Dec 15 '12 at 14:02
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Yes. I think what you suggest is exactly what we'd like to do.

But how do we do it in a manner that is acceptable to the terms of use of the groups owning the Sites?

Why would the groups want to allow a "competitor" to advertise themselves, which will only take away traffic from their site?

How can this be done in a non-spammy way?

I don't know the answers to these questions.

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  • I'm proposing to target the users of the sites, not necessarily the site themselves. Wrt to why would the sites 'allow' us to compete - it may be in their best interests. None of them are Q&A sites per se and some may view the Q&A as a burden they'll happily share with us. Plus we potentially at least (ableit not yet given the numbers) widen their audience. – Duncan Dec 15 '12 at 14:05
  • @Duncan, I suspect the sites view Q&A as a core offering and one that brings potential new members/subscribers/eyes on their adverts as well as encouraging existing users to be 'sticky'. – user104 Dec 15 '12 at 14:33

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