Fourteen Years! 1998-2011
° Overview ° Site Statistics ° Testimonials
° Development ° Revenue ° Financial Overview ° Contact
Overview
The Maritime Heritage Project started as a high school paper in 1997 when my daughter was asked to write about a notable person. She choose Captain James H. Blethen, her great-great-great grandfather, who was a noted sea captain and Chief Wharfinger in San Francisco during the 1800s. Information about Captain Blethen uncovered during that research led to ongoing research and a growing respect for captains and their ships for their enduring commitment in protecting shorelines and in moving merchandise, livestock, and people around the world under unpredictable and often dangerous conditions.
More than 30,000 hours have gone into the project and it continues as new sections are added or expanded. (This does not include 45 years of travel and research: Refer to Bibliography.)
For more than a decade, The Maritime Heritage Project has been considered a valuable reference web site, receives more than 245,000 accesses per month, and is well-regarded by researchers, educators (4% of all page views), genealogists, and professionals in the maritime field.
Comments include: "There is no other site like it in the world," "For the first time during years of research, I found information about family members," and hundreds of notes from educators who acknowledge the importance of the site to their students.
The site also illustrates that America belongs to everyone; the health and wealth of this nation was formed by individuals from every nation who migrated to its shores seeking refuge and opportunity. The Maritime Heritage Project is not a commercial website. It is basically the creation of one person with minimal income through affiliate marketing and through modest donations. If you find value in this project, please contribute to its growth.
Site Statistics
(as of April 2010)
2010: Number of requests 2,379,406
Statistics are supplied through Urchin (charts available for verification upon request) and Alexa.com
Alexa Traffic Ranking: 4.5 million (4,525,836) out of a possible:
- 200 million Web sites (Netcraft, 2010);
- 80 million active Web sites (Netcraft, 2010);
- 20 billion indexed Web pages (Yahoo 2009);
- 1 trillion web pages (2008)
Audience: March 2011: 244,586 requests, ages 35-44, college, mostly female, browsing from home, no children
The market is international: Given the aging of America, family historians/genealogists are blossoming. San Francisco Bay Area has 6,605,428 residents, many with ancestors who arrived by ship. Internationally, 72 cruise ship lines carry more than 1 million passengers annually and that industry is growing (it is expected to exceed oil revenues). Thousands of families have an "historian" (one genealogical library received 30 million viewers, although a timeframe was not given nor numbers substantiated).
As of April 2011, individuals speaking 35 languages visited the site, 75% of visitors were from the United States; the remaining were from the U.S. Government (including U.S. Military), educational institutions and other non-profit corporations, Australia, Brazil, France, Germany, Netherlands, New Zealand, Belgium, Spain, Greece, Poland, Italy, Czech Republic, Switzerland, Thailand, India, Mexico, Argentina, Colombia, Japan, Singapore, South Africa, Malaysia, Pakistan, Turkey, the Faroe Islands, the Russian Federation, etc.
Visitors view as many as five pages and a significant number stay between 5 and 30 minutes.
83 sites linking in: Includes Wikipedia, Google, California State Library, SFHistoryEncyclopedia.com, SF Geneaology, American Merchant Marine, Central Pacific Railroad, various Maritime Museums, various school districts, Ask.com, World News Network (wn.com), PBS (Public Broadcasting System), Yahoo!Directory, libraries and virtual libraries, Asia Finest, LearnOutLoud (audio books), expertgenealogy.com, Cyndi’s List of Genealogy Sites on the Internet, Museums on line, ItaliaMaritime, SailBlogs, Immigrant Ships Transcribers Guild, Antique Maps, Arabic Military, California Wreck Divers, OldSaltBlog.com
Search engines include: google.us, .uk, .au, .in, .ca, .fr, .nz, .au, .my, .tr, .ie
Traffic 2010:
- Egypt: 267,855 requests
- Ships: 91,821
- Steamships: 82,213
- Clippers: 79,214
- Captain 56,179
- Ship Wrecks 38,327
- Hudson Bay: 37,722
- Ireland: 32,069
- China: 31,008
- Australia: 20,371
- The Blog: 19,525 (this is a new product)
- New York: 18,667
- England: 18,034
- Hawaii: 15,456
- Central America – El Salvador: 15,338
- Nigeria: 15,332
- Greece: 15,185
- Italy: 14,019
- Somalia: 12,777
- Algeria: 7,302
- Japan: 6,177
- Central America – Honduras: 6,072
- South America: Argentina: 5,572
- Sweden: 5,450
- Mauritania: 5,118
- South America: Ecuador: 4,722
- Wales: 4,705
- Cambodia: 4,691
- South Africa: 4,438
- South America: Chile: 3,919
- U.S. port cities average 7,000-8,000 per year each
7,702 people have translated the site
Operating Systems: Windows: 2,221,618; Mac: 382,612; Unix: 31,679; All others, i.e. Symbian OS, WebTV, OS/2, BeOS, Palm OS
Testimonials
Testimonials started arriving the month this site was launched in 1998; among the first eMails came from an English gentleman who had been seeking his great-great grandparents for many years and found them on this site.
That email was shortly followed by requests from a French student writing on the French in California during the Gold Rush.
A personal favorite is from James P. Delgado, author of To California by Sea: A Maritime History of the California Gold Rush. He wrote that this is the only site of its kind in that it is listing all ships and passengers arriving at the port of San Francisco.
- Thank you for Captain E H Hitchcock. Your efforts to transcribe Daily Alta California list of Ship Arrivals lead to location of Fred's Wife's ancestor. All we had was Betty Hitchcock's "Gone to California as ship's captain" info. . . We really appreciate this.
-- G. Cramer- Thank you very much for your help. You told me in a previous message that you are working on this project by yourself. I'm impressed with your work and recognize pain of research. -- Regards, L. Mims
- Thank you very much for pointing me in the right direction. Very handy site you have; it has been of great value to my research from here. You must visit New Zealand again. -- Regards, D. Armitrage
- I have enjoyed your site, located the arrival of my 2nd great grandfather in August of 1849 on the Humboldt. Lots of information on the site. Thank you and all the others for all the work it took to place the information on the net for all to discover. -- Barb
- I've enjoyed your web site while looking for photos and marine drawings/plans of side wheel steamers built by William H. Brown during the 1850s . . .. We are trying to build a scale model (of the S.S. Pacific) for display. -- Thank you, M. Boyd
- Guess you've heard it before, but you've got a fantastic website. Great job and thanks for the enjoyment. -- D. Hunt
Development Plans
The focus will continue as a content/reference site for maritime history in and around San Francisco Bay and will focus on the build-out of specific areas, i.e.:
- Captains: Biographies
- Ships: Hundreds of people have asked for images of a given ship, captain or personage arriving in San Francisco during the mid-1800s.
- Passengers: More than 275 lists now on the site contain more than 27,000 names of families arriving in San Francisco by ship during the 1800s. Planned are additions to the lists, valuable to genealogists around the world, an increasing number of which are arriving from Australian's seeking ancestors.
- Routes and Ports
- News
- VIPs
Revenue
From maritime-related entities, i.e. shipping lines, cruise lines, maritime products, etc., which have resulted in logos placed on the site.
Affiliate Marketing partners such as Amazon.com, Ancestry.com, InternationalHarbors.com, each of which has provided modest (but growing) income to The Maritime Heritage Project through online purchases through the site.
The site is listed on major maritime search engines around the world, including maritime museum sites, shipping lines such as American President Lines, and merchant marine sites. The Maritime Heritage site is also used as a training/reference site by the San Francisco Maritime Museum and J. Porter Shaw Maritime Library in San Francisco.
The market is international: Given the aging of America, family historians/genealogists are blossoming. San Francisco Bay Area has 6,605,428 residents, many with ancestors who arrived by ship. Internationally, 72 cruise ship lines carry more than 1 million passengers annually and that industry is growing (it is expected to exceed oil revenues). Thousands of families have an "historian" (one genealogical library received 30 million viewers, although a timeframe was not given nor numbers substantiated).
Financial Overview
Management and Organization
The Maritime Heritage Project is a U.S. registered 501(c)(3) tax-deductible nonprofit charity
with a governing board with a goal of providing free information to researchers seeking ancestral travel to the West Coast of North America.
Expenses
Expenses are minimal and include salary for the project director and fees for copying, travel (mostly local to/from historical societies), acquisition and/or reprint rights of prints, maps, etc.,
