| By Forbes Magazine,
on 30-12-2007 21:56
|
Favoured : 1 |
Online Sites Offer Peek Into The Past
It
is the time of year when families travel to be together, share meals
and sit around swapping stories about childhood, relatives who've
passed away and what life was like in the old country.
Seems like a recipe for surging traffic at Web sites devoted to family history. But oddly enough, that's not what happens.
"You'd
think people would get to talking with family, and then look online,"
says Bill Tancer, general manager of global research at Web-tracking
firm Hitwise, who notes that the holiday season is actually a low point
for genealogy and family tree sites, since people on vacation tend to
spend less time on the computer.
Instead, interest in family roots is piqued all year round, and
in the last year, dozens of start-ups have launched slick, easy-to-use
sites to help the curious get started building their online family
trees and family social networks.
Genealogy sites, namely those
from the Provo, Utah-based company Generations Network, have been
around nearly as long as the Web itself, but they typically cost money
to run basic searches and have a distinct "Web 1.0" feel. Though
Ancestry.com, the Generations Network's flagship site, receives more
traffic than any other genealogy site on the Web, its traffic has been
flat during the past year, according to Hitwise data, suggesting room
for improvement and an available market niche for a more innovative
competitor.
For the past year, genealogy-related Web-traffic has held steady at about 9.1 million U.S. visitors per month, according to ComScore data, but newcomers to the business hope to steal that traffic from the
old guard of sites and grow it into a huge audience of repeat-visitors.
One
of the earliest "Web 2.0" family tree start-ups is Geni.com, which
launched in January 2007 and has since received $11.5 million in
venture capital (valuing the company at $100 million) and attracted
nearly 1 million registered users. The company's founder, former PayPal
chief operating officer David Sacks, wants his site to be useful
throughout the year as family members mark birthdays, anniversaries and
other life events. But like all social networks, Sacks' challenge is
recruiting more members to join, and getting them to return.
Though
nearly 1 million Geni members have created more than 10 million
"profiles" of relations in their family trees on the site--not all of
those people are interested in joining up. Many of them aren't alive,
they're merely extensions of a living member's tree. For living
relatives, then, the key is to invite them to join the site via an
introductory e-mail that offers to show off a relative's tree.
"We
have a good response rate to those invitations," says Sacks. "A much
higher percentage actually join than other social networks. It’s a draw
because not everyone wants to make a tree, but everyone wants to look
at what their relatives have done."
In the past, the trick to
gaining users at a genealogy site was to make the technology
unintimidating to those in the 55 and older age range who are most
likely to take an interest in genealogy. At Ancestry.com, about 47% of
its users are 55 or older, according to Hitwise data, and the pattern
is similar at Geni.
But as a slick new Flash-based site, though
Geni might be intuitive to actually use, it isn't easy for Geni to
introduce itself to retirees and grandparents. The site doesn't
advertise, and gets much of its press attention from blogs about
cutting-edge Web design. The introductions, then, must be made by the
younger set, which hasn't shown a historical interest in roots
discovery. Geni has an edge here over Ancestry.com, though. According
to ComScore, nearly 25% of Geni's users are between 25 and 34, while
only 14% of Ancestry.com's are in that group.
These demographic
issues make the genealogy network business different from that of
social networks, which Sacks says aren't very useful to older people.
"The need we address isn't communication, but self-preservation," he
says. But that doesn't stop Sacks from learning and apply the best
tricks of sites like News Corp.'s,MySpace and Facebook. In coming months, Geni.com will introduce a
"family news feed" page, an editable life timeline of events and a
family-tree widget that embeds into any other Web site. These additions
should make the site more "sticky," and give members reasons to keep
returning to Geni after the first visit, according to Sacks.
These
updates should also help Geni fend off the swarm of similar start-up
genealogy competitors. Some of them, like Germany-based Verwandt.de,
appear to follow Geni's style closely, while others offer more features
such as multiple languages, integration with DNA-testing laboratories,
the ability to merge related family trees and the ability to upload
family files in the established genealogy file format called Gedcom.
But
Geni has a lead on nearly all of these competitors in traffic and
stability, says Sacks, who refers to these sites en masse as "the
attack of the clones," and says that many of them can't handle complex
family scenarios in their family tree software, such as step siblings,
in-laws and other non-traditional family relationships. "They're not
going to catch up as long as we keep innovating," Sacks declares
Last update : 31-07-2009 14:29
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