Family Trees 2.0

(page 2 of 2)

Visitors to Ancestry.com are gravitating toward the premium features—paid subscribers have increased 7.2% over the past 12 months, to 777,000. But according to Nielsen//NetRatings, the site has seen a drop in overall traffic. Unique visitors fell 17% to 3 million in April, vs. 3.6 million in the same month last year. This means Ancestry.com is getting fewer casual users and more avid family historians eager to pay for premium content.

By contrast, Geni is free and ad-supported. The startup has raised $11.5 million in venture capital, including a $1.5 million first round led by the Founders Fund, and a $10 million second round in February led by Charles River Ventures of Waltham, Mass. Since then, Sacks says, Geni has been striving to increase the site's "stickiness" with new features, including a "friends of the family" networking option.

Geni still has only minimal advertising, and doesn't plan on turning a profit until next year. Once there's a steady flow of families, more ads will start appearing and a fee may be charged for premium features. "It doesn't make sense to try to monetize users until you have a lot of them," says Sacks.

Privacy is an area being refined by many of these sites. Geni plans to let users choose how closely related someone has to be in order to view their personal information, or block individuals they mistrust. At present, though invisible to the public, user information such as addresses, phone numbers, and religious preferences can be viewed by every distant relative in the family tree. It's nice to learn you have cousins thrice-removed in Hungary, but maybe you don't want them showing up unannounced on your Ohio doorstep.

DNA Networking

One other type of family-networking site is on the rise: DNA testing repositories. Users of a service called the DNA Ancestry Project can swab the insides of their cheeks and send the samples to the lab to identify their 46 unique DNA chromosomes. Then, they can go online to see how their genetic material has mutated over time, research whether they're related to Marie Antoinette, or find out if they descend from the Babylonians.

"The exciting thing is you can match yourself to others on the database, and find out whether you are descendants from a common ancestor," says Dr. June Wong, vice-president of operations for Vancouver-based Genetrack Biolabs, the company that launched the site last November. In one case last year, a man who had been orphaned at a young age found someone on the site with a perfect DNA profile match—a cousin living on the opposite coast who helped him find his biological father.

DNA Ancestry Project participants pay $119 to $318 for a testing kit and membership, replete with online tools such as family tree building and surname searches. Users can keep their genetic info confidential or limit access to family members. But to search for matches in the worldwide database of users, they have to make their own DNA public. So far, Wong says, the site has signed up more than 2 million participants, with as many users in their 20s as there are older ones.

Others, including Google (GOOG), also seem to see powerful potential in linking people with generations of great-great-great-great-grandparents. Google recently invested $3.9 million in 23andMe. The startup (created by Google founder Sergey Brin's new bride, Anne Wojcicki) plans to charge $1,000 for an extensive genetic profile and features to help track down lost relatives. And on June 18, the Generations Network announced that it's partnering with a lab, Sorenson Genomics, to start building its own database of cheek-swab-generated DNA reports on Ancestry.com.

But DNA testing isn't a fit for all family tree builders. Geni user Bob Warden says, "It sounds spooky."

MacMillan is a reporter at BusinessWeek.com in New York.