We just got word that genealogy site Geni will be announcing that they’ve hit their 5 millionth profile, just five months after launching the service. This is up from 2 million in March. You can view the press release here.
This is not the number of registered users (Geni had 100,000 when reporting 2 million profiles), but rather the number of people put into Geni family trees. A user, after adding themselves, begins to add other people. If you include an email, that user is notified of the existence of the tree and can choose to sign up or not. Every non-deceased person who’s added, therefore, is a potential Geni user. That single viral component to the service will ensure orders of magnitude greater growth compared to established competitors like ancestry.com.
Geni has raised a total of $11.5 million in capital – the last round was $10 million on a $100 million valuation. They continue to add features that have proven to be successful at creating growth at Facebook and other social networks, suggesting that valuation may not be as crazy as it seems at first blush.
but whats the demographic and why
I know Alexa ranking is not much of a traffic indicator but still for those many profiles, there # is still 10,000 plus. Something is off here.
i see dead ppl surfing the interwebs
Is this just a database? Or does it actually have some genealogical search capability? No search == pretty lame == transparent marketing tool.
After signing up for Geni immediately after their launch and getting my entire extended family on there, I can say we’re not really getting much out of it besides family drama brought on by users initial ability to edit someone else’s profile. Sibling rivalry rears it’s ugly head and nothing says fun like your ex-husband leaving comments on your new husbands page.
My answer to that was to simply throw it all to the dogs and start sneaking in odd fake relatives here and there with strange photos and interesting histories, just to see if anyone noticed.
Use with caution. YMMV.
I’ve used it and find it extremely addicting. i have over 200 people in my tree right now, about 20% deceased and about 5% registered. I’m using it about 3x week.
I tried this out when you guys first mentioned it. I thought it was cool and then was worried about the info and spam. Mothers maiden names was a mentioned concern.
I told my girlfriend about it and her family has loved it. She has about 300 people connected to her now as the women in the family have really put some time into this. The kids like it too, they can see pictures of people they haven’t met and relatives they never knew about.
I still haven’t used it since the initial try out but I have seen the growth first hand.
Their tactics of adding users is dangerously close to spam. It also kind of has the feeling of linkedin -e.g. once you sign up and waste a bunch of time adding contacts…you realize it’s not really useful and you never use it again.
HA ha, no email verification either, I just signed up as George W. Bush
I don’t know. I just signed up and played around with it and I like it. It’s not really my kind of thing, but my family is ENORMOUS (11 kids on my dad’s side, more than 100 cousins, etc.) so I can see it being fun for whoever I invited to work on it. The interface is excellent. Very easy to use, intuitive, etc. I could see both my sisters getting into it.
I think this kind of stuff is always of interest to people, and making family trees has always historically been a pain, so I can see how an online site could have legs. I’m sure there are some creative ways to generate revenue, like selling print outs, framed trees or something. They could more than likely source it out to another company and take a bit of a cut on the back end of it…..
It’d be a cool project for students or a class. I’m never quick to sing the praises on start ups but I think this one can work.
Releasing that statistic is smoke and mirrors. The key issue for Geni.com is sustaining traffic growth, yet the opposite seems to be happening:
http://siteanal...te.com/geni.com
I put round about 40 to 50 people of my familiy to Geni, right after theire launch.
Now we have about 1300 people in the family tree.
This is really viral.
I am glad, I found Geni.
It seems, most of our family member like it too.
Did David Sachs pay you to write this post, Michael? I’ve noticed a trend in Techcrunch postings lately in which you or Duncan write posts that defend ridiculous valuations placed on pre-revenue start ups (Meebo, Geni) funded or founded by Silicon Valley elite.
You say that their valuation is not as ridiculous as previously thought at first blush because:
1) they added features that work for facebook — facebook’s features worked because there was an active user base; features with no users are useless
2) they have 5 million nodes in their system — i’ve added 150 people to my family tree. I would say that 5 are under 10, 15 are teenagers, 20 are 18-45, 25 are 46-60, 10 are 61+ and the other 70 are dead. That’s 35 nodes of people that are active internet users, 3 of whom have registered for teh site.
It’s interesting to me that Geni published 2 million nodes on 100K users initially and now only publishes the new number of nodes. Why no mention of the 2.5x growth to the number of users? Perhaps because that number hasn’t changed at all.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, Michael, if you want people to respect Techcrunch as a source of information you need to show some jounalistic integrity (or at least support your arguments if the rationale is not obvious).
How is it dangerously close to spam? If it is considered spam, then blame the person adding you to the network… That’s like me sending you a message through Hotmail, and then having you claim that Hotmail is spamming. I just don’t see it.
Perhaps if they send out multiple notifications in an attempt to get people to join, rather than a “I add you once, you get a notification once” approach. Plaxo was closer to spam than Geni, and they are actually pretty damn successful. Hell, I’ve received several Facebook invitations – are they spammers too?
hmmm…”TC needs to show some jounalistic integrity”?? – hey buddy, where are you from? this is america, we don’t need journalistic integrity….We have got bills to pay.
Why do they keep saying Geni is a genealogy site. Its a joke if you wanted to use it as a genealogy tool. It’s more like a site to keep in touch with family members. That doesn’t make it a genealogy site. If they truly wanted to be considered a genealogy site, they would make it easy to import Gedcom files so you could literally see your entire family tree displayed to you.
@ eli – I agree. Either Michael Arrington has a hard on for David Sachs or he is in bed with Claremont.
Michael A – you post about the same handful of companies that you obviously adore over and over and over. It’s getting old. Blah Blah Blah I know that you write about “whatever you damned well want to write about” and disclose blah blah and are “obviously biased” but could you try to be a LITTLE less blatant about it? It’s embarassing (for you).
Geni is a one hit wonder. You use it once, a few people get into it but most NEVER return.
I’d like to see someone really take this area to the market. No one has hit it right yet. And it’s not Ancestry that tries at all to be viral, it’s MyFamily.com (owned by Ancestry) – just clarifying as Ancestry is really about genealogical research.
I guess if we’re talking in terms of pure usefulness, then we can also take a look at MySpace or Facebook. How useful are these services when you break them down? Is “poking” someone really that important? What about leaving a comment on someone’s “wall” saying “ur da b0mb!!”?
People need to realize that usefulness isn’t needed in order to strike it big sometimes
Surprise surprise. Michael Arrington told me he is my father. Scary.
I’ve found the site to be fun and interesting. I am currently going through geneology.com, getting information my dad has entered and putting it into this site. While I do not know much about geneology.com, I’ve found it hard to see an entire family tree… it is taking forever to transport this information into the Geni system… perhaps a feature that might be useful… or at least the ability to enter all of the information about a person at once, rather then the 2 steps it currently requires.
A few people are questioning the ammount of traffic coming into this site… I’ve been able to search for last names of family members and I’ve come up with a multitude of results. Many not having to do with my family (none) but it does show how popular this site really is. No, my last name is NOT Smith.
If you have any interest in your family tree, give this site a try.
Well, out of all the things in the market, this is at least somewhat a concept that is intelligent enough to talk about (from an idea and technical aspect), and the fact that the founder has some proof in the market (Paypal) makes it worthy enough to hear about. I don’t think this article is here on bias. I would write about David Sachs and what’s going on with his new venture, and I don’t know him.
It is obvious who knows who on the blogs, but that’s certainly nothing new to media and definitely not limited to TechCrunch. Ingest all media and information with a filter, guys. Much of what you read in all areas and capacity is based as much on relationships as it is newsworthiness. Why do think Lindsay Lohan has non stop coverage? It isn’t out of interest.
Ever noticed that just about every start-up has someone from PayPal and every single VC claims to have invested in it? That basically means that it’s a non-factor. That’s like assuming that everyone who worked at Google pre-IPO is a genius. Many are, but many are just lucky to be at the right place at the right time (which can be a skill in and of itself).
If you want stats find them yourself. I am impressed with Geni and its ability to get all the family and data and allow its members to establish contact with family members that you may not have seen in forty years, if ever.
To the guy who wrote “Geni is a one hit wonder. You use it once, a few people get into it but most NEVER return.” Well you obviously haven’t seen my family site on Geni. We have grown to over 700 members and counting, in just a little over a month. I did not even know we had half that many family members. So it is doing the job I thought it would do and so much more.
BTW Mike, I am the relative you haven’t seen since the 84 Olympics and our helicopter battalion deployed to Los Alamitos and we did terrorist scouting. I stayed at your house instead of sleeping on the floor of a local elementary school.
So if I sound like Rah, Rah go Mike, well Rah, Rah Go Mike!
eli: I agree with the points you’ve made about the importance of new features and the true measure of the service’s growth.
Even for those who find Geni to be a useful service, I think the question we should be asking is: is Geni a $100 million company at this point? Was it a $100 million company seven weeks after launch when it raised $10 million at that valuation?
We can speculate about whether or not Geni’s recent additions are going to help it build a business that justifies the valuation, but it’s the type of speculation that you’re more likely to see in Vegas than from venture capitalists investing in a sane market. Of course, all venture capital is speculative, but even if Geni turns out to be a huge success story, I think the current valuation is so far ahead of where the business is at and where it could realistically be in the medium-term that this borders on insanity.
I’ve posted a detailed analysis of Geni’s valuation on my blog from the same perspective I’d use to evaluate Geni as an investment opportunity that I was presented with. Although I’m sure it will never happen, I’d love for Geni’s investors to explain why they thought Geni was worth $100 million and just how realistic they think their chances of exiting profitably are.
Personally, if I was a limited partner in a fund that gave a $100 million valuation to a seven week old startup that is in a competitive market, pre-revenue (or close to it) and that lacks defensible technology, I’d pull my money from the fund.
http://www.dram...-20-valuations/
By the way, I wanted to comment on this statement:
“That single viral component to the service will ensure orders of magnitude greater growth compared to established competitors like ancestry.com.”
There are a lot of ways to measure growth. Maybe Geni is growing its “registered users” and “profiles” but is that really building value for the company? How much will it be able to grow revenues? It’s going to need a lot of revenue to justify that valuation.
It’s also worth noting that not all of ancestry.com’s data is user-inputted. The company apparently has the largest database of historical family records, so it actually has significantly more data than Geni does now (some of it obviously from more reliable sources than its own users) and therefore doesn’t necessarily need “viral” user growth to grow its already strong business.
One of the problems with Web 2.0 is this focus on user growth, but how many startups have been able to successfully monetize their users at a level that justifies the hype? Unless you’re lucky enough to sell your startup before questions over monetization arise, it’s worth considering that users are worthless to a real business if they can’t be converted to cash.
I’m not sure why people are comparing this to ancestry.com – they are quite different. geni.com is basically like “myspace” for families I suppose…..just a basic user-created social circle with some additional features. ancestry.com is an actual database that they created from both electronic records and actual hand scanned & typed in records from many different sources (military, government, birth/death records, etc). ancestry has a huge database which is why they are able to easily monetize their services via subscription.
Hm… seems Geni reached the critical mass – I would like to see some international database – since geni did not launch in other languages right now, other startups raised with an equal offer (e.g. http://www.familyone.de for Germany)
People need to check out Kandaan.com. It has a lot more services than what Geni has to offer.
That’s what i call a juggernaut.
It’s sad to see how the Geni team thinks the whole world speaks English. By not offering their service in other languages they are missing out on a huge potential market!
I have an idea how Geni could speed up its viral growth. For every new profile, which has no parents, automatically add profiles for parents. Default last name for parents is easy to guess. And it is easy to prove that every man or woman has parents. For even bigger viral growth, profiles for grandparents could be also automatically created. With this technique they can in two months exceed MySpace in terms of open profiles. What do you think?
Unfortunately, Geni doesn’t work for me, the serious genealogist… See my post here: http://rodrigo....ng_for_an_.html
This (geni.com) is a joke, right? Genes Reunited has 120 million names in 7 million trees. (Obviously there is a lot of duplication, but at least it is really for genealogy research.) (And it is the only one I am prepared to pay their affordable annual member for.)
… But anyway, U.S. genealogy websites are pretty much useless for me, although the Mormon database (www.familysearch.org) is what got me started, and yes, I have relatives in USA and Canada, but only at the distant cousins level. Likewise for UK, but at least prior to the mid-19th century, that’s where my ancestors are from.
Check out http://www.genesreunited.com/ it is _well_ worth it.
According to Ancestry.com’s homepage, they have 5,556,986 new user-created family tree nodes added THIS WEEK.
What’s up NOW geni.com?!
I agree with others that the excessive geni.com interest is unusual.
“HA ha, no email verification either, I just signed up as George W. Bush”
Common suggest me some name, let me save my seat on the site too
BeyondWWW
Ancestry dwarfs the viral of Geni by adding many times more profiles per week than they do. Odd that they get such press.
Geni.com is just a blatant attempt by a utah wanna-be enterpreneur to try and cash in. He thinks that if he creates enough viral buzz around it that Ancestry.com will acquire them. NOBODY will acquire this smoke and mirrors site. You cannot force fake PR out into the internet and hope to sucker some big dot com into acquiring you. That would have worked in the late 90’s but this is not web 1.0.
To the fools who put ANY VC cash into this bubble of a website- your partners should run you out of town! Geni.com is a bubble who’s burst has come— POP!!!
I find it useless for many of the same reasons listed above. Why bother contributing to some other closed network that doesn’t help with discovery of information.
Geni has a nice interface, are lobbed into a competitive market, but the majority of the people who go to it have no reason to return. All they’ll do is add more “MyFamily.com” features to it and try to take a stab at them.
MyFamily really missed the boat a few years ago, as I believe Paul Allen (not THE Paul Allen) even commented here on one of Arrington’s other nine thousand posts ooh-ing and aww-ing like we do over fireworks on Geni.
@ Patricia, I can understand that the bloggers want to help their friends. I get it. I know many reporters slant stories just as much, but no one holds bloggers to a credibility standard whereas with other news sources at least it goes thru 1 filter (editor) who’s paid on the basis of presenting factual info. Everyone is totally afraid to criticize Michael lest he blackball them in the VC community. I fear the true power of TC is a spike then not much as the fickle “need to have the latest gadget/technology/cool thing” moves on, but that initial power is STRONG and MA needs to be a bit humble to it and not abuse it by posting over and over about his little pets. Everyone is so scared of Michael Arrington. All the start-ups are in fear, the VCs want to be cool and hip so they read it, they see him, all the organizations quote him and want him to be on their panels.
I know blogs are opinion based. I know bloggers are biased. I however side with those that think that when an(y) Arrington gets to his level of ability to influence (and I don’t mean just the usual techCrunch crash that comes after he posts a glowing review about any company, I’m talking about the personal connections he has and how far his influence wields in inner circles) that he has an obligation to hold himself to a slightly higher standard than joe blow blogger.
That’s all I’m really trying to say.
The got 5mil because of their loose standards of sign up –
– they have to develop a way of finding fakes / then prove its not just a marketing engine ..
Compliments for Geni from http://www.zooof.com ! You can export your Geni file into ZOOOF
! We launched one month before Geni, but pity enough we are not in the inner circle of MA. So Micheal, you can make it up with ZOOOF and publish about our coming start-up http://www.vicuso.com 
! You know where to find us!
UGH…how the hell do these guys keep getting so much positive press? This is just like PayPal when it started-they suck.
The difference is that these supposed “industry veterans” are acting like they have never had these issues before. “What? Privacy concerns over the newly launched feature that we didn’t tell you about and specifically promised in our privacy documents we would NEVER EVER do?!? Oh., don’t worry about those. They make your experience better!”
DON’T SCREW WITH US Geni! We’re not susceptible to the Jedi Mind Tricks you’re trying to pull off.
It’s all smoke and mirrors. A giant Chain Letter – Phishing scam.
What good is a website that only asks for the names, ages and e-mail adresses of your family and friends?
What good is that to you. Don’t you know your family/friend’s e-mails adresseses already? Do your really care about having the e-mail address of a 5th cousin your never met and never will?
Who benefits from knowing that?? They do, not you.
Genealogy is not about that. If you want to meet friends join an online chat group. at least there you can be anonymous.
As for being a genealogy program. It’s useless. Just a come-on for dopes who can’t figure out real genealogy software.
P.S. I’m surprised nobody has mentioned the largest genealogy site in the world
Rootsweb.com
Ok it’s now owned by ancestry.com et al. but it’s much larger and 100% free. no log-in or subscriptions needed. Besides it has every possible surname/occupation/location mailing list you could imagine and massive user supplied databases that you can actually search and download. All run entirely by the members themselves.
Rootsweb has 480 million names. and 29 million searchable archived e-mails All free and all searchable and member posted – no strings attached .
So why all the hype about this “new improved and original” future pay-site which members must ultimately pay for in ways they may not like?
Geni privacy statement says “We will not spam you or your relatives. Detailed account settings allow you to control which emails you receive from us.”
however Geni will spam your familymembers email accounts using your name until your relatives validates their email accounts and sign up to change the “notification” setting and make the spamming stop. That’s how they got 5 million users in 5 month!! 4.9 gave in to nuisance spam!!
Damn Geni! I can’t believe that they continue these friggin privacy violations! David Sacks is an idiot for leading this company like this. It’s a waste of the 10 million dollars. or maybe not. Maybe the money came from privacy violating companies who have now massed this database with millions of personal pieces of information. Oh it’s all over now. DAMN YOU GENI!