Israeli startup MyHeritage was a bit of a sleeping giant. Until newcomer Geni came along and shook up the genealogy world with its slick new viral family tree application. Geni quickly reached 5 million people profiles and a monster $100 million valuation just a few months after launching.
MyHeritage has been around since 2005. They’ve quietly raised $9 million in venture capital (about half from Accel and half from two angel investors, Yuval Rakavy and Aviv Raiz). Until recently MyHeritage required users to upload family genealogy information from desktop based software. The information was viewable online but no changes could be made. An unwieldy system, but they still managed to gather 150,000 family trees with 180 million people profiles from 17.2 million users. 150,000 new profiles are added daily. That dwarfs Geni, although MyHeritage had a long head start.
A couple of weeks ago MyHeritage unveiled a number of fundamental architectural changes to their service. They’ve taken the best features of Geni and married them to the stuff at My Heritage that has worked over the past couple of years.
Users can now upload data (name, email, born/died dates, photos, etc.) directly on the MyHeritage website in addition to the client, choosing from17 different languages. The user interface, which like Geni is in Flash, shows a couple of different views to quickly move around a family tree. Over 100 million photos have been uploaded to the site, and users can tag faces with names an attach them to user profiles.
That isn’t all MyHeritage is up to, though. They acquired Pearl Street Software late last year. That acquisition brought matching technology to the company which allows the service to compare family trees to find overlap – even if names are spelled differently or the basic data is somewhat off (slightly different birth or death dates, for example). They are just beginning to roll out the matching service, but they expect to see a lot of overlap between family trees. If both sides agree, the trees can be merged at appropriate places.
MyHeritage hopes, like Geni, to one day have much of the world’s genealogy mapped online. Given that 1 billion people are online today, MyHeritage’s 180 million people profiles is a good starts towards reaching that goal. They eventually hope to have 3 billion profiles, including people who’ve passed away. And at that point the family relationship between any two people in the world is just a mouse click away.
It’s a grand vision, but one that is likely to be achieved someday by MyHeritage or one of their competitors.
As an aside, MyHeritage also has a robust (and free) genealogy metasearch engine that taps into 1200 genealogy databases around the world.
Arrington great post dude. how are companies like this valued?
I just dont understand how they value companies on line, I have a start up and im heading to the States and to London for investment and things are looking great but when it comes to actual valueing I am at a loss because there is no standard price. Could you help me out with this please.
Johnny
Was this originally intended to help Holocaust survivors locate extended family members?
They have a few Web 2.0 tools on their site, including a Celebrity Look a Like Finder and a Video Morphing Tool that turns your Uploaded Picture into your Celebrity Twin – based on their face recognition technology.
Hi Johnny
This article from Paul Graham should be helpful
http://www.paul...com/equity.html
Anand, thankyou that makes total sense. Paul Graham is great i had those essays but for some reason i did not have that particular one.
Thank you
johnny.
In this day and age of myspace and facebook and orkut and what have you not, I think the definition and characteristics which determine who people care about is being redefined.
“Friends” is more becoming the kind of person you connect to on facebook as opposed to the kind of relationship we had with peers in elementary school. The ties of family weaken.
It makes me wonder how this affects the potential userbase for this service. Will it make people more eager for roots, or is the slide towards superficiality in relationships (see google for the “monkeysphere” essay) an indication that less people care about someone who shared our DNA a few hundred years ago?
Johnny: Before you start using the Graham method of valuation, simply look at the methods your company has outlined as revenue generation mechanisms. What are the potential revenues for a year? It should be a range with high and low numbers and be derived from market research data that you can cite. Depending on what you’ve got built already and how high the barrier to entry would be for other companies to compete, multiply by an integer from 1 to 10.
If your company is planning on ad-generated revenue that comes from getting eyeballs on your site, perhaps Anand’s link will help.
Lots of good info overnight Mike…I love a good read in the morning EST!
MyHeritage signs up 150k new registered users per day? That’s hard to believe considering that that would imply 4.5M new registered users per month and comScore had them at 1.28M unique visitors (total visitors, not new registered users) in July. Perhaps they ONCE signed up 150k users in a day?
Also, if you want to look at any web traffic metric for valuation purposes, monthly unique users that are reached on some kind of regular basis are worth something because they draw advertisers. Total/cumulative (not quoted monthly) registered users is pretty useless, because any given site can sign up millions of users because it becomes a sort of craze for a couple of weeks… if none of the users are visiting the site a month later, that’s not worth much.
This looks very interesting.
I signed up with Geni right away. It’s a great concept. And they’ve recently rolled out some new stuff…but it felt mostly cosmetic.
The appeal of a site like this is to hook up with others. With MyHeritage’s installed user base, it seems a lot more likely that I’ll find other folks to hook my tree into.
How can a post like this not mention Ancestry.com?
“They’ve taken the best features of Geni and married them to the stuff at My Heritage that has worked over the past couple of years.”
Indeed, if you’re not taking cue for your users then at least you should be taking them from your “competitors”. Other Genealogy sites include:
zooof.com
genoom.com
ancestry.com (as mentioned)
familypulse.org (beta)
What I am amazed about continuously is how many great start-ups are coming out of Israel – a country with less people than Chicago.
@Michael and others, you can see a list of Israeli web-centric and internet-centric startups on on my blog:
http://blog.waj...-20-and-beyond/
Well 17 languages is only on paper. It’s the same with zooof by the way. The european translations are terrible! The German one in particular, but French, Spanish and Italian are not much better…
So the planet with the languages and the dropdown on the bottom-left may be working to show off for only-english-speaking people, but its hardly usable for everybody else
What about Famillion? It’s another israeli based start-up that has all the features Geni and Myheritage have and more (they also merge overlapping family trees).
The name dropping by companies is getting old. How would you know so much about Famillion to know they have every feature of Geni and MyHeritage (even though I highly doubt that), and yet aren’t affiliated with the company? Famillion will have its day too if it starts exploding like MyHeritage and Geni are. For now, it’s just an also-ran.
Mike, are those your screenshots? I didn’t know you were Jewish. : P
The fact of the matter is most people don’t care about this family tree mumbo jumbo. It’s nice to check it out once but that’s about it. The Church of the Latter Day Saints (Mormons) has a far more extensive library and could come wipe out all of these people if they felt a Web 2.0 play was worthwhile. They are letting the little kiddies like Geni and MyHeritage play and duke it out. Chances are that there’s no market here. If there is, our boys in Utah will come kick some ass.
Familion.com and Famillion.com are two completely separate sites – the first a medical one and the latter Geneaology (spot the difference). I’ve seen the names confused in the press, as they were here:
http://www.thea...6/post_307.html
Famillion- I’d do a name change right now to something like bazzaboomr (babyboomer) (only joking)
Well, that’s intereesting.
As some other blogs have suggested (such as Tech Crunch’s Arrington himself, on http://www.tech...e-peanut-butter, or more recently http://techitea...web-20-concept/ , or even Bnee : http://www.bnee...o-check-it-out/ ), Geni should merge with a social network. This will provide added value to both.
Johnny, I agree, or at least put in an often-dreaded Facebook app that could become quite viral indeed.
Hi Mike,
I’m wondering, did you use either of the services, Geni or Heritage? I put in three generations of my family tree and found Geni to be far more usable.
I have a one set of grandparents who were divorced in 1933. Remarried immediately. But the children (my parent, sisters, etc) were all from the first marriage.
This one usecase isn’t even covered in Heritage. They have no concept of divorce at all, that I can tell. And they have very rigid ideas about structuring the data, with required fields even if you don’t know the data (for example, if you know a grandparent’s first name, wouldn’t you rather have that, than nothing at all because you don’t know a lastname?)
Geni has structured fields, and will take whatever you’ve got. It also understands the concept of divorce, children being apart of only some of the family, being deceased without a known death year, etc.
I can also just drag two fingers around the page to move and resize it. For ancestral visualization.. that rocks.
I have to say, after entering all this info, I’m far more impressed with the usability of Geni, and would at this point much rather use that service.
And I would imagine the other users would feel the same way.
Like most things technological, you often have to use it to get it and see what actually works. But I’d suggest in future not just taking the screen shots.
It only took me 10 minutes on each site to figure out which site has done the real usability work. It’s nice that Heritage has done the architectural upgrades, but when they did the matching, they tried to push me to “parr-hodder” family which is not mine at all. In fact they trapped me there and I had to close and reopen to get out of it.
Geni is hands down the winner. The only thing I can’t tell is how much of it is shared semiprivately or just mine, and what I can push out to everyone. But I’m sure that will come as I use it more.
We have family data that goes back to 1307 on the hodder side, and I’m kind of excited to put it all in Geni and check it out visually.
mary
MyFamily.com Famiva.com Famillion.com ….www.Family20.cn
If Mike only knew how many names the LDS church has in its coffers. Take a look at FamilySearch.org to get an idea.
Mary, was that entry commissioned by Geni? There are some screenshots of MyHeritage here:
http://www.myhe..._release_1.html
I advocate neither, and have used neither.
Hi!
Looking at their Alexa stats, MyHeritage should add 150.000 profiles (not active users, not users, not family trees) a day. Probably via a mixture of Gedcom imports and profil-adding on their site. I would guess Geni.com is at least adding half of that via profil-adding only.
17.2m users given 150k trees rings not true. That would imply over 110 users per tree. 10 on average at most seems right. That would lead to 1.5m users, pretty much in line with the Comscore data.
Disclosure: I am co-founder of verwandt.de, Germany´s leading family tree site. We will launch in Polan and Italy the coming two weeks. With truly localized versions (each with local domain, own country head etc.).
In addition, we will launch our Gedcom im- and export-Tool next week. Completely free of charge for all users. We will position us as the operating system and the Facebook of genealogy.
Techcrunch has argued in the past that we would not innovate, be surprised what is to follow
Best, Sven from verwandt.de-Team
All of these numbers pale in comparison to the results that Ancestry.com have achieved from their Web 2.0 tree application. Quoting from a recent press release, “more than 275 million individual profiles and more than 3 million family trees have been created on the site since it debuted new tree-building and sharing tools in late July 2006. Users have also attached 30 million family history records and uploaded 2 million photographs.”
http://myfamily...43&item=106
Somewhere along the line all these trees should merge, the how and when is yet to be determined.
Check out Hellotree http://www.hellotree.com
Very slick … could be a nice acquisition
NOW FOR THE TRUTH ON GENI Vs. MY HERITAGE
Plain and simple, comparatively speaking, My Heritage is very user friendly and Geni IS NOT USER FRIENDLY.
Geni in my estimation is useless; how they can say they have so many users when they are not user friendly is beyond belief.
I live in BC, Canada and a relative in Denmark uses Geni, so I have attempted several times to add a lot of the Danish connections relatives and find it near to impossible.
MyHeritage is what I use; mind you it could be perked up a bit but it is certainly much easier to access and use than Geni is for sure.
That’s my opinion and I’ll stick to it because I’m Truth Guy.