It’s been just a few days after our post on Geni’s big growth numbers - and now big news from Israeli competitor MyHeritage.
The site has grown from 180 million profiles a year ago to 260 million today, they say. Registered users have also grown, from 17 million to 25 million. Compare that to almost 2 million users for Geni. 230 million photos have been uploaded to the site, which is available in 25 languages and has 5 million monthly unique visitors. Support for ten more language will be released this month.
Investors have certainly noticed MyHeritage’s stellar growth. The company has raised a new round of funding - $15 million in a Series D round led by Index Ventures and joined by current investor Accel Partners. That brings their total capital raised to $24 million.
New Features - Recognize Those Faces
MyHeritage’s facial recognition, which works a little like recent Picasa enhancements, lets you train the service by tagging a few photos of an individual. MyHeritage then starts to auto-tag other photos that you upload of that person, too. Users don’t have to upload photos directly, either. They can sync from Picasa, Flickr, Facebook, etc. And once the photos are properly tagged with people’s names, MyHeritage will re-sync them back to the original services.
Just to reiterate that, MyHeritage has created a heck of a tool to let users auto-tag photos with people’s names on the services they already use.
Any idea why the superior growth, other than better picture tools?
Myheritage is leading in their SEM/SEO efforts over geni and that is why they are doing so much better in their assault. The demographic both these companies are hitting are heavily dependent on search engines, since they are not avid tech readers and myheritage is kicking ass on all the hot keywords. I think genis service offering is superior but they will lose this battle if they don’t take traditional search marketing seriously.
Reply -
Just FYI, both Geni and Ancestry shows much better results on trends or alexa !!
Geni is growing faster and Ancestry has double the traffic…
Comscore data shows that MyHeritage is more than 7x the size of Geni in unique visitors. Google Trends or Alexa are the wrong tools to use in this case because MyHeritage has 20 different domains (myheritage.com, myheritage.es, myheritage.cn and many more) and you’ve been looking at just one of them (MyHeritage.com) instead of an aggregation of all 20, which Comscore provides. With new domains added every month, MyHeritage.com is constantly having portions of its traffic shift over to other domains so when myheritage.com is showing minor growth, the site as a whole is experiencing tremendous growth.
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Though a bit more subtle, it is not as if you should talk, spammer.
It seems your just a critic of critics with nothing original to offer… assistant crack whore.
Quit spamming. If it has nothing to do with article, people will respect you less. Give some commentary you fuck.
sweet….just tried it out….I am dropping geni and going to myheritage
Hi Michael,
I believe the numbers you mentioned regarding Geni are incorrect. You wrote in your last post about Geni’s growth “And the biggest family tree at Geni now has over 680,000 profiles and 40,000 users (profiles include deceased family members).” pointing to those numbers for the single, largest family tree. I’d be curious to see what their total number of profiles and users are respectively, but it is my guess that it is significant.
I don’t know the specific “rules & regs” of counting users/pageviews/profiles, etc., but from the way MH is described here, it would seem that unless MH has been around far longer than Geni, MH’s significantly higher numbers come from the fact that they have created a very deep aggregation of “profiles”, etc. from other sites.
From the 9/3 Geni article: “A key feature driving big trees is the ability to merge smaller ones, which can create a SNOWBALL EFFECT. Prior to the release of the merge feature, Geni’s largest tree was just 35,000 profiles”
Sounds like Geni was headed down the same path as well, it just took them longer to figure out how to do it.
It’s a great idea, but of course Geni is already doing something about it.
It’s a great idea
All this talk of Jewish Heritage reminds me of this joke:
A Jewish father was concerned about his son who was about a year away from his Bar Mitzvah but was sorely lacking in his knowledge of the Jewish faith.
To remedy this, he sent his son to Israel to experience his heritage. A year later the young man returned home.
“Father, thank you for sending me to the land of our Fathers,” the son said. “It was wonderful and enlightening, however, I must confess that while in Israel I converted to Christianity.”
“Oi vey,” replied the father, “what have I done?”
So in the tradition of the patriarchs, he went to his best friend and sought his advice and solace.
—-
No Space to paste the rest of the joke — but it is at:
http://cackl.com/joke/view/714/Jewish-Heritage
and its funny!
creative application
more jokes here - funpiz.blogspot.com
The success of family tree startups seem to rely heavily on their users’ demographics. A random search on Google Trends on websites similar to Geni reveals many such family tree websites, mostly in Arabic language, for example.
Is it true that the users takeon rate is highly dependent on the demographics?
MyHeritage is a cool site, but most of the users mentioned are probably from their rather popular Facebook app that tells you what celebrity you look like rather than the family tree website.
I believe that MyHeritage also has monthly fees more than a certain number of users per family, so if the number really does represent active MyHeritage.com users, they should have great revenue by now.
Hi, this is Noah from the Geni team. It is great to see all of the interest in this space, we truly believe that the interest in family networking will continue to grow rapidly. I just wanted to build on what “M.” has already pointed out:
* Geni.com is approaching 2 million users of our social family tree app. These users have created well over 25 million profiles of their family members. Both of these numbers continue to grow rapidly, and as we benefit from the network effect I expect this will only increase. These numbers do not include users of widgets we’ve created or any other unrelated apps that happen to live at our website (because we don’t have any!)
* We have 1 million unique users per month (and growing rapidly) visiting Geni.com to build and share their family history and communicate with their families. Again, these numbers only reflect users for our family network.
* Unlike other sites, Geni.com is completely free, and does not place a limit on how large your tree can grow, how many photos or videos you can upload, or anything else.
I’d be interested in an apples to apples comparison of family social networks, rather than comparing Geni against collections of unrelated apps and widgets.
Hi Noah,
I am Hila, affiliated with one of the seed investors of MyHeritage.
Just to clarify a few misconceptions, MyHeritage has had 5 million unique visitors in August 2008 of which 90% came from the MyHeritage Websites (myheritage.com, myheritage.es and 18 others) and only 10% of the traffic came from its social network apps. The fact of the matter is that MyHeritage has 12.5x more registered members, 10x+ more genealogy profiles, 25x more languages and who knows how many more photos, than Geni.
On photos, go objective and just check how many photos Google has indexed.
From geni:
http://images.google.com/image.....amp;tab=wi
about 3000.
From MyHeritage:
http://images.google.com/image.....rch+Images
about a million.
So according to Google, 300x more photos on MyHeritage, than Geni.
MyHeritage is probably the #1 repository of family and family history photos worldwide.
MyHeritage has supported unlimited GEDCOM (family tree format) imports from day one, several years ago. Geni has only added this 4 months ago, and such imports are still limited to 15,000 individuals according to the Geni blog. So no wonder Geni is so inferior in terms of data.
MyHeritage has Smart Matching technology that intelligently suggests where any trees overlap and connect, with fuzzy comparisons of names, facts and dates. MyHeritage now provides face recognition technology to tag people in photos automatically.
Geni is a nice site, but it has no technology to speak of.
It’s great that everything is free on Geni, but it’s also good to have a business model
Just setting the record straight.
Christ almighty….STFU you total failure.
Thanks for the helpful clarifications Hila.
One point regarding the photos data you mentioned. By default your photos on Geni are private to your family and are not viewable to the public (we believe this is best for our users). This accounts for the low number of publicly viewable photos. We of course have many more than 3,000 photos, our users upload multiples of this every day.
Gilad kol hakavod !
That’s a big round for a family tree site. Ancestry.com has more features in genealogy, but is stuck in the past — these startups Geni and Myheritage eclipse it in viral growth and community features, and certainly with face recognition smarts Myheritage seems to be in the lead.
Myheritage has so much to offer, their family tree and the new photo features is a must for every family and so easy to use and share. I’ve been using it for a year now and those guys are real pro. No comparison to any other family site, they are clearly the top in terms of offering and size and those investors are smart enough to see the enormous potential.
mazal tov myheritage!
Seriously, this is turning into some serious biz
Congrats to Gilad for your continued success ! You know my comments about why as a serious genealogist I still use geneanet.org. Nevertheless, mazel tov !
So Hila
Could you please explain why growth has stopped on Google trends?
http://trends.google.com/websi.....amp;sort=0
See my response further above.
Hi,
this is Sven from verwandt.de (English site: http://www.itsourtee.com).
First of all congrats to Gilad for raising this great round. With Accel and Index he now has top investors by his side. He earned it through his success, especially with the family pages.
Second of all, congrats to the Geni.com for their recent growth. David, Noah, and the whole team have built an amazing site.
In my eyes both successes validate the space and show the huge potential. Our numbers are also a proof of the rapid growth in that segment:
* We now have over 5 million family trees with more than 50 million profiles
* Across our 11 local sites (no widgets etc.) we have close to 2 million uniques per month
* We are completely free to use without any usage limits
* Next month will introduce a (completey free) desktop application similar to the MyHeritage.com-download solution in all our markets
* For Christmas you will be able to order poster print-outs of your family tree at 80% (!!!) less costs than all offerings in the market
Ancestry.com/ The Generations Network is clearly the market leader, but I am convinced that Geni.com, MyHeritage.com and verwandt.de will pose a relevant threat in their respective markets, as we all will add more innovative features over time.
Best, Sven
Do you compare your cock-size at parties? I think you do.
Congratulations to Simon Levene at Accel and now to Index on the success so far with MyHeritage, all of this is great for the on-line genealogy industry in general. Just a quick note for comparison as long as everyone is doing this: our portfolio company Familybuilder has 40,000 uniques daily, 22 million profiles growing 2 million a month and 4.2 million registered users, so somewhat smaller than MyHeritage and comparable to Geni on some metrics, better on others. Only difference is that the site has only been live for a little over a year, and the growth has been generated with a little over $1 million to date (total raise since inception $1.7 milion vs. $9 million prior to this round by Myheritage and an even larger sum by Geni). It will be interesting to see what Familybuilder can do once it has a similar war chest to the others… although I think we are going to be going down slightly different directions in terms of user involvement than the other two…
I don’t even want to know who’s related to me. The suckers I already know are enough, lol.
this is the weirdest thread comments rivaling any pissing contest that I’ve ever seen on techcrunch….
Couldn’t agree more.
The bottom line is Ancestry.com is still the leader and has a huge lead over these guys. They are also a cash machine. Ancestry gives me the ability to automatically match my records to existing family tree’s, census, and immigration records. Then import the records complete with proper citation to my family tree. Features like this are killer for the hard core genealogist.
Agreed. Ancestry.com still dwarfs these startups, in number of trees, names, and dollars in the bank.
I think that “hard core genealogists” make up only a small portion of the users. What Ancestry has done so brilliantly is to bring this to the ‘masses’ so anyone can feel comfortable to search and find their data.
Ancestry is still very much for hard code genealogists only and has not taken this to the masses. The masses are not interested in the 1930 census or obscure newspaper and obituary databases. That’s why sites like myheritage and geni are able to grow so quickly; they’re about the family and not solitary genealogy research. Ancestry’s making money but it has been going for 10 years and its current growth is flat, they’ve recently cannibalized their rootsweb.com property into the Ancestry.com domain to try to give the illusion of growth in traffic, but the end result is weaker than ancestry and rootsweb were separately. Ancestry is a good hard-core genealogy website but not more than that.
This is very interesting.
Used this quite a lot. The face recognition is more of a gimmick but the geneology resources are terrific!
John, try the new face recognition stuff they just put up on the site. It’s the real deal of automatic photo tagging and facial search, and certainly no gimmick.
Genesreunited.com is probably the most popular in the UK but is very clunky from a tree sharing and editing perspective. Plus it cost £9.95 per year to share info with other members…
A new player on the scene is Hellotree http://www.hellotree.com
Good quality site, could be a good acquisition for someone looking to enter the space or add features.
Does any of the services offers an open API?