Here's a little Internet trivia question: What category of consumer Web sites started charging for online information and nonpornographic images back in the late 1990s, and has since amassed more than a million paid subscriptions and annual revenue approaching the US$100 million level?
The answer is genealogy. Once largely the province of Civil War buffs, Mormons and aging aunts, family history is now among the fastest growing and more potentially lucrative niches on the commercial Internet. And along with collectibles trading, it is a consumer category that has truly flourished in the digital era.
"The Internet has really fueled this activity because it's made it easy to transfer data, collaborate and do research without traveling around," said Curt Witcher, president of the National Genealogical Society. "It's been phenomenal."
Executives of online ancestry services said that about 60 million people in the US are involved in creating family histories -- one of the most popular hobbies in the US. While the numbers are difficult to prove, what is certain is that few other categories of service have induced consumers to pay for subscriptions in greater numbers than genealogy has.
The biggest beneficiary of the trend is MyFamily.com, the parent company of Ancestry.com, which said it currently has about 850,000 paid subscriptions.
The company, which began offering online subscriptions in 1997, will reach about US$60 million in revenue this year, according to MyFamily's chief executive, Tom Stockham.
Half of Ancestry.com's information is free, users pay US$39 quarterly to US$189 annually for the right to search and view materials like census takers' completed forms from 1790 through 1930, and slave journals. Site executives said users can find that nowhere else in a complete form on the Web. Since these documents have been digitized, users may search for particular names, dates or places to find relevant information and plug it into their family trees. The site has information on 1.8 billion names.
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