YouWho Family Tree Internet Start-up

May 1, 2011
Bill Atkinson

YouWho Launches a New Family History Site: Sort Of - Bill Atkinson

YouWho, self-proclaimed as "a new kind of family history site" has launched - and if their logo is any indication, their claim may be true.

The only reason to pay any attention to this start up genealogy company is the fact that they have raised 5 million dollars in venture capital money from Light Speed Venture Partners. Their web site contains 3 pages right now: the main page (Fig. 1), an “About Us” page (Fig. 2) and a hiring announcement (Fig. 3). TechCrunch who reported the SEC filing for the company on April 25 says that the company is in “stealth mode”.

Why Pay any Attention?

There are two factors that provide fuel for speculation. First consider the numbers that FamilySearch.org reports as their web site traffic:

Number of visitors since launch: over 150 million
Number of pages viewed since launch: over 5 billion
Number of hits per day: over 10 million
Number of visitors per day: over 50,000
Number of pages viewed per day: over 1 million
Number of registered users: over 1 million

Ad companies and advertisers must drool over the inherent sales potential of all those page views going “wasted” on a free site. However simply consider those 50,000 people who visit each day and on average spend enough time there to look at 20 pages each. It indicates to a company like YouWho that family history really is an active field with lots of potential customers.

Second consider just how much work it is to develop, research and create even a modest family tree of 5000 ancestors and cousins. It can take years and cost a serious amount of money in document fees, travel costs, hired researchers, and subscriptions to family history sites and societies. There is a market and Ancestry.com’s massive advertising campaign on television over the past year provides another confirmation if one is needed.

What Might be Involved in a “Faster, Easier, More Enjoyable” Genealogy Site?

The web site simply recycles the more personal, enjoyable message which provides very little information. We can assume that they aren’t going to try and compete with Ancestry or FamilySearch in providing access to indexed, searchable documents. The TechCrunch article reports that the trademark filing included: “providing an on-line searchable database in the field of genealogy and family history”. This does not sound all that radically different but it did manage to attract that $5 Million. Andre Brummer one of the co-founders of the new company was formerly a senior Vice President of product at My Family which is the forerunner to Ancestry.com. He has experience in the field but can that credibility produce a new kind of family history site?

It seems that the site is tending towards more media which will probably harness all the web cam video potential of telling your family’s story and posting queries in a more engaging way. It looks to be heading towards the idea of linking all subscribers’ trees together that was started some time ago by RootsWeb with their WorldConnect Tree project and has been taken up recently by One Great Family Tree and My Heritage. YouWho may have a good idea, now we can watch and see if they can pull it off.