Genealogy 2.0

The Next Generation of Genealogy Sites

One new entrant, Geni.com, which was launched last month by a former PayPal executive, offers a new model, based on connecting living relatives free of charge. The site is part genealogy, part six degrees of separation: Instead of paying a fee to research family records buried in archives, it asks users to build their own family trees -- using the knowledge of living relatives -- that eventually will merge into one giant family tree for the world. That is the hope anyway.
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Geni.com is taking some of the elements of popular so-called social-networking and user-generated content sites such as Wikipedia and MySpace. It went live in mid-January and has registered more than 100,000 users since then. It has done no traditional marketing yet, but blogs such as Digg (where users submit news stories) and Tech Crunch (which focuses on technology) passed the word. The site is free. Rather than charging fees, Geni plans on selling advertising and also plans to generate revenue by creating "premium" accounts and selling products, such as posters or coffee-table books of the family trees.
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The Generations Networks -- founded as MyFamily.com, Inc. nearly a decade ago and now operating eight sites including Ancestry.com -- has built its $150 million a year businesses primarily by selling subscriptions to passionate family historians for access to archives that track family lineage, such as census records, draft cards and death certificates. The Provo, Utah-based company is offering more free, ad-supported features, allowing family members to build trees by attaching ancestors' names, photos and stories. Since adding these features last July, Ancestry.com users have created more than one million family trees, with 150 million names, 400,000 photos and 10 million family documents from the site's thousands of record collections.

The article by Emily Steel also has a good list of genealogy sites and their cost.