760,000 Subscribers

The 2007 media kit says Ancestry has 760,000 subscribers [Warning: this link is a PDF download].

760,000
x $150 (per subscriber, and that is being conservative)
$114,000,000 Gross

Just how much does it really cost to operate TGN. They use volunteers for much of the routine work. Does anyone know how many people are employed by them? What kind of servers do they use and how many do they have?

Even if Ancestry spent $900,000 on RootsWeb maintenance, they still have $113,000,000 to play with. Someone is making a killing.

And that was before they stole the Internet.

Want to bring back FREE genealogy. Use Google groups or Yahoo groups. Google offers free web space, photo albums and much, much more. Yep, they do cache web pages, but they never claim the sites as their own. And they never try to charge for them. Their motto is “Do no evil.”

I think someone at TGN overestimated the value of online genealogy and the little cadre of MBAs have been busting their butts to figure out a way to make a bigger profit ever since. It began with trying to charge $20 for email addresses, and when that didn't work out so well, they turned to harvesting everyone else's work – copyright be damned – and charging $13 to view websites that are already FREE.

Compare that to Google's philosophy.

BTW, the state of California has declared that the Internet Archive is a Library. How much do you want to bet that TGN/Ancestry will be petitioning Utah to do the same for them?

Take a look at TGN's Board below. Check out the links. And the unlinked!