Liz Gannes

Recent Posts by Liz Gannes

Family Site Makes Paying for Subscriptions Social

Social media companies like Reddit, Facebook and, recently, LinkedIn have found it makes sense to make their advertising social, too. This means building ads into the function of their sites and making them shareable and personalized. Now, the family history site MyHeritage is doing something similar with its paid services.

Tel Aviv-based MyHeritage, which has 57 million registered users, already offers subscription plans for larger families and premium features like timelines and matching to other families across the network. Its new “Family Goals” will allow families to encourage each other to chip in to pay together for those subscriptions.

In testing earlier this year, these MyHeritage group plans were split among an average of three family members, and anecdotally families said that by spreading around the commitment to pay for the site, they felt more invested in it.

It’s not that hard to give an option for users to split payments, so this may well be an idea we see more of as newer group sites like Posterous and Fridge experiment with paid features.

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There’s a lot of attention and PR around Marissa, but their product lineup just kind of blows.

— Om Malik on Bloomberg TV, talking about Yahoo, the September issue of Vogue Magazine, and our overdependence on Google