Subscriptions Online - Online Subscriptions Entrepreneur of the Year 2008

Online Subscriptions Entrepreneur of the Year 2008 - Reaching New Market Segments

Every year we celebrate an entrepreneur whose inspirational story shows you can start a subscription offering that succeeds online without major corporate backing. Past winners include AskTheBuilder.com and TheLadders.com. Find out who will win this year!

My Notes

Paul Allen is the winner this year - he founded ancestry.com and a number of others and in 2007 he started familylink.com (family record site).

This now competes with ancestry.com which turns over about $150M per annum. This is a mature segment where the users are usually over 60.

Founded 2006 with 7 from original team - now 32 ee's. They raised seed funding of 1.2M last Autumn and they have a very traffic successful Facebook application. They started the development of that the day it was announced and it changed their marketing strategy to focus on piggybacking on the traffic from the social networks.

They have about 2.5M unique visitors a month (over 100k active users a day)
and they have 30,725 paying subscribers from a standing start in 2007.  They have
He spoke about their sales channels - with affiliates accounting for 39% of their sales. They pay a 40% commission to them.

They have content partnership deals with over 30 different businesses and organisations.

He spoke more about Facebook and where they see it going for them. They spent an initial 15k to advertise it and none since - all adoption since is viral with over 3.5M downloads since October 2007. The facebook app showed a lot of Canadian activity and this lead them to the fact that the over 50's in Canada use Facebook a lot more than the US. Facebook in Canada was not launched as a college service.

He then presented some of their experiences with worldvitalrecords.com and facebook. They gather email addresses by offering to send emails which help with your research and this has a 4% conversion rate.
Searches done on the application give summary results which if clicked on bring you to a sign up page. Each page of the app carries a surname search box.
They have a special offer for Facebook users which is 99c for a month - taken from iTune track pricing which the facebook users are familiar with.
They reckon they will have 10 million facebook users by year end. They are collecting 2,700 emails a day.
.26% conversion rate for the 99c offer - with a lot of click throughs but a 4.15% conversion rate for those to give their CC or paypal details (paypal slightly higher).

Q&A session
Why are affiliates so successful - Paul said they treat them properly with the 40% one off revenue share a fair payment for their contribution to the business.

He said that the social networks can deliver really targeted advertising because of the profiling information that they have gathered - this offers tremendous opportunities for businesses.

On a humorous aside he said that he does get email for the MS Paul Allen and does forward it if it appears to be legitimate (via a friend who knows the real one) :-)

keith