Ancestry.com Ad Campaign to Begin This Month

Ancestry leaf logo.bmpAncestry.com is launching its first ever fully-integrated external marketing campaign. This campaign will run throughout 2007 and will include television, print, radio, out-of-home, and online. The ads capture the emotional experience of connecting with your ancestors and the rewards that result from gaining an understanding of your family history. The campaign will run on national cable including A&E and Scripps network, nationally syndicated radio stations including Fox News Radio, Air America Radio, and CBS News, and weekly and monthly Time, Inc. publications. Click here to get a sneak peek at some of the ads.

13 thoughts on “Ancestry.com Ad Campaign to Begin This Month

  1. I think that it’s great that you want to expand your business. However, now I finally understand waht the excessive fees that you have charged over the recent years will be used for. You have used your long term users as guinea pigs for your future growth and excess profits.

  2. I agree with Bonnie. The fees that are charged are HUGE. I almost don’t enjoy searching because I am very busy mom of small children but I work on my tree because I feel obligated to simply because of the amount I paid for my subscription. Yes, I understand it costs money to run the show but with as many subscribers as you have, it’d be nice to give us a break. I’m sure the ad campaign is going to be a huge success. Remember the people who have been here before the big push.

    To get away from bashing Ancestry.com, I do find that the information is great and it’s well organized. Things are easy to find, most times.

  3. I hope that ancestry.com will treat their new clients better than their old. Disreputable telemarketers quoted me fees that were suppose to include everything. I then got overcharged on the amount they quoted (later refunded), and then kept getting additional add on fees added to my credit card now and then. Plus, I specifically stated I did not want the CD, and was sent the CD and was billed for it anyway. I was told they would only refund if I returned the CD, which would involve taking my own time to go to the post office and spending my own postage to rectify your error.

  4. I think the information on Ancestry.com is great, however, I also believe their fees make it prohibitive to take advantage of the resources the way we (family historians, researchers, etc.) all would like to be able to do. It’s a shame they profit from OUR family information/histories. Any profit made should be used to greatly reduce or eliminate their fees, thereby allowing everyone to share the wealth of information.

    Of course, we allow this to happen by giving our information to them instead of sharing with each other. If we are doing the work and/or sharing our family information with Ancestry.com, maybe we should start charging them for allowing them to publish it.

    The fees charged by Ancestry.com do not guarantee the information we receive is accurate, so we still have work to do and other fees at other places to pay. Also, there is no guarantee that, after paying said fees, that we can even find useful information, or any information at all. You know “you get what you pay for”, but in this case, we definitely are not! Adding their fees to the lot is adding insult to injury.

    I know there are costs to Ancestry.com, and I don’t mind helping offset those costs with a membership fee, after all, that’s only fair. However, if there is enough money to run a marketing campaign (and it sounds like a substantial one), that should indicate a profit, which in turn, should mean membership fees could be lowered. Right?

    Unfortunately, I am not only disable, I am also on a fixed income, so having information easily and readily available is fantastic. But, the high cost of Ancestry.com is maddening because I can see there is information, but I can’t touch it.
    Aah well, such is life, and no one ever promised it would be fair [or cheap 🙂 ].

  5. I hate to see you advertising for more customers, when your system is apparently already over-loaded, i.e. during prime time evenings and weekends, it’s difficult, if not impossible, to retrieve database information. I don’t have this problem with other websites

  6. I believe that Ancestry.com is fair with its prices. I would not expect to get free information anywhere else in my genealogical searches. I am saving money by not having to drive someplace to get the information I have obtained from Ancestry.

  7. I believe that the information that I have received at Ancestry.com is worth the fees I pay. If I bought magazines, books, etc. to aid in my genealogical searches, they would cost me money. In many cases I would have to take trips to different places to get the info that I can get on
    Ancestry. In my lifetime I have found that there is “no free lunch.” Ancestry’s fees are within the boundaries of our capitalistic way of doing business in our Democracy.

  8. Please give me a phone number I can call to order.
    I have a subscription now but want to renew

  9. No Ancestry is NOT cheap! I squirmed at buying in at first too.

    However I read the free daily newsletter for an entire year (and learned a lot about genealogy) before I began searching successfully. If I had to actually go to a library and roll through microfilm I never would have started.

    All my family discoveries I have made in my pajamas (bed time is my only free time). There is very little available on Ancestry that is not available free elsewhere. After all, Ancestry does NOT own the census or any other offical government records.

    If you want to sit in front of a microfilm reader searching an unindexed list (census, WW1 draft cards etc.) you can get all those free at a federal depository/library.
    However, factor in gasoline ($3/gallon) meals out (sack lunch?), travel time (possibly motels?) work only during the library hours (I was kicked off the microfilm machine at my local library after only an hour yesterday) and even at several hundred dollars a year when using online access, you are still money ahead.

    The only way you really lose money is if you dont actually use the service. (Anybody pay membership to a gym they never actually go to?) Knowing I have paid for this service motivates me to actually search and that’s a good thing!

  10. ancestry is great even the cost but i have had ftm 16 for three months and as yet i cannot get the program to function on my computer.

  11. Ancestry.com membership fees are reasonable, BUT it is NOT reasonable to expect people on limited budgets to pay for one year at a time. They should make it so you sign up with a credit card under a contract for a year at a time, but bill monthly.

  12. It’s interesting reading all of the comments about the high price of ancestry… I have been paying my yearly subscription for over 10 years now and have never regretted it. I only had one complaint in all of these years and they fixed it immediately.
    Maybe people who are new to research can’t imagine what it used to be like. Before Ancestry, if I wanted to look at a census record I had to find a repository where the record was on microfilm (usually limited to National Archives – only a few in the entire country, or the Family History Library in Salt Lake City). You have to visit a national archives center in person (how much does that cost if you don’t live near one- travel, hotel, food, etc) or order a microfilm from the library (now it’s $5 per film and takes a few weeks to get in at a local family history center). That’s just US census records. What about other records- want a birth, marriage or death? If the library hasn’t microfilmed it, then you get to pay for each record- I’ve paid as little as $5 and as much as $25 for one record. Oh- and did I mention that there were no indexes then for US census records? Granted the Ancestry index has plenty of errors, but with some imagination you can still usually find people. Before Ancestry (and the LDS church indexing the 1880 census) you had to guess where they might be and look page by page unless that census year was “soundexed”. Talk about tedious and time consuming!
    I could go on and on. The convenience, the huge amount of records collected and available (and it’s growing all the time) make Ancestry quite inexpensive in my mind. I am very grateful for all they provide. I am happy to have the convenience of having so many records at my fingertips any time I have the chance to research- even in the middle of the night in my jammies. No need to travel and be at an archives or library during short specific hours.
    I also have a limited budget- but this is higher on my list than just about anything else (eating out, shopping, movies, etc)…
    I also feel like sharing my data with them helps to preserve it. I remember hearing about a woman researching her own family- she uploaded her data to Ancestry. A short time later she had a house fire and lost everything. She was heartbroked about losing all of her genealogy- until she remembered she’d uploaded it to Ancestry. She was able to download it to her new computer and pick up where she left off. It’s not only a great way to share, but a great way to preserve your hard work.
    So maybe we need a new perspective. Is Ancestry really expensive? Compared to what? What about convenience? Is your time worth anything to you? People who don’t want to pay the price they believe is too high for Ancestry don’t need to subscribe. They can continue to research the old fashioned way- one letter, one visit, one record at a time. As for me, I am happy to have things so much easier today because of the work of the good folks at Ancestry- paid for with my yearly contributions.

  13. Prices for a popular annual subscription were raised to $69.95 in 2001. If prices went up 5% per year for 8 years, we would now be at approximately $98 per year. The new rates seem to outpace the rate of inflation.

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