Geni and the joys of digital economics
I picked up this link from O’Reilly Radar and it’s impressed me. Geni is a site where families can collaborate to create their family trees. The usability of the site itself is terrific (it’s all built in Flash) and it took almost no time to create the first few sections of the tree. It’s really easy to put relatives’ email addresses in, and collaboration is almost unstoppable, which is surprising me. The least digitally literate members of my family are participating, and I only set it up 24 hours ago.
I did read on their blog that they’ve raised $10m in funding recently, and I’m really intrigued as to what they plan to do to develop the idea commercially. I expect it will be ad-backed, but they’re not collecting marketing consent on the sign-ups, so it can’t be email related.
What I think is that they’ve designed something very infectious, something that only works if it’s done by a community, and that will lead to a lot of registrations and a lot of traffic. In the short term, that can lead to great advertising revenue if they can monetise it, but whether they can sustain traffic depends on what they do next to keep people coming back.