Comment by bruceb
Comment by bruceb 3 days ago
Closest competitor does a lot of heavy lifting in this situation. Ancestry is the overwhelming leader in the find long lost relative space/your "roots" space. Look at https://www.ancestry.com/ and https://www.23andme.com/ 23andme has basically given up on this part of the business.
Their pitch is health. But that pitch is murky with no good hook to keep you hooked for a monthly subscription. So after they get the initial $99 from the customer, most of the value customer is going to get is already served up in the first report. Maybe their big database will turn into making cancer drugs but maybe it wont.
> 23andme has basically given up on this part of the business.
The routine emails I get about them allegedly finding new DNA relatives suggest otherwise. The DNA relatives feature is also still pretty prominent in their UI (at least on desktop browsers; haven't looked at the app yet).
That said, it certainly doesn't offer much beyond "these are your relatives; send 'em some messages or something lol". Ancestry probably has a lot more features on that front, which is unsurprising since that's the sort of thing Ancestry was doing long before they even offered DNA sequencing kits like 23andMe does. I don't know if I'd characterize that as 23andMe "giving up", though; more that it's good enough for a product that never intended to enter the genealogy software market in the first place.