THE FUTURE OF THE PAST
At the helm of Ancestry.com, Tim Sullivan '85 is bringing a dusty pastime into the digital mainstream
Provo, Utah — A few years ago— during a long, late-night drive from a concert in Asheville — a friend of mine launched into an over-caffeinated lament about her romantic troubles.
With all the sleep-deprived giddiness that marks road-trip rambling, she bewailed the pitfalls of post-collegiate dating.
“What am I supposed to do?” she demanded, theatrically. “Take a pottery class? Walk up to strangers in the grocery store and ask for phone numbers?”
Much giggling among her fellow passengers.
“You know what? Forget it,” she said, warming to her subject. “No more bar-hopping, no more awkwardly
hitting on friends-of-friends . . .”
—dramatic pause—
“I’m going make a Match profile!”
The giggling turned to guffawing as she whipped out a cell phone and began reciting the personal profile questions on Match.com, the country’s largest online dating site.
“Hmm . . . ‘Sports & Exercise?’” mused my droll travel companion. “I think I’ll write, ‘Coming soon!’”
Given the belly laughs in the backseat, it seemed that mockery of online dating might propel us all the way home.
But a funny thing happened somewhere on the quiet stretch of highway between Statesville and Winston-Salem.
Sarcasm turned to sincerity, and by the time we all shuffled groggily out of the car in Chapel Hill, my friend was clutching an earnest online dating profile. Evolving from scornful to hopeful without so much as a bathroom break, she was now a genuine (and paying) Match.com customer.
“It’s not that weird, right?” she asked sheepishly, seeking social absolution.
And after giving it some thought, we all had to admit: no, not really that weird.
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For the grace of social acceptance, she can thank Tim Sullivan ’85, who was CEO of Match.com from 2001 to 2005. At the time he arrived, Match had fewer than 200,000 subscribers, and the whole idea of online dating was, in Sullivan’s words, “very much on the edge of acceptability.”
Back then, commercials for Internet dating tended to look like ads for cheap lingerie (or worse), and it was far from clear that a site like Match could win legitimacy.
“I went to Dallas to go run this online dating company, and people would look at me like I had two heads,” Sullivan recounted. “We needed to take this service—that really was a fantastic, life-changing service for many, many people — and really destigmatize it.”
To bring the country’s dating culture in line with his company’s product, Sullivan oversaw an intensive public relations campaign. With a barrage of television ads and well-pitched lifestyle articles in newspapers across the country, Match helped drag online dating squarely into the center of popular culture.
You can see the shift in Match’s latest round of ads, which look like previews for a G-rated sitcom. “You could meet that one great person!” enthuses an emphatically normal-looking woman in a recent ad, striding into an upscale restaurant to meet her date. “One in five relationships now begin on an online dating site,” intones a soothing voiceover. “The world has changed.”
And that change has created a huge pool of customers willing to scout for soulmates online—and shell out a monthly fee for the privilege.
By the time Sullivan left in 2005, Match was rocketing past the million-subscriber mark (on its way to more than 1.8 million today), helping transform the phrase, “We met online” from a reluctant confession to a mainstream storyline.
“Part of that was building a great product experience,” Sullivan says today. “But part of it was also making sure the brand and the idea of online dating was in the right environment.”
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Now, more than five years into his tenure as CEO of a different online service, Sullivan finds himself once again creating a cultural demand where none existed.
There are some online concepts that seem obviously matched with their core demographics. It makes perfect sense that Facebook would explode into the culture through college students or that e-mail would originate among computer engineers.
But picture the person in your family most likely to keep a meticulous scrapbook or a well-organized drawer of faded pictures. Imagine the keeper of family lore, the cousin or aunt or grandparent who remembers all the stories about your great-great-grandfather and knows who might’ve served in which World War.
Does the phrase “tech savvy” apply to this person? “When I came here, family history — genealogy —was just sort of this dusty, musty, niche idea,” Sullivan said, sitting in his office at the Provo, Utah, headquarters of Ancestry.com.
He looked every inch the technology CEO, sporting jeans and a dark sweater over a collared shirt. A mug of red tea rested on the small conference table in front of him.
“I was unsure about the long-term growth prospects for the Ancestry service.”
His skepticism was easy to understand.
The website Ancestry.com — which enables users to conduct in-depth genealogical research and build far-reaching family trees— was first launched in 1996 as one element of a broader genealogy company. By the time Sullivan arrived in Provo nine years later, the site’s appeal was still limited mostly to history buffs and the relatively few dusty, musty genealogists willing to venture online.
In a case of corporate bet-hedging, Ancestry’s parent company, then called MyFamily.com, had a family tree of its own, with branches in book publishing, magazine distribution, proprietary software sales, online directory services, and a family-themed social networking site.
“In my first couple of years here, I thought there were going to be more opportunities with some of these other brands, these non-Ancestry businesses,” Sullivan said.
Social networking for extended families seemed especially promising, and the company invested heavily in the MyFamily.com site.
In a sense, Sullivan’s instinct was right; millions of extended families now keep tabs on one another via social networking. They just don’t do it on MyFamily.com.
“Truthfully, it’s completely irrelevant to us right now,” Sullivan said of MyFamily.com. “I think Facebook has provided all the family social networking one needs, and we don’t really have too much focus on any of those businesses outside the core Ancestry idea.”
The book publishing and the magazine were chucked, and the desktop software became a kind of companion to the online service. Refocusing the company away from its more fledgling products, Sullivan said, was painful but critical.
By 2009, with the Ancestry.com site accounting for about 95 percent of the company’s business, the corporation’s name was changed to Ancestry.com.
“We’re more focused on the core than we’ve ever been,” Sullivan says now.
And that core idea turned out to have broader appeal than anyone might’ve guessed.
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If you head away from Sullivan’s tidy office at Ancestry headquarters, past rows of denim-clad engineers and through a foyer filled with ping-pong tables, you’ll eventually find one of the most technologically bizarre rooms in corporate America.
Rows of technicians—all of whom looked about nineteen years old, expressionless and permanently attached to iPod earbuds—sit in front of state-of-theart computers hooked up to strikingly antiquarian equipment.
Flat-panel monitors are connected to slide projectors. Technicians flip the pages on century-old books as digital cameras catalog detailed photos. Portable hard drives are stacked like Legos.
The technological hodgepodge is designed to turn very old, very analog information into a vast digital archive. Anyone who has ever converted an eight-track tape into a CD will have the vaguest idea of what it’s like to turn the 1880 U.S. Census — on microfilm —into a fully indexed online database.
“That census is actually one of the earliest databases we put online,” said Sally Trahan, supervising a row of whirring microfilm viewers. “Now we’re going back and fixing some of the rougher images from the original scan.”
In another corner of the room, duct-taped boxes were piling up. “We’re moving six pallets today,” chirped a Polo-shirted techie as he carried a stack of old annuals (“yearbooks” to our younger readers) to be scanned.
On any given day, at sites scattered across the world, Ancestry and its contractors are scanning and indexing hundreds of thousands of photos, government documents, immigration papers, draft cards, land titles, criminal records — anything and everything that might fill a gap or add an interesting detail in someone’s family tree.
More than anything else, it is these documents—hard evidence of the multigenerational march that brought each of us into being — that draw users to Ancestry.
“Our whole goal is to deliver that first document to somebody as quickly as possible,” Sullivan said. “I think for a lot of people, seeing a handwritten document — seeing a document that has the name of a grandparent and the street where that grandparent was born, and some little tidbits of fact, like whether they owned their house or they rented it, or they had a radio in their home or they didn’t — is really one of those emotional moments that kind of hooks people in.”
It’s the kind of emotional moment that was once possible only through weary, expensive detective work.
Just fifteen years ago, accessing an 1880 U.S. Census record — which will tell you, among other things, what your great-great grandfather did for a living, whether he was literate, and whether he was “deaf & dumb,” “idiotic,” or “insane,” to the best reckoning of the census-taker — would have required a trip to the National Archives in Washington, D.C.
Thanks to Ancestry’s close partnership with the National Archives, you can now view the original document and make it part of an ever-expanding tree of family records. (The company has a large scanning facility near the Archives in Silver Spring, Maryland, so government documents can be hand-delivered and monitored by Archives personnel.)
Sullivan, in explaining Ancestry’s continuing search for untapped records, says the goal is to create “an unending investigation, a constant stream and flow of new content coming onto the site.”
Last September, for example, Ancestry began adding a huge cache of immigrants’ oral histories stored at the Ellis Island Immigration Museum. If you log back in to check on your great-great grandfather, you might find that his story has grown beyond that 1880 census form to include a detailed account of his arrival in the United States.
“Discovery is always energizing, and when you’re discovering things about your own family, it’s a very interesting mix of emotional hot buttons,” Sullivan said.
The quest to add richer content has led Ancestry’s researchers to some odd places. The company recently spent months negotiating with the Catholic archdiocese in Germany for access to detailed property records. The church ultimately turned them down — on orders from Rome — but Sullivan said most agencies have been happy for the help.
“Do national taxpayers really want to spend the billions or trillions of dollars it will take to digitize these old, historical, analog records? It’ll never happen,” Sullivan said. “There’s no budget, really, of any scale to do that.”
So Ancestry — and its competitors — are chipping away at the backlog, offering the equipment and the manpower to do labor-intensive digitizing in exchange for the right to use the material. Ancestry commits between $10 and $15 million annually to find and digitize new archives.
“It is, in some senses, a radical kind of public-private partnership,” Sullivan said.
In the long run, however, Sullivan knows that the most dynamic content available isn’t in government archives or massive historical databases. It is sitting in attics and basements, curated by the kinds of family historians and amateur genealogists who predate both Ancestry and the Internet.
Drawing those people onto the site — and coaxing them to upload faded black-and-white photos or a yellowing folder of handwritten letters — is the company’s biggest strategic challenge.
“I think the question going forward is how content over time will want to become more free on the Web,” Sullivan says. As governments, museums, and libraries make it easier to access records for free, the value of Ancestry’s paid service could wane.
“The truly proprietary part of the value proposition very much is—and I think it will continue to grow—is the access to the user content.”
The goal, in other words, is to create a kind of genealogically focused Facebook (what Sullivan terms a “premium social network”) where users can piggyback off the research and contributions of other Ancestry subscribers.
As with any kind of network, value comes through critical mass. And to get there, Sullivan is borrowing a page from his Match.com playbook.
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Prominent coverage in the New York Times is the kind of publicity you literally cannot buy. But as with Match.com, which became a mainstay of style section coverage during the past decade, Ancestry has shown a knack for finding the limelight.
In 2007, when the company wanted to highlight its database of African-American records, it partnered with the New York Daily News to explore the family history of the Reverend Al Sharpton.
Ancestry struck PR gold when its research uncovered a slave contract involving one of the Reverend Sharpton’s ancestors and the forebears of longtime South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond. The finding was touted in newspapers across the country, including the Times.
At a news conference, Sharpton called the discovery the most shocking event of his life. “I couldn’t describe the emotions that I've had over the last two or three days thinking about this,” he said at the time. “Everything from anger and outrage to reflection, and to some pride and glory.”
It is the kind of high-profile research that Ancestry has used time and again to draw attention to its service, and it is devilishly effective.
In 2008, the company traced the descendants of George Washington and found that an 82-year-old retired manufacturing manager in San Antonio, Texas, would be our current king if Washington had been crowned a monarch instead of elected a president. Newsweek covered the story under the inevitable headline, “The Man Who Would Be King.”
“Some of these have been kind of silly and frivolous and fun,” Sullivan said. (The supposed connection between Barack Obama and Brad Pitt comes to mind.) “But some have been just profound in their resonance.”
And all of them have helped push the idea of online genealogy into the mainstream, making Ancestry.com sound more like a research institute than a commercial website.
The company’s television ads focus heavily on the idea of unexpected discoveries. In a recent ad, a middle-aged woman offers up the latest tagline. “You really don’t have to know what you’re looking for,” she says reassuringly. “You just have to start looking.”
And people have started looking, propelling the site to a more sustainable growth model. Gone are the days when Ancestry goosed its subscriber numbers with sketchy referrals through America Online or other dubious partnerships, practices that were common before Sullivan’s arrival.
“There was — justifiably, I think — a very negative sense about the strong-armed marketing tactics,” he said. “I was committed from day one to having a business we could advertise on television. If you can’t advertise on television . . . you don’t have a business that can be much more than a niche.”
The kind of patient, mainstream branding effort the company has conducted in recent years appears to be paying off. Sullivan guided Ancestry to a successful public offering in 2009, with shares offered at $13.50. As of this writing, ACOM was trading at $37.47. Ancestry’s third-quarter earnings report for 2010 pointed to about 1.4 million paying subscribers, up substantially from just over a million a year earlier.
But some analysts continue to voice concern about the staying power of a $17-per-month, subscription-based hobby. The site’s churn— the rate at which existing subscribers depart — runs about four percent a month, raising concerns about how long the company can maintain that impressive growth.
Sullivan remains adamant that an even broader market is within reach. “This isn’t 500 million users like Facebook, but it doesn’t need to be because it’s a subscription model,” he said. “I think we can be significantly larger than we are today.”
The company is investing heavily to improve its user experience and expand its marketing reach. The company has moved those operations to San Francisco, establishing an outpost near Silicon Valley to attract top consumer marketing talent.
This is the kind of strategizing that gets Sullivan visibly excited. The company recently added to its board Mike Schroepfer, Facebook’s vice president of engineering, and Sullivan launched into a rhapsodic review of Facebook’s latest Palo Alto headquarters.
“It was just an inspiration!” he said. “It was wide open, concrete floors, desktops; it was the kind of thing I’ve said for years we should go for.”
The Facebook comparison, to say nothing of the entire “premium social network” business model, is a touch ironic for Sullivan. He is, by all accounts, protective of his privacy. He’s not given to much wandering around the office; employees have occasionally mistaken the CEO for a new hire. And Sullivan’s own Facebook account is
accessible only to his family.
“At one point I was on Facebook as ‘Tim Sullivan,’ and I was just a little bit overwhelmed by the network of connections,” he said, sounding almost apologetic. “So now I’m only on there as an anonymous user that really only my family knows about.”
When it comes to the market for family history, though, Sullivan is betting on openness.
“Truthfully, I don’t think, five years ago, that I believed what I believe now, which is that we can make it almost universal,” he said of Ancestry’s appeal. “This is one of those categories being created that didn’t exist, and we’re not done creating it.”
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Sidebar: National Quirks
Ancestry.com has a large presence in the United States, Britain, Canada, and Australia, with plans to expand further into Europe and beyond. That has given the company’s researchers the opportunity to explore some interesting cultural differences.
In the United States, for example, the most emotionally powerful discovery for many users is the name of the ship that first brought their ancestors to America. Ancestry has immigration records for everyone who arrived in the United States by ship between 1820 and 1960.
"The seminal question here is, ‘What kind of mutt am I, and where did I come from?’” Sullivan said.
In entering the Australian market, Ancestry’s team was initially skittish about opening up a trove of prison records, wary that a country settled in part by British convicts might be offended.
“Then we finally hired an Australian,” Sullivan said. “And she told us, ‘No way! We love that stuff!’”
English families, it turns out, have a keen interest in who lived at their address centuries ago. “It’s an old country,” Sullivan quipped. “Here, no one lived at my address 400 years ago.”
Still, Sullivan emphasizes, “the big surprise is that there aren’t that many differences.”
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Sidebar: Why Provo?
Though the company’s official history doesn’t mention it, some of Ancestry’s roots extend back to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, based in nearby Orem, Utah.
Ancestry has no affiliation with the Mormon Church, but a branch of the company’s complex corporate history traces to a venture called Infobases, which sold floppy disks and CDROMs (remember those?) of Mormon genealogy databases. Family history is a major component of Mormonism, and the LDS Church maintains one of the largest genealogical libraries in the world in Salt Lake City.
Sullivan is quick to note that Ancestry remains on good terms with the Mormon community—Brigham Young University is about three miles from Ancestry’s headquarters—but the LDS Church has also become one of the larger
competitors in the genealogy market.
FamilySearch.org, the church’s online genealogy service, bills itself as the largest family history organization in the world. “Our commitment to helping people connect with their ancestors is rooted in our beliefs,” according the
group’s website. “We believe that families are meant to be central to our lives and that family relationships are intended to continue beyond this life.”
Shying away from calling the Mormons’ online database—which is free—a competitor, Sullivan refers to the church as
a “very important competitive dynamic.”
“They have a very longterm goal, which is very similar to ours, which is getting millions and millions of people interested in family history,” Sullivan continued. “They’re not looking at what we do as a zero-sum world.” ◆
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Originally published in The Scholar, the alumni magazine of the Morehead-Cain Foundation at UNC Chapel Hill.
See full issue here (pdf).