Biggles, I am looking forward to part two of your recent comment. The way I see it Ancestry prey on naive people who don't really know what they are buying. Most people, when I am looking at my matches, seem to think that they are going to be told every ancestor they ever had and where they were all born. That's why you see so many people that have themselves and just their parents in their tree. Their website, judging by the numerous comments of complaint here, is frequently in disrepair. The price for a test seems exorbitant, even though they are cheaper than a few years ago.
In balance, I'm thoroughly impressed with myHeritage. I first came into contact with them seven or eight years ago when they were doing a pro bono offer, helping people identify adoptions and mysteries in their life. They gave me and tens of thousands of other people, free tests. Their range of statistics is far superior to Ancestry, their support is friendly and courteous and prompt, which you certainly can't say about Ancestry.
A couple of years ago, when I became really enthusiastic, I did pay for an Ancestry test, and was very disappointed that there was no chromosome browser, and no detailed segment data. And now they have the cheek to actually start charging for a little bit more information. I certainly won't be renewing at the end of the month. I would even be very reluctant to pay for any further ancestry tests in light of my earlier comments. I think this is why they are doing this one month free offer. They are getting desperate.
Zaph
If I may be permitted to add a little. It is true that Ancestry has weak spots in its lack of a chromosome browser. I have posted several suggested ideas that they could offer beyond that, which would offer a lot more and save a lot of time. They should really be offering some of that for the £8 per month, including a chromosome browser.
I have some info on what's going on internally. Ancestry had a affiliate program. And they've basically decided to nuke its potential growth by reducing commissions to basically zero. Thus they are now taking in close to the full value that can be obtained and there is no longer financial incentive for affiliate to generate content. FindMyPast has also done this. Affiliates are an important part of any sector, as many blogs and reference sites rely on it and other ads to incentivise content generation. So you see a lot more MyHeritage ads now, as they are still offering good incentives.
I think this was done as a cash grab. Since the effects of COVID-related money printing and the Ukraine war, discretionary spending has been hit. Ancestry lost $200m in the last few years. It looks like they are looking to squeeze what cash cows they have for what they can.
The growth of DNA testing has slowed. You can see that most of your new matches come from kits gifted at Christmas. And so the new ProTools has been a very slow and low-value offering to extract a bit more money from the most loyal customers.
As a programmer I am a bit surprised how slow and thin their Pro offerings are for DNA. I have developed some tools to download a kit's match list, the attached trees and shared matches. This allows me to very quickly identify clusters of matches, any shared DNA, and shared ancestry in trees, shared surnames and shared locations. The through lines and common matches feature is good. But there is nothing to help you find the literal hundreds of clusters of matches that might be from unknown common ancestors. It would take a few months to develop a very robust interface to auto-cluster all matches, look for potential common links automatically and provide a facility to manage your work with each cluster. But Ancestry is so slow to do anything.
I have or have contact with people from FindMyPast, Ancestry, MyHeritage and FamilySearch. There isn't a question that Ancstry have always been the worst most faceless people to deal with. I did have a good contact with FindMyPast, but after they left they took the faceless Ancestry approach. Always very good dealing with MyHritage.
But in terms of Anglosphere ancestry, Ancestry has far many more tests than MyHeritage. About 97% of the DNA matches I've found are on Ancestry. And a good part of that is because something like 70-80% of the matches on MyHeritage are false positives. So looking at many MyHeritage matches is a wild goose chase, where there is no definitive sign that it is such a chase.. That's where much of the value comes in. They also have a vast repository of trees. When I am extending small MyHeritage match trees, I look up dead-end ancestors on Ancestry.
