Paid Subscription Sites

Our 101st  blog post!  Thanks for reading.  Does having fifteen followers here mean only fifteen people read us?  Leave us a note -- even if it just says "Read it" or less. 

Do you have paid subscriptions?  Good information doesn't come free.  Even plain online storage (and our access to it) costs somebody something somewhere. 

But what about the monopolizing effect? 

Last October 21 I got this message from Footnote.com:

     "Several weeks ago Footnote.com (as part of iArchives) agreed to be acquired by Ancestry.com and that transaction has officially closed today. As we join forces with Ancestry.com there is a huge opportunity to leverage each other’s strengths and move even faster toward our goals. You may be curious about how this deal effects members of Footnote.com? The plan is to continue to run Footnote.com the way we have always run Footnote.com — continuing to do what we believe is best for our customers, our business and our brand.

Now that the deal is officially closed we are excited to leverage some of Ancestry.com’s resources and expertise to take Footnote.com to the next level. It has been exciting to see Footnote.com grow over the past 4 years. Footnote.com started with only 5 million historical documents and today we have nearly 70 million searchable documents, over 1 million members, nearly 100,000 Footnote Pages, and over half million annotations added. We couldn’t have done it without our members and the great team at Footnote.com and we are excited for Ancestry.com’s support in the next chapter."  -- Footnote.com, now a subsidiary of Ancestry.com

(Now it's me again, your blog editor.)  But what if you've already been paying for each separate subscription, Footnote and Ancestry, for several years? 

I let Footnote expire, until they offered me a much cheaper deal to renew -- $50 a year. 

As of yet, I still haven't seen anything of what Ancestry paid 27 million dollars for from Footnote.  Maybe they're records I don't use.  It's nice to be able to access census records at both places, though.