Bank of eFinance

For the last three years, Facebook has been synonymous with social networking. Before them, it was MySpace, and before them it was Friendster. The truth is that long before Facebook became the 500 million user elephant in the room, another social network has quietly been expanding on the internet to 3x’s Facebook’s size… and it might be time for someone to take them out from behind the curtain.

Unleash the Old (and dead) People

Ancestry.com is not usually mentioned when people discuss sharing photos and making connections online with long lost friends, but in reality, they dwarf the competition with 1.5 billion profiles online.

In it’s current form, don’t expect Ancestry to make any disruptive market moves by dropping their fee based business model in favor of ad supported. As a public company reliant on these fees, long-term strategic thinking doesn’t always fit well with next quarters earnings report. For the same reason, you won’t read about Ancestry.com on Techcrunch or any of the other Silicon Valley blogs; the membership fees they rely on restricts them to a much older audience.

Monetize My Network

At close to a $700mm market cap, only a company with significant financial and technical resources could make this work. But there are a couple I can think of.

Due to questionable decisions by Facebook’s leadership, some ambitious young upstarts are attempting to seize market share by luring away disgruntled Facebook users. The iron is now hot, but it will be interesting to see how this space evolves over the next few years.

Does Facebook have anything to be worried about? Could Ancestry.com ever make a serious run at Facebook’s user base? Would love to hear what you think in the comments below!