What genealogy sites have you found that use bait and switch?

[Ted Pack]

What genealogy sites have you run across that are “bait and switch”, besides ancestry.com?

Details:

There are three marketing models for commercial web sites. The first is free, with advertising. Google and Facebook are both truly free, both supported by advertising, and both successful.

The second is subscription. I get 2 – 3 offers a week that sneak through the spam filter offering me pornography for $14.95 a month, so those spring to mind.

The third is “bait and switch”. Classmates.com was the first I found, 10 years ago. They advertised “We have 10,000,000 entries. One might be your long-lost best friend. Free registration.” I dutifully registered, with my name, e-mail address, state, city, school and graduation year. They showed me the names of 40 – 50 old classmates, then told me I couldn’t write to any unless I subscribed. Now they could say “We have 10,000,001 entries …”. Registration was free, all right; it was just useless. Mylife is about the same; free registration, but you can’t write to anyone unless you subscribe. Ancestry gives you some data for free – their query boards are full of nuggets, for instance – so they are not as bad, although much of what they give you for free is a powerful lure to at least try a 14-day trial.

From the questions we see here constantly, with “FREE” in all caps and repeated several times, I suspect there are genealogy sites that let you register for free, then spring the subscription on you, after you have found someone you are interested in. I also suspect the newcomers to our sport have tried those first, with increasing frustration.

NewspaperArchive.com was “bait and switch”, as I recall. Have you run across any others? I’m old and cynical enough I don’t believe most advertising. I spend 90% of my “hunting” time with my ancestry subscription, find-a-grave, the Mormons, and US Gen Web. As a result, I haven’t tried a lot of other sites.