Brightsolid nets further three years on genealogy website

The contract will be seen as another key milestone in the development of brightsolid's position in the growing genealogy sector.

The site, with almost one million registered users and growing currently by more than 10,000 per month, is run in partnership with the General Register Office for Scotland (GROS).

Brightsolid is among the major online publishers specialising in family history and genealogy sites. It has operated the ScotlandsPeople.gov.uk site since 2002 and also owns the genealogy site findmypast.com. Last month brightsolid completed the acquisition of Friends Reunited, including Genes Reunited, from ITV.

"This new contract to manage ScotlandsPeople.gov.uk in partnership with GROS is a significant one for brightsolid," said brightsolid chief executive Chris van der Kuyl.

"ScotlandsPeople is a world-leading website that has built a real community of users worldwide, with that number rapidly approaching one million people."

The site contains more than 50 million records dating back to when statutory records of births, deaths and marriages began in Scotland in 1855. It also includes parish records, dating back as far as 1533, as well as other data including wills and testaments.

Paul Parr, deputy registrar general of the General Register Office of Scotland, said: "We are very proud of ScotlandsPeople.gov.uk. It is one of the leading sites of its kind worldwide."

The deal coincides with plans by van der Kuyl to develop the Friends Reunited site ten years since its launch by husband and wife team Steve and Julie Pankhurst. The firm ushered in a mania in the UK for hooking up with old school friends. In a bid to dominate new media, ITV paid 175m for it.

But the broadcaster was criticised for failing to innovate and introduce "sticky" applications and for continuing to charge for use while other social networking sites were free. In its heydey it had 24m registered users but traffic has dwindled to about 2m users a month.

Van der Kuyl admits it is still early in the firm's planned renaissance. Brightsolid has been running the business for only five months following a Competition Commission inquiry over the sale.

He says the firm still has 13m to 15m active users against Facebook's estimated 19m UK users. Friends became part of a stable of businesses run by brightsolid which will add to options available to users.

Genes Reunited, launched in 2003, is seen as a good fit with Brightsolid's other genealogy businesses: 1911 Census, Findmypast and Scotlandspeople. He also sees revenue opportunities springing up from its deal with the British Library to digitise 40m pages from its collection of historic newspapers.

A video games industry veteran, van der Kuyl also plans to give users access to games. Initially these will also come from within the DC Thomson stable of businesses, such as crossword and Sudoku maker, Puzzler Media, which the publisher acquired in 2005.