Brightsolid shifts profit focus to Freeview – and the rest is history

THEY say all firms can improve their business by learning lessons from the past, but Brightsolid chief executive Chris van der Kuyl has taken that adage one step further and is turning history into profit.

As one of the early dot.com pioneers, the Dundonian knows the power the internet has to drive sales, with customers flocking to his online family-history website, Findmypast.co.uk.

But now van der Kuyl is ready to harness the influence of a slightly-older medium by launching his own TV show.

“We see such a spike in business on our websites following programmes like the BBC’s Who Do You Think You Are? that we’ve decided to make our own show,” he explains.

Find My Past, a ten-part series made up of one-hour episodes, will begin airing this month on Yesterday, one of the UKTV channels available on Freeview.

The show, which will be presented by BBC sports presenter and 2009 Strictly Come Dancing winner Chris Hollins, takes advantage of the changes to the UK’s product-placement laws, which allow firms to pay for their services to be advertised within a programme.

A Nescafe coffee machine being used on ITV’s This Morning show is the most high-profile placement so far, although Superior Interiors – a home improvements programme presented by Kelly Hoppen, actress Sienna Miller’s stepmother – began showing on Channel 5 last week, funded by cooker maker Siemens.

Van der Kuyl wouldn’t be drawn on how much money Brightsolid – which is owned by Beano-publisher DC Thomson – has pumped into the programme, but he did say the series was the most-expensive original show produced by Yesterday.

While BBC1’s Who Do You Think You Are? focuses on the family history of celebrities – including comedian Alan Carr, Olympian Sebastian Coe and actress Emilia Fox in the current series – Find My Past will instead follow the lives of “ordinary people” who were involved in famous events such as Dunkirk, the Mutiny on the Bounty and the Tay Bridge disaster.

Researchers have found descendants who don’t yet know they are related to people who were involved. Launching the show is the latest step in van der Kuyl’s expansion plans for Brightsolid, which last year bought the Friends Reunited website from ITV for £25 million following an inquiry from the Competition Commission.

“We’ve spent time integrating Friends Reunited into the business and that’s gone very well,” says van der Kuyl. “Next year we’ll be launching some exciting new products using the brand.”

Last year Brightsolid was awarded a three-year extension to its contract to run family history website ScotlandsPeople.gov.uk on behalf of the General Register Office for Scotland, building on its work with the National Archives.

Van der Kuyl now wants to take the company’s successful formula developed in the UK and roll it out overseas.

He has already opened offices in Australia and Ireland and is now aiming to crack America.

“The United States is a huge market,” he says. “We want to focus on English language markets that have historic links to the UK before venturing into other parts of the world.”

Entering America will put Findmypast.co.uk head-to-head against US-based Ancestry.com, its biggest rival. But van der Kuyl says: “I don’t see it as trying to beat Ancestry. We offer complementary products so I want us to grow the whole market together.”