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Comment by jaysonelliot | Hacker News Reader

They seem to be competing with https://www.newspapers.com/, which has been providing access to historical newspapers for about 10 years now.

I did a few searches on OldNews.com to compare with Newspapers.com, and it seems that OldNews has a smaller database, with far fewer newspapers. It didn't contain results from a sampling of local newspapers that I tried, nor from major newspapers like the NY Times, Wall Street Journal, or Chicago Tribune.

At $99/year, OldNews is also slightly more expensive than the basic Newspapers.com subscription.

Their UX is also lacking, with poor filtering options that make it difficult to select a specific publication, city, or range of dates.

It's not clear to me how they hope to compete with the incumbent in the market.

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They're probably just banking on the fact that MyHeritage has a lot more customers than either one of those, who probably haven't heard of either one, and are already proven to shell out money to research their family history. Whatever you show them first, they'll use. Of course the smart customers like you are going to stick with the better alternative but I think you're in a small minority of elites.

Newspapers.com is an Ancestry.com property. I'm not sure who's the larger company in terms of user base, do you know their respective sizes?

They are both around 4 milion paying users (each)

I have accounts on both. In 2018, I would visit Ancestry 80% and MyH 20%. MyH was good for post-1940 records.

Now it's ~99% A & 1% MyH. I try MyH when I can't find something on Ancestry - generally w/o luck. Most of my MyH hits are profiles from FamilySearch (probably ones that I made).

Oh, I didn't know that. Two rivals doing the exact same thing. The move makes even more sense now.

In Australia at least, the state and national library sites offer free, searchable access to newspapers going back since the early 1800’s. Even obscure community papers are available. Is a similar thing not offered by the equivalent US institutions? What is the threshold of ‘worthiness’ for a publication to ge archived and served by Library of Congress?

The same is available here, but through local libraries, so not necessarily available to everyone, because most everything is at the whim of local government in the US.

> OldNews is also slightly more expensive than the basic Newspapers.com subscription.

newpapers.com is $150/yr or $20/mo for unlocked content - and $90/yr or $8/mo for partially unlocked content.

Or you can pay $360/yr for Ancestry and get newspapers.com for $150/yr for unlocked - $90/yr for partially unlocked.

Or you can pay $600/yr for Ancestry and get newspapers.com at no extra charge.

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