why wouldn't people sign up, look at their information, then cancel their subscription?
how do you know if they have anything relevent for you prior to you signing up?
seems like the same thing with Angie's list, living in flyover country, how do I know if there are any reviews worth paying attention to prior to signing up?
Any of your friends or relatives can (by invitation) also view the history of your family that you have generated, for free. They can also receive emails when you update, with links to the new information. If you are really investigating your family, you will have updates every few weeks to months (at least my relative does).
Discussing family is a very popular topic for many people. Extensive family histories might not work for many Americans, who often can only trace their history back a few generations. Many in Europe however can easily trace back to the 1600's or 1700's, when Church records started being kept. This of course varies by country, Ireland, for example has few records earlier than 1800.
> A bit like facebook for the dead :-/
Start with whatever paper or digital records are available for each cemetery, then scan each area of the cemetery, with multi-spectral cameras mounted on gyro-stabilized (like a Segway) mobile platform.
Index by matching cemetery records to gravesite locations. Try to do OCR / ICR in real time to cross-check / ground-truth the imaging process. Publish images similar to Street View that allow pan/tilt/zoom and 'try to OCR'.
Include searches that can combinate text, OCR, and Soundex sets of names, and search for for 'anyone else with similar names nearby'.
So, if you are into that kind of thing, it suddenly becomes interesting to know that you are related to this or that famous or semi-famous person. Such connections are increasingly likely (and vicariously ego-boosting) the more people join and the more research they individually put into documenting their family history.
However, I do warn my relative, who has spent much effort on this endeavor of hers, and shared it with Ancestry.com, while paying for the privilege to do so, that she should keep all the things she finds through Ancestry on paper and in other formats for herself, and not to rely on Ancestry to maintain that information for the time spans she is used to dealing with. Fortunately, as someone who gets frustrated when a particular lead into the life of some obscure distant family member turns cold because of missing documents, this isn't too hard.
http://www.findagrave.com/ "Search 88 million grave records"
Ancestry adds new data bases every day. All sorts of documents are triple-entered by hordes of cheap offshore labour. You never know when new stuff will include your ancestors: ship's manifests, regimental rolls, cemetery inventories, wills & probates from all corners of the World, etc.