AncestryDNA and 23andMe periodically announce the sizes of their autosomal databases. AncestryDNA reached 3 million in January, and 23andMe just announced that they had more than 2 million individuals tested. Family Tree DNA and MyHeritage have yet to release their numbers publicly. By crowdsourcing information from people who have tested at more than one company, we can hopefully get realistic gauges of the relative sizes of the databases and, for 23andMe, how many are participating in relative matching.
If you have tested at more than one company and would like to contribute, please fill in the survey. At the moment, I am not collecting data from people who have only tested at one site.
Thank you in advance for your contributions!
The survey is here.
(UPDATE: The survey is now closed.)
I’m sure we want FTDNA company to succeed. Many more testers will be all the more helpful for us. By publicizing an estimate of FTDNA users, if these numbers look low in the eyes of potential testers then there might be a tendency for these persons to go elsewhere!
I think potential testers should have as much information at their disposal as possible when they make decisions about where and how to spend their money.
I agree that people might go elsewhere based on numbers alone. However, FTDNA also doesn’t advertise much at all unlike Ancestry who advertises ethnicity reports and bow easy it it is to cluck and add to you tree. Those ads result in a lot of confused and disappointed people and people with wrong trees. FTDNA doesn’t advertise that they have the largest database of non-US testers which they should because it is a big benefit to many to have those results. Personally, my FTDNA match number is WAY higher than my match number at 23and Me and is also growing faster that at 23and Me (I am adopted and have tested at all 3 companies).
You may already be aware of this, but you ARE getting new matches. Smaller matches will scroll off as larger new matches are added. The larger matches will obviously be more valuable to you as an adoptee, but if you want to keep track of the smaller ones, you can download your aggregate data periodically.
They shouldn’t scroll off if I’ve sent a sharing invitation, right?