Who is in Control of Your Obituaries? Legacy.com Sold Two Weeks Ago
I am not sure how we missed this, but we did and I apologize. On April 10th Legacy.com Inc was sold to Great Hill Partners in a deal reportedly valued between $50 million and $100 million. Legacy.com claims to cover 75% of all deaths in the U.S. through partnerships with nearly 800 newspapers. I have never really been a fan of Legacy.com and frankly don’t see where they provided any value to the funeral industry or funeral homes they partnered with. Oh, and that partnership Batesville formed with them in 2009, I really never saw the value in that.
I could be catastrophically off base by saying they (Legacy) provided “zero” value to the funeral profession, but I really struggle to see the plus side to the service they offered.
From my understanding it goes something like this; funeral home/director spends multiple hours crafting an obituary with family – family pays $400 to have obituary published in newspaper – Legacy.com grabs the obituary from the newspaper or serves the obituary to the newspaper depending on arrangement with funeral home – obituary now lives on Legacy.com where they are cashing in on visits to the obituary by displaying distasteful belly fat ads (among other crap) – someone in local community searches Google for the obituary – instead of the local community member visiting the funeral home website to read the obituary, they end up at Legacy.com because Legacy.com has 5 links that appear for the obituary ahead of the funeral home website in Google search results.
Am I wrong? Funeral homes have been sending their website traffic to Legacy.com for years and it makes no sense to me why funeral homes would want to do that. Web traffic for an obituary of a deceased that your funeral home is serving should come to your funeral home’s website.
One more thing before I am stop ranting like a lunatic; the distasteful belly fat ads that display next to obituaries hosted on Legacy.com are only going to get worse. Why, because the new owners of Legacy.com, Great Hill Partners, are also heavily invested in an online ad services business.
If you disagree or agree please share in the comments below.
Here is a link announcing the Great Hill Partners’ purchase of Legacy.com:
