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23andMe lays off 100 people as DNA test sales decline

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Re: 23andMe lays off 100 people as DNA test sales decline

#81

Post by mc32 »

jsgo wrote: post #79

> Wojcicki has theories Think the obvious one is that the results are shared and whether someone is a criminal or not (or will be one in the future), people are not particularly comfortable with sharing to parties they didn't initially trust it to for the purposes they trusted it for. Anecdotally, I bought a 23andme kit (just the genealogy one) but never submitted it because the labeling was to send it to the lab in…

Exactly. Many people naively thought that it was going to be positive. Build your family tree, get better ancestry information.

Even finding family relations can be fraught with issues like illegitimate children, sperm donors who thought they’d remain anonymous, secret affairs now outed and then there is the other health data aspect...

Re: 23andMe lays off 100 people as DNA test sales decline

#82

Post by bobthepanda »

jsgo wrote: post #79

> Wojcicki has theories Think the obvious one is that the results are shared and whether someone is a criminal or not (or will be one in the future), people are not particularly comfortable with sharing to parties they didn't initially trust it to for the purposes they trusted it for. Anecdotally, I bought a 23andme kit (just the genealogy one) but never submitted it because the labeling was to send it to the lab in…

Honestly, I would also say that a partial reason why these would've dropped is that everyone who can do it has done it.

You only need these kinds of results once because your DNA doesn't change. I knew people who were giving or had gotten these as gifts, but those are one-off purchases. And if you've heard of people doing it then you'll do it too but that's also a one-off.

I don't think I'd personally benefit because my family came to the US relatively recently from a country that has very few records going back very far, that haven't been destroyed. So what would be the point for me?

Re: 23andMe lays off 100 people as DNA test sales decline

#83

Post by fiftyfifty »

ilamont wrote: post #55
ThrowawayH4MCb wrote: post #47

Current, unaffected employee here. Throwaway for obvious reasons. A big chunk of the layoff is the new lab that we built in Phoenix. That only made economic sense in the scenario where we were selling far more kits than we succeeded in selling. The rest of the layoffs have a similar root cause: a massive overestimate of how much we were going to sell. I'd blame the shortfall on some combination of growing privacy con…

Ancestry.com has also stepped up its marketing game. Used to be a follower with DNA, now a leader, and discounting heavily. And, unlike 23andMe which got rid of family tree tools used by genealogists, Ancestry still has a very strong suite of trees and traditional genealogy tools. Some people really want to have both genetic and traditional genealogy accounts under the same provider, and are either unaware or don't r…

One thing I would add is the data for places outside of Europe looks pretty weak for both Ancestry.com and 23AndMe, at least it was the last time I looked. If you are from European descent they can practically tell you what village your ancestors are from (how accurate that is I don't know) but if you are Asian about the best you get is yep, you're Asian! I married into an Asian family and the reports I've seen from Asian family members are pretty disappointing compared to what I've seen from my family members (white, European descent). I imagine it's similar for some other non-white races too, that's a big demographic that's being missed.

Re: 23andMe lays off 100 people as DNA test sales decline

#84

Post by cnekj383 »

dragonwriter wrote: post #3

> Wojcicki has theories, but she doesn’t have clear proof for why consumers are shying away from getting tests Because the ones that want them have gotten them and there's no reason to ever buy the product again once you've done it once. I mean, smartphones are great, but the market for them would have hit a wall pretty quickly if no one ever had a reason to replace them after buying their first.

This is somewhat of a misconception. The variants they test for change over time as new biologically significant SNPs and haplotypes are discovered.

One of the things that is a little misleading about how they present results is that a "negative" result means they don't know (i.e. not one of the SNPs they test for) rather than you have a "normal" copy of some particular gene.

Re: 23andMe lays off 100 people as DNA test sales decline

#85

Post by fiftyfifty »

avocado4 wrote: post #80

23andme testing is one and done. Once you've had it you will never spend a dime with them. It's a red flag for any investor.

It's worse than that, I talked my parents into doing one of these tests, now I don't ever have to pay for one.

Re: 23andMe lays off 100 people as DNA test sales decline

#86

Post by refurb »

patall wrote: post #21
EmoSupportEmu wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because you can have a mutation that your parents don't have?

23&me most like will not help you there as they are only looking for relatively well known mutations and not de-novos. They are basically scanning a few (or less) million variants but there are billions of possible new ones

Yes, but if you get a mutation in one of the SNPs they test for, it will show positive even though both parents are negative.

Re: 23andMe lays off 100 people as DNA test sales decline

#87

Post by hotgoldminer »

fetus8 wrote: post #4
dragonwriter wrote: post #3

> Wojcicki has theories, but she doesn’t have clear proof for why consumers are shying away from getting tests Because the ones that want them have gotten them and there's no reason to ever buy the product again once you've done it once. I mean, smartphones are great, but the market for them would have hit a wall pretty quickly if no one ever had a reason to replace them after buying their first.

I mean, there's the fact that companies like this also provide your data to DNA databases that governments and other companies have access too. That seems like a good reason to shy away from getting their tests done.

Smart phones also leak data. While you didn't mean this, I do think there's some sympathy here - the people that don't care about their data being out there because they 'have nothing to hide' probably feel the same way with their genetic data being out there.

23andME need to figure out a follow-on product to get the folks that have already taken the base test to purchase. Otherwise they have no new market to address.

Re: 23andMe lays off 100 people as DNA test sales decline

#88

Post by PaulKeeble »

jsgo wrote: post #79

> Wojcicki has theories Think the obvious one is that the results are shared and whether someone is a criminal or not (or will be one in the future), people are not particularly comfortable with sharing to parties they didn't initially trust it to for the purposes they trusted it for. Anecdotally, I bought a 23andme kit (just the genealogy one) but never submitted it because the labeling was to send it to the lab in…

When 23andme first started they were offering that a sample and your data could be destroyed whenever you liked. Then they got bought and their erasure document is a disgrace, their default position is they can't delete your genetic data and they don't say a thing about the sample at all. Those were not the terms under which it was collected.

There is a reason their business is failing and its because of this enormous change to their basic policy. What they have changed to is against the law in the EU and it is definitely not GDPR compliant despite the amount they say it is in their document.

Re: 23andMe lays off 100 people as DNA test sales decline

#89

Post by rb808 »

fiftyfifty wrote: post #83
ilamont wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ancestry.com has also stepped up its marketing game. Used to be a follower with DNA, now a leader, and discounting heavily. And, unlike 23andMe which got rid of family tree tools used by genealogists, Ancestry still has a very strong suite of trees and traditional genealogy tools. Some people really want to have both genetic and traditional genealogy accounts under the same provider, and are either unaware or don't r…

One thing I would add is the data for places outside of Europe looks pretty weak for both Ancestry.com and 23AndMe, at least it was the last time I looked. If you are from European descent they can practically tell you what village your ancestors are from (how accurate that is I don't know) but if you are Asian about the best you get is yep, you're Asian! I married into an Asian family and the reports I've seen from…

Lol $199 - yup you're Asian. Thanks!

Re: 23andMe lays off 100 people as DNA test sales decline

#90

Post by Barrin92 »

avocado4 wrote: post #80

23andme testing is one and done. Once you've had it you will never spend a dime with them. It's a red flag for any investor.

also, the value you get out of it seemed to be mostly curiosity and novelty. Getting a bunch of stats on your heritage is nice and all but it's not any sort of ground-breaking consumer service.
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