Ancestry.com is possible largely because of the Mormon church. There is a religious obligation in Mormonism to proxy baptize one's non-Mormon ancestors so they can get into heaven. To allow Mormons to identify these ancestors the LDS church has spent decades going around the world and making microfilm copies of birth, death and marriage records and the like. At one point when I was doing genealogy research on the East Coast I went to the local Mormon church's family history library and ordered a microfilmed copy of some birth records from the Russian Empire in Yiddish and Russian. I could then go through the microfilm and try to pick out the names I wanted.
Because much of the hard part (getting access to these archives and making copies of these records) has already been done, Ancestry just has to scan and OCR these records. My understanding is that Mormon volunteers do a lot of that work as well.
> There is a religious obligation in Mormonism to proxy baptize one's non-Mormon ancestors so they can get into heaven.
That bugs me. I'm afraid of it going down like this. I die, and the Valkyries select me for Valhalla. As I enjoy the afterlife there, knocking back flagons of mead and knocking up wenches, while trading tall tales of valor with the other chosen, there comes a knock at the door. A maiden answers, and then goes to Odin and whispers something.
Odin frowns, and whispers something back to her. Now all eyes are on the maiden as she walks back to the door, and invites in two Mormons. She leads them to Odin, and they hand him some paperwork.
Odin summons me, and tells me that they are from Mormon Heaven. He tells me that my half great great great great great grand niece has converted to Mormonism, found me in their ancestry records, and baptized me into the Mormon Church--and that I must leave Valhalla and move to Mormon Heaven. No more mead and wenches for me. :-(
Starting with the assumption of an afterlife, this would be a pretty crazy way for it to work. Can another descendant get you transferred back to Valhalla?
I understand the offense you can feel at finding out a loved one got baptized post-mortem into a religion they didn't believe in, but if the living could get the dead kicked out of any sort of heaven it would be essentially not be an afterlife.
Mormons may have done some of the work to help build out Ancestry.com's database, but they also have built a free competitor: FamilySearch.org
From a startup perspective, the base of records is important, but the 1.6 billion dollar purchase came from lots of paying customers who aren't Mormon (there just aren't enough Mormons who are devout to the point where they will pay for a genealogy resource when a free one built by their own faith exists). The Ancestry folks just took a relatively cheap/free pool of data, and did the work necessary to feed that data to customers willing to pay. I'd guess there are a lot more startups that can be built on readily available data sets like this. Congrats to the Ancestry.com team.
Edited to add how cool this whole business model is. Something that could be thought of as a "lifestyle business" ended up with a huge win by having the silly ideas of charging customers and building something people wanted.
There is a religious obligation in Mormonism to proxy baptize one's non-Mormon ancestors so they can get into heaven
Not quite right. Proxy baptism simply allows an individual recipient the opportunity to accept or reject the teachings if they didn't get a chance to learn about them during their lifetime. There's nothing passive or automatic about it.
I fail to appreciate any material difference given that the individual is dead and utterly incapable of accepting or rejecting anything.
If you're expecting a non-passive response from these ancestors, I'm afraid the whole endeavour is a total waste of time and energy. See definition of dead for details.
The idea that proxy baptism for the dead has any effect is predicated on the belief that there is an afterlife and that the individual has the ability to accept or reject the ordinance.
Not really, a proxy baptism might make those still alive feel better about themselves or their ancestors, and of course it solves one of the theological conundrums of purgatory.
My point is that the dead are dead, no matter what anyone of any belief chooses to think. Just because a group of people think or believe something doesn't actually make it so.
I guess they have a fax machine or something in a corner in some room in SLC? Or maybe some sort of special courier service to ferry the communiques to the various other-denominational Heavens? A really secret interoffice mail envelope?
I mean at a certain point doesn't this just turn into grown adults playing pretend?
> given that the individual is dead and utterly incapable of accepting or rejecting anything.
In Mormon (& indeed, most Judeo-Christian-Islamic belief), the state of dead might be defined as "Transferred to different plane of existence, still a cogitating being".
That the microfilming was accomplished is invaluable - and I understand
that the typical offer to various records-keepers from the LDS family
history folks was: "We'll pay to microfilm your records, you get a copy
to keep, and the LDS gets a copy to use." Win-win.
The transcription of records for indexing is also valuable, but less so,
given that volunteers were working from projected microfilm copies of
(usually) hand-written records (some in beautiful but dated hands).
OCR in the 1980s was not adequate, but Soundex indexing helps a lot,
and if you need to search a small area exhaustively, you can see
many of the microfilm copies of records through a site like
ancestry.com or from the digital media available for use at
local LDS family history centers.
The LDS was also strong in producing the GEDCOM data standard,
which is widely (almost universally) used for family tree exchanges,
and the PAF software package (which now has many competitors.)
Note that research into ancestry has an interesting network effect -
while people have 2^N N-parents, once N gets over 4 or 5 it can
become challenging to trace individuals - but the chances that some
other active researcher shares some of those 2^N N-parents start to
increase - and ancestry.com has done well at providing links
to other researcher's public trees when they become available.
This pattern has the effect of encouraging subscribers who have
already found most of their ancestors out to level N, for whatever N,
to continue to subscribe in hopes of finding a new link from another
researcher, or perhaps a new clue in a newly digitized document set.
It will be interesting to see how the decreasing cost of genome
analysis affects family history research - perhaps helping find
distant cousins, or perhaps revealing surprising differences between
a presumed history and the biological record.
The LDS was also strong in producing the GEDCOM data standard, which is widely (almost universally) used for family tree exchanges
And of course, since they are bigots, they don't let 2 men be married in their GEDCOM standard, or other non-traditional family structures. Get your politics out of standards.
You are incorrect - GEDCOM supports same-sex marriage, there is nothing that prevents the recording of same-sex partners.
You are confused with Personal Ancestral File, the Church's free genealogy program, which does not allow the entry of same-sex marriage. Many other programs do, and can export these marriages to GEDCOM.
Calling people bigots does nothing to promote civil discourse about important issues such as homosexual marriage.
The standard was drafted in 1984, long before efforts to redefine marriage. It isn't very fair of you to project your 21st century politics back on the creators of a 30 year old standard.
You apply the label of bigotry to exclude from the conversation those who differ in opinion from you. That isn't how democracies are designed to function. Nor does it recognize the complexity of the issue. Religious people can desire a standard of public morality without espousing hatred for those who don't share that standard. Calling that bigotry makes it harder to identify true prejudice.
Aw, that's precious. Defending the Mormons against charges of bigotry by saying it's the gay rights people who were trying to redefine marriage. coughpolygamycough And you're talking as if marriage hasn't been under rolling redefinition since Gutenberg. Women owning property, being allowed to have a profession, and having the right to vote changed marriage way more than allowing two women to get hitched and have babies.
Also, I don't think the campaign against gay marriage can be anything but bigotry. It's exactly analogous to the campaign against interracial marriage: Religious actors try to use the power of the state to stop people from doing something they think is icky. And they're doing it on the basic of intrinsic characteristics, and with absolutely zero demonstration of harm to anybody. Irrational devotion to prejudice against a group is precisely bigotry.
You citing a number of examples of marriage evolving and being redefined only serves to clarify how the process is continuing today and how people of all backgrounds have an interest in those issues.
Your demeaning tone and labels doesn't serve your supposedly tolerant position. I agree that everyone should be treated with respect and decency. But I also believe that there is a standard for morality that should be honored in order to promote the greatest mutual happiness.
Advocating a standard of public morality in marriage is the same as in drug control, pornography, hate speech, or any other area. We might have different opinions on what standard will bring the most happiness. We don't have to agree, but mutual respect smooths the democratic processes around reconciling those differences.
We are a bit off topic here, so I'll stop derailing the conversation.
I believe everybody should be treated with respect and decency. Just as long as they are behaving respectfully and decently, and perhaps a little past. But you know what? Trying to keep loving couples from getting married and having kids is not even vaguely respectful.
The whole, "I'm going do what I can to keep you from having your civil rights, but don't be mean to me" thing is dumbfounding to me. Freedom of speech does not mean freedom from having your fee-fees hurt.
Suppose I got a referendum passed that banned the Mormon Church: meetings are forbidden, Mormon marriages are nullified, and the feds start tearing down the churches. Can you honestly say that the appropriate response is a quiet, "Oh, pardon me, perhaps you could reconsider?"
We don't have to agree, but mutual respect smooths the democratic processes around reconciling those differences.
Nope. I do not respect a believe that my love life, and my relationships are some how inferior and "not as good" as different sex relationships. My humanity is not up for debate.
It's important to note that "the priesthood" in the Mormon faith is every adult male[1]; so by not permitting Blacks into the priesthood, they were basically not permitted in the church at all.
The Mormon faith was founded in 1830s New York (shortly after slavery was abolished in that state), long before efforts to redefine racial relations and blacks as humans. It isn't very fair of you to project your 19th century politics back on the creators of a <200 year old religion.
> so by not permitting Blacks into the priesthood, they were basically not permitted in the church at all.
That is a wild and incorrect jump to make. Why do Mormons go to church? What are you referencing the physical buildings used or something else?
The thing is, often people will say that Mormons are racist towards blacks until 1978 and if you ask why they usually don't know. Sometimes, they'll reference the Priesthood and if you ask what that is, they usually don't know.
From your comment, unless your answers to my questions indicate otherwise, I would say you do not understand. There is so much that people do not understand in regards to this topic yet they feel valid to proclaim others as being racist.
"The Lord had cursed Cain’s seed with blackness and prohibited them the Priesthood." - Brigham Young (second LDS prophet, 1847-77).
Note that "the priesthood" is considered a requirement for salvation, so denying blacks the priesthood was quite significant. Various LDS sources seem to disagree as to why this is; Joseph Fielding Smith (10th LDS prophet, 1970-72) claimed it's because blacks didn't fight on God's side in a war during the pre-mortal existence, while Gordon B. Hinkley (15th LDS prophet, 1995-2008) simply says "I don't know".
The official position of the LDS church now is that blacks are fully equal to whites: "Forget everything that I have said, or what President Brigham Young or President George Q. Cannon or whomsoever has said in days past that is contrary to the present revelation. We spoke with a limited understanding and without the light and knowledge that now has come into the world. We get our truth and our light line upon line and precept upon precept. We have now had added a new flood of intelligence and light on this particular subject, and it erases all the darkness and all the views and all the thoughts of the past. They don't matter any more." (Bruce R. McConkie, member of the Quorum of the Twelve -- basically, the lesser prophets one step below the top guy. 1978.) When he says "forget all I said" he's referring to his 1958 comments affirming the view that blacks were less valiant in the pre-mortal war [0].
EDIT: to be totally fair, despite institutionalized LDS racism, they were strongly anti-slavery in the early years; LDS founder Joseph Smith ran for president as an abolitionist in 1850.
This isn't really the place for an in-depth discussion of Mormon doctrine (and I don't really have the time today), so feel free to email me if you would like to continue the conversation.
But I will quickly correct a few of the mistakes in this conversation:
* There were black members of the Church before the lifting of the ban on the priesthood.
* Though Brigham Young characterized the priesthood ban as a "cursing" he was very clear that the priesthood would be available to people of African decent at some point in the future.
* Not being ordained to the priesthood never meant that blacks would be excluded from salvation. Through the practice of proxy ordinances for the dead, Mormon doctrine has always made clear that all would have the chance at salvation even if denied the opportunity to have the priesthood during this life.
* Limiting the priesthood, or even the preaching of the gospel, to a specific family is part of the Biblical pattern in both the Old and New Testaments.
* Though there was clearly some racism in the Mormon Church before 1978 (and probably still is today), the people I know who were part of the church at that time say it was limited. The official position then, as it is now, was of love and acceptance within the limitations they felt the Lord had set.
Conversations such as this one are valuable, but be aware that they tend to oversimplify complex topics.
A great book on the topic written by a black Mormon who joined the Church before 1978 is this one:
While the Bible definitely shows a pattern of preaching to specific groups, as soon as there's an organized religious system, there's a method for outsiders to receive full benefits. Moses allowed foreigners to participate in passover (Ex 12:48) and other sacrificial ordinances (Ex 22:18). While certain rites were only performed by priests, who were from a particular family, the benefits of those rites applied to everyone in the nation (see Num 15:25-26). Likewise, immediately after Jesus' resurrection, both Jewish and non-Jewish believers received the same spiritual gifts (Acts 10:45) and the same salvation (Rom 1:16, Gal 3:28).
Interestingly, the early LDS allowed blacks full membership with no limitations (for example, Elijah Abel was a black LDS priest in 1832.) The Book of Mormon describes blacks as cursed (2 Nephi 5:21) but allowed to come to the Lord just like anyone else (2 Nephi 26:33). And it makes the anti-racism statement "revile no more against them because of the darkness of their skins" (Jacob 3:8-9). Joseph Smith himself was an abolitionist (D&C 101:79).
But Brigham Young declared that if Utah received statehood, it wouldn't be Congress' business whether or not they had slaves or how they treated them (Journal of Discourses 4:39-40). He also stated that the penalty for mixed marriage is death on the spot (JoD 10:110), and that blacks couldn't hold the priesthood until after all of the whites did, at which point they would actually turn white (JoD 7:290, 337). Wilford Woodruff (4th LDS prophet) said that the only way someone in a mixed marriage could have salvation was to be beheaded, and for all of his children to be killed as well; there's no "proxy baptism" option present here.
By the 1950s, the common view was that blacks were cursed because they had not behaved valiantly in the pre-mortal existence, but that they would eventually receive full blessings. Then in 1978 a "revelation" allowed blacks to hold the priesthood. There are still some vestiges of the 1950s view, though; a friend told me of someone else in his mission who, after visiting a non-committal black family, complained that "n___ers were fence-sitters in the pre-existence and they're fence-sitters now".
So, as you say, it's complex. Official LDS doctrine (specifically coming from "prophets") regarding blacks went from a little racist to extremely racist to kinda racist to not racist. Individual LDS attitudes have always had some variability.
The cynic & atheist in me thinks that "Mormon beliefs followed contemporary conservative US attitudes" to be a much more accurate, succinct and possibly honest description of the situation. Racist when it was common to be racist, not racist once that got politically unacceptable.
A similar timeline happened with polygamy/plural marriages. Abandoned when it became politically unacceptable.
Your version isn't actually very accurate. In particular, note that official Mormon doctrine was at times much more racist and at other times less racist than contemporary conservative US attitudes, with significant changes from one "prophet" to the next. I wouldn't characterize it as following others attitudes, but rather as being controlled by the whims of individual men who were all over the spectrum of US attitudes, and who didn't particularly agree with each other.
Your comment on polygamy is also lacking sufficient detail. In particular, note that LDS polygamy was never convenient or accepted by outsiders; whenever it was publicly known, it led to serious community opposition, and probably contributed to their being chased out of Nauvoo [2]. They also officially denied practicing or teaching polygamy, even as Joseph Smith was accumulating a total of 34 wives [0]; he was actually killed as a result of fallout from burning the printing press that was used to expose the practice [1]. Even their "abandoning the practice" was more of a denial that it ever happened, and a weak bit of "advice" to "refrain" from violating local laws [3]. This came shortly after serious attempts by the US government to end polygamy via asset seizures and other forms of pressure; unlike in the 1850s, there were few uncolonized areas they could move to (but some LDS fled to Mexico, including some of Mitt Romney's ancestors [4]). So it would be more accurate to say that the practice was officially abandoned when it became exceedingly difficult to continue. Even so, unofficially within the main LDS church and officially within various offshoots, polygamy continues to this day [5]; official doctrine still teaches polygamy in the afterlife as well [6].
[5] My friend Doris Hansen escaped from fundamentalist Mormon polygamy, and now runs a ministry to rescue other women and children: http://www.shieldandrefuge.org/index.htm . The ministry has its own TV show at http://whatloveisthis.tv/ . The show archives contain lots of interviews with former polygamist men and women.
Listen, I'm sorry that their feelings are hurt when I point out that their mantain a policy of bigotry against LGB people, but tough. That's how democracy works. You have the right to say what you want, but not the right to say what you want without people pointing it out.
Y'know what hurts me more? The fact that I can't get married.
Marriage has been redefined many times since 1984. In my country (Ireland), divorce was impossible/illegal. Times change, adapt.
Not my politics nor bigotry, thank you. I'm just thankful
that some entity came up with a generally usable standard,
rather than 20+ competitors in the software market all
rolling their own incompatible or non-exportable data store.
I haven't checked recently, but for a while there was one vendor
marketing family tree software in big box stores that used a
proprietary and non-exportable data format. People would buy the
simple package, work on their tree, and want to migrate, only to be
put off by: "you'll have to re-enter your data."
As for non-support of non-traditional family structures,
I'm not surprised that a conservative religious entity
motivated by research into historical vital records
tends to focus on the typical needs for its own users.
Many of the rest of the user population benefit from a generally
usable (and I'll agree, imperfect) data standard, without which
this field would be less interesting and less profitable.
There are a bunch of challenges for software developers in
regard to traditional family structures of many kinds,
generally showing that real life is often more complicated
than simple tree-oriented data-structures might suggest.
Divorce & step-parents are fairly well handled, but consider how to
store, display, & represent explicit and implicit relationships among:
unmarried persons living together
adoptive parents
egg donors
surrogate mothers
I expect that software and standards will evolve as real life
does, but I don't expect the LDS to be putting their effort
into areas that they likely do not see as benefitting them,
or that they see as controversial for many of their members.
On the other hand, an entrepreneur could produce a set of patches or
extensions to GEDCOM that addressed the more complicated areas, and
provided export into and import from GEDCOM or an extended format.
Firstly, many users don't just use genealogy software to track their DNA ancestors, people use it to record details of their family tree. If a relative died without leaving any offspring, that person isn't deleted from the tree, they are still there. Likewise, people may want to record same sex marriage in their family trees, even though there might not be any off spring. People in same sex marriages might want to track their own family trees. A man might want to include his mother and his mother-in-law (his husband's mother).
Secondly, yes, some same sex marriages can produce children. From adoption, to artificial insemination/surrogacy, to one partner having a child(ren) from a previous marriage, which the other adopts, etc.
Thirdly, it is possible to have genetic children from a same sex marriage. Some countries have gender recognition law which allows trans people to legally change their gender and get a new birth cert. Depending on the law, they may still be in the original marriage, and still legally have children. (Yes there are people who start living as a different gender and their spouse still loves them and stays with them.)
Yes, these are new issues, and a lot of genealogy deals with stuff in the past, but this is only going to get more common as time passes. Blanket statements saying essentially "This is nothing to ever be worried about at all" is false.
(As an aside, bisexuals et al. can enter into same sex marriages, it not just 'homosexual marriage')
Many years ago -- 1980? -- I visited SLC and looked at some of these microfilms. They had tax records from the turn of the century that included info about my grandfather. It was like going back in time.
My father did some of his ancestry research with help from the LDS people at a centre in London. I was wary, expecting a bit of evangelising or conversion talk, but they didn't try any of that stuff.
It was interesting that at the time it was one of the best ways to get access to computers and cd rom drives for no cost.
That's interesting that you were surprised that the LDS didn't try any of the usual cult practices of trying to induce you into their fold. Meanwhile, we have a presidential candidate from the same organization...
This might not be an issue if if we actually had separation of church and state in this country, but alas that's a myth (despite what people might want to believe, just ask any grade school CHILD what they do first thing in the morning at school, or look at the currency and see who WE trust etc etc.)
Regardless of any political view, and I'm not advocating any, I'm just picking up on the view that you had cult-like suspicions of a church organization that is a big part of the life of what might be the next President of the most powerful nation on Earth.
The LDS Church has records that are donated to it by its members and others. It also has an extraordinary collection of microfilmed church records from little churches (of all denominations) from around the globe. These churches are often very sensitive about their records and how they will be used. These records are made available free to any individual who wants to do genealogical research through an LDS Family History Center, but they are NOT made available to commercial organizations such as Ancestry.com.
Ancestry.com, on the other hand, photographs public records such as census documents or licenses private records such as shipping manifests, indexes them, and sells access to the indexes and photos. They are free to resell their data and, by selling the company, that's what they'll be doing. They own the copyrights of the hi-rez photos of old census docs, even though the docs themselves are in the public domain.
Though Ancestry.com has some agreements to share resources with the Family History Department of the Church of Jesus Christ Latter-day Saints, it is a completely separate organization and a for profit company. It was founded by Mormons, many of the employees are Mormons, and lots of the customers are Mormons and driven by their religious interest; but it is distinct from the work you are discussing.
The efforts of the Church of Jesus Christ are all non-profit and publicly available at Family Search (http://familysearch.org).
Yeah, just OCR badly hand-written text. That's a hard problem! I've run across matches in the census data that I would consider illegible, but that somehow got matched with the right name.
Mormon developers do not donate their time. https://www.lds.org/church/employment?lang=eng (Must be LDS to browse and apply for jobs, but you can see the heading on the linked page indicating Information Technology jobs are available).
Looks like a classic example of a huge market that young techies think isn't important. I don't know anyone my age who has an account on ancestry.com or who cares about their family tree, but I have lots of older (and richer) relatives who do.
Pet owners are another example. Apparently some of those "facebook for dogs" sites are doing pretty well, since the dog owners who use them tend to be middle-class and middle-aged - a huge market that most tech startups ignore. Think different!
I had the pleasure of being next to some of the engineers from Ancestry.com in the queue for the WWDC keynote this year - it was really interesting to hear about a business that you don't think is that big, but is actually massive. They said Europe was also a very big market for them (I know genealogy is quite popular in the UK at least - the TV show that the article cites, 'Who Do You Think You Are', was originally a BBC show first), so being acquired by a European private equity firm makes some sense.
Yeah, I believe that europe is actually a big market for that. Would be interessting to see if the ancestry.com guys hit the same fogy barrier the 30-years war presents in most of central europe. What I never imagined was that there's enough of a market to come up with a 1.6 billion company. Job well done though!
That's probably an opportunity for someone to pick up. Keep in mind that the data is more easily obtainable thanks to the household registries institutionalized in East Asia [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hukou_system] which record familial information such as parents, professions, dates, residence changes, etc.
India's gonna be tough -- records tend to be maintained on sheets of leather in ink, by a fellow who'll need a decent bribe to let you see it. Enough to let him copy all his data --- maybe that's doable in scale for everyone, but who knows?
(Note: this is from my Dad, and it's up-to-date as of ~2 years ago, at least for his old village).
Many young techies are accustomed to chasing one specific type of profit function: namely, massive quantity x low price.
Ancestry.com is a good example of the opposite, though potentially very lucrative function: small quantity x high price. The site has only a few million active users, but each of them pays a decent chunk of change per month. Those users also use the site very frequently, and for long periods at a time. (Again, contrast this with a service like Facebook: lots of users, each one presumably browsing or using in very quick and sporadic bursts).
People forget that a market involves both # of users -and- willingness to pay. There's more than one way to reach a large addressable market.
Some of the best kept "under wraps" business models are in these areas. A surprising amount of interesting/challenging problems exist, and they have real impacts on peoples' lives.
They are traditionally backed by large companies, but a talented/knowledgable/passionate group can shake things up in a big way (with stable/long term revenue streams).
Interesting to observe the "what is your passive income" type threads and realize just how many in this community are unaware/under-appreciate some of these amazing business models. Not shocking to see medium sized 1-man projects to have lifetime revenues over 1 million.
One of my first gigs was at one of these types of companies. While the engineering was deplorable (one reason I left), the insight into the business side of things has forever changed my path.
> I don't know anyone my age who has an account on ancestry.com or who cares about their family tree, but I have lots of older (and richer) relatives who do.
Not sure how old you are, but I'm 24 and have a premium Ancestry.com account. My family tree is really strange, so tracking through it is interesting to me.
So we seem to have a formula: something a lot of people use + dogs = popular thing. We have Facebook pet pages. We have dog/cat memes. So I've come up with the next multi-billion dollar project:
Anyone seen actual financials? FTA: To monetize all that information, the website has a subscription model that two million people pay into at $12.95 to $34.95 a month, according to the company.
So (say) $20/month = $200/year * 2 million = $400M/year run rate. In rough terms the buyout happened at 3-4x revenue.
I'd say it's not too rich a valuation, and given my wild-ass guess above, my error bars are big; But the bottom line: not an insane number.
>"The buyout group includes the private equity firm’s co-investors, members of Ancestry.com’s management team, including CEO Tim Sullivan and CFO Howard Hochhauser, and Spectrum Equity, which already owns about 30 percent of Ancestry.com."
"Ancestry.com has been acquired by European private-equity firm Permira for $1.6 billion, which is a little over 1.5 Instagrams"
Is "Instagram" the new word for a billion? I like it. It sounds like a unit of measurement.
It will be interesting to see how this grows. Some of my family members are very into family history and genealogy and want to get their DNA tested as well to see where we are from. If nothing, it's a good way to at least pique the curiosity of a large population, so I can see it going for as much as it did.
Funny when I read it I was wondering if it shouldn't be more like 2-3 Instagrams at current FB stock price but I guess it was never said how much was in cash.
"To monetize all that information, the website has a subscription model that two million people pay into at $12.95 to $34.95 a month, according to the company."
So even at a lower bound that's close to $26m/month in revenues or $312m a year. So it's only 5x revenues.
Wikipedia says that they had $13.67B in capital in May. A 12% bet that upper- and middle-class baby boomers will keep spending at that rate for at least the next 5 years? Somebody must be confident.
I see this as a larger play. As the internet generation gets older many more people will have almost their entire life online making the information Ancestry.com can provide much greater and more detailed family trees.
Subscription revenue model that offers a certainty premium for investors? check
Tap into a deep psychological Maslow-style need that potentially hundreds of millions if not billions have (aka the desire to know where we come from, who we are connected to)? check
Future plans to possibly pivot itself towards being a platform that other developers can build apps on that tap into its genealogical data? check
Looks like it could turn out to be be a bloody good deal!
I sometimes use it to check if people I meet are closely related to me. Pretty much any two Icelanders are relatively closely related. It's a small island with an even smaller population, mostly descended from the original settlers.
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?
I know someone who uses Ancestry.com. You can add as many details about your relatives as you want, upload copies of wills, photographs, etc. A bit like facebook for the dead :-/
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.
How long until Google announces "Street View for Cemeteries"?
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'.
In a sense, Ancestry is doing something similar. We are all related at some point in the past (more recently if we are from the same country, less so for Americans with their high rate of immigration). My relative has succeeded in joining our family tree with that of people we had no idea existed, because one of their family members uses Ancestry.com. My relative can now see their family tree, including pics of gravestones, etc.
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.
Agreed. My family history spans 3 continents, so tracing the people gives a very personal connection to history. Who knows what could be revealed as the site grows?
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.
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.
It used to be that there were records websites and family tree websites / software. Combining them is a win/win: records access has more value so higher prices but no need to keep subscribing, while family tree sites emphasize longer subscriptions to keep your tree online. Both Ancestry and MyHeritage are now going to this model from opposite sides.
if you are interested: John Esser, Director Engineering at Ancestry.com, is participating in a webinar next week about how Ancestry.com implemented Agile and Continuous Delivery (disclaimer: yes, he will also talk about how they used ThoughtWorks Go in the process): http://www.thoughtworks-studios.com/content/go-user-group
I think Ancestry.com is worth the 1.6 Billion. I have ancestry in Poland and the Ukraine and doing research can be tricky. Ancestry.com was the go to source for me. Amazing resource.
However, the current pricing is prohibitive. A year's full access was almost $400, and that was nearly 10 years ago. I hope they lower their price. I'll sign up again if they do.
If you are looking to expand your research, I would suggest Family Tree DNA. It can test the paternal or maternal lines to get ancestry. I did the paternal tests since my dad was adopted and didn't know his ethnicity and it was really neat to find that his side is from the Balkans after migrating from East Africa (oh and that I might be an ethnic Jew as well).
Because much of the hard part (getting access to these archives and making copies of these records) has already been done, Ancestry just has to scan and OCR these records. My understanding is that Mormon volunteers do a lot of that work as well.