Ancestry.com’s Owners Reportedly are Exploring a Possible Sale of the Company

This story strikes me as non-news: Reuters News Agency is reporting that Ancestry.com LLC, the world’s largest family historical past website, is exploring a sale that would be worth between $2.5 billion and $3 billion, together with debt, based on information from individuals acquainted with the matter. Permira Advisers LLC, the buyout agency that owns most of privately held Ancestry, has employed funding banks to run a public sale for the corporate, according to unnamed sources.

You can read the story at http://goo.gl/TTazpi and at a few other web sites as well.

I am repeating the rumors here because there is a lot of buzz about this story. However, I am surprised that anyone would be surprised that Permira Advisers LLC is thinking of selling. Of course Ancestry.com is for sale!

There’s nothing new in the latest rumors. Ancestry.com has ALWAYS been for sale. In fact, it has already been bought and sold several times so that’s not a recent change. Buying and selling of other businesses is not unusual in the business world. Ancestry has always been owned by investors who hope to buy it at one price and then later sell it for a profit. Nothing about that has ever changed.

Permira Advisers LLC is a buyout agency. It is in the business of buying other businesses, pumping them up with real or perceived value, and then selling the businesses for a significant profit. The day that Permira Advisers LLC purchased Ancestry.com LLC it was obvious to most observers that the goal was to sell the company for a profit as soon as practical. The latest rumors published by Reuters only confirm what many people already knew.

The article in Reuters is somewhat misleading. The latest actions isn’t “news.” Of course Ancestry.com is for sale and always has been for sale. The same is true for dozens of other web sites and other businesses presently owned by investment firms and buyout agencies.

14 Comments

Try linking to the original source (Reuters) instead of some obscure foreign tabloid:
http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/05/21/us-ancestry-m-a-exclusive-idUSKBN0O52UE20150521

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    The same story from Reuters has been published on dozens of web sites around the world in the past day or so. I haven’t read all of them but the few articles I did read all seem to be identical, containing a story written by Thomson Reuters (a British company).

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    Humphrey has a point. Best practice in genealogy is to link to the original source, not a derivative, no matter how “identical” it may appear. It’s disappointing that someone who purports to give advice to genealogists doesn’t display better genealogical methodology.

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    I will admit that when I see an article from Reuters, Associated Press, or any other wire service that is republished word-for-word the same on multiple news web sites, I don’t pay much attention to which web site I link to. After all, the words are all exactly the same on all the web sites, whether the various web sites are located in New York, London, or Katmandu.

    The same is true for press releases issued by companies that get republished widely.

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    Dick has a point. That is how wire services work. They write stories to be spread through news services around the world. It is like finding a vital record in the Local Town Hall, on Ancestry, and on Family Search. They are all the same record.

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    Suggest you both read the BCG Genealogical Standards Manual, especially the section concerning original and derivative documents. Also suggest that Dick stop being so defensive and belligerent toward commenters. Looks bad.

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For those of who use Family Tree Maker, we can only hope that a new owner might pay serious attention to FTM. It has “fallen” to two year updates, and the last one was without any significant changes. FTM has been allowed to languish as ancestry has focused on the acquisition of databases.

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Ris, I agree and have been railing about their zest for money over any ethical, thanks, or thoughts of what they are doing to the name of Genealogy.for quite a while.

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It crosses my mind that this situation might have contributed to the recent dumping of the Sorenson Database by Ancestry. They may have felt that the database was a potential liability in a sale. I was a little surprised by the precipitant way it occurred.

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Is Ancestry too big to be bought out (leveraged) by a community trust of subscribers?
If so, would it be able to fund expansion from subscriptions, or would they need to raise new equity or loan capital (which might dilute the community’s equity)?

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Afterall – we are writing our own family trees every day on Facebook and if we are not doing the writing ourselves then someone else in our family is…..and the US Archives are keeping the records….how many more years would one need ancestry.com? Is it not a case of getting out, when the getting is still good?

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Yes we may be writing up our trees (although most of the family historians I know are putting that off as long as they can as that is not so much fun as the actual research) and putting them online but genealogy is not an exact science. Once you have got back to a certain point in time your family tree will always be a case of “best fit” to the records that you had access to. So individual family historians’ trees may differ. We need access to as many data sources as possible not only to check that we agree with the compiler of a family tree’s conclusions by revisiting the source records but also to check whether some new piece of information has come to light since the tree was compiled.

Ancestry in all its worldwide permutations does not just cover North American records or in fact North American subscribers. I have a worldwide subscription so that I can trace those from the UK who moved to America or Canada or Australia or New Zealand. However much I may moan about it being too big or aimed at newbies it is still where I try first.

And I was heartened at WhoDoYouThinkYouAreLive in Birmingham last month when I talked to one of the website developers and discovered that contrary to popular belief they are genealogists after all with a touching faith in us old hands to figure out how to use the website no matter how much they dumb it down for new researchers.

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Holly Kilpatrick May 27, 2015 at 6:08 pm

I get very wary when venture capital firms start buying and selling a business. Having been on the employee end of several such transitions, I have seen some very short-term thinking, and some real damage to businesses. The management teams never really understood the business, and thought they had some quick fix actions to lower spending. Hopefully that isn’t happening or doesn’t happen with Ancestry.

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    After this last roll out of the new and improved site, I started looking elsewhere on the internet for somewhere to display my tree. I purposefully did not visit ancestry for about 2 weeks other than to down load GEDcoms and DNA results. I was amazed to find I was getting hints at WikiTree, DNA matches at Gedmatch and all sorts of bonus material from other sites that I had never heard of before. I found out I don’t really need ancestry. It was great when I started but now I’ve outgrown them. I’ve been a victim of the guy behind the desk who never worked my job. It never ends well.

    Liked by 1 person

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