Ancestry.com recently announced it had finalized its acquisition of Archives.com for approximately $100 million in cash and assumed liabilities.
“Archives.com is a great addition to the Ancestry.com family,” said Tim Sullivan, President and CEO of Ancestry.com. “It is a fast-growing business that has expanded the addressable family history market through a simple and affordable approach.”
More than 440,000 subscribers pay about $39.95 a year for a subscription. Archives.com was launched barely more than two and one-half years ago. During that time it has accumulated over 2.3 billion historical records according to its website. The records known to have been obtained from FamilySearch account for over one billion of these: 500 million public family tree records and over 500 million U.S. census records.
Archives.com’s other largest holdings are also available on other sites. From England and Wales, BMD records account for nearly 300 million of their records and census transcripts contain another 160 million. Living people records contain 200 million and NewspaperARCHIVE contributes another 100. The Social Security Death Index is the next largest collection, at 90 million.
Multiple price points is a tried and true method of marketing. Witness three drink sizes at McDonalds. Ancestry.com plans to operate Archives.com separately, retaining its brand and website, keeping it as a lower priced offering to its more robust Ancestry.com property.
Am I missing something? What records are on access that are not also available someplace else?
ReplyDeletecsccat - I agree. I subscribed to Archives.com for a short time a couple of years ago. Unless they have added something, most of what I found was a re-hash of newspaperarchive.com, chroniclingamerica.com and a couple of other sites, some of which are FREE.
ReplyDeleteI personally REALLY dislike the "false advertising" of archives.com. Any time you search, for example, for [any state] death certificates, archives.com is the first listing, even when those death certificates are absolutely not available. I've had a few friends who were taken in by that misleading pride-of-place google return.