Thursday, March 20, 2014

Ancestry.com Government Filing

Ancestry.com 2013 Form 10-KAncestry.com recently filed a form with the government that contained some interesting information.

Ancestry.com has 2.1 million subscribers on the Ancestry.com website as of the end of last year. That goes up by only 600,000 when including their other websites: Archives.com, Fold3.com and Newspapers.com. (Have you ever felt like they ignore Genealogy.com?)

They had over 12 billion records at the end of the year. (I went through their card catalog and could only account for 10 billion, but, hey, what’s 2 billion among friends.) That’s an increase of 1.2 billion records during last year.

Users have created 55 million trees containing more than 5 billion persons. (I just found the two billion records missing from the catalog!) Users have uploaded 207 million photographs, scanned documents, and written stories. Users accepted about 1.3 billion shakey leaf hints last year alone.

About 65% of their subscribers have subscriptions of six months or longer.

Ancestry.com identified what they felt were their key business highlights for the year:

  • added more than 1.2 billion records to their content collections;
  • completed an agreement with FamilySearch, one of the largest genealogy organizations in the world, to make approximately 1 billion global records available online over the next five years;
  • total subscribers to Ancestry.com branded websites increased to approximately 2.1 million or 6% compared to December 31, 2012;
  • acquired Find A Grave, Inc., which provides a significant collection of burial information with more than 105 million records and 81 million photos;
  • the AncestryDNA database more than doubled in size in 2013, and the AncestryDNA test now maps a test taker’s ethnic origins to 26 global regions, including expanded regions for people of European and West African descent;
  • their mobile apps have now been downloaded more than 10 million times across the Android and iOS platforms; additionally, the redesigned iOS app includes new social and other features;
  • launched the StoryView product experience that enables users to create a highly sharable narrative around a person in their family tree; and
  • released a new version of Family Tree Maker software that includes updates on editing, sharing, tree viewing and TreeSync to make collaboration even easier.

You can read the entire, rather boring, report online.

7 comments:

  1. Hardly boring if you like finances. Their business model is explained and the trends in subscribers, personnel and technology are documented. One interesting tidbit is that they are excluded from certain financial reporting because they operate under an "emerging growth industry" provision of accounting, which includes not revealing executive compensation.

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  2. A lot of the purported increase in 'records' is indexes added from other provider sites. Aggregating such duplications is a lot cheaper than uploading images of actual records.

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  3. If only what they were already doing worked well then adding new things would be a good idea. Every year they come out with an Improved version that doesn't work until 2 months before the next New Improved version. I won't be giving them any more of my money. I broke the habit about 6 weeks ago and it wasn't as traumatic as I expected. And then they came out with "sliders" for a search engine. I went to see what all the brouhaha was about. What a stupid idea. If the goal was to make it harder to search, it's a huge success!

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  4. I would love to see these numbers on a side-by-side chart with FamilySearch.org. Just curious...

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  5. Do you accept direct e-mails with questions about Ancestry? If so how do we do that?
    Douglas Burnett
    Satellite Beach
    FL
    DougB81042@aol.com

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    1. My email address is AncestryInsider@gmail.com. I read every email I receive. Unfortunately, I don't have time to reply to more than a few.

      ---The Ancestry Insider

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  6. I really wish Ancestry.com would just merge the Genealogy.com content with Ancestry.com.

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