Ancestry.com Acquired for $1.6 Billion
theatlanticwire.com
theatlanticwire.com
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.
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.
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.
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.
Also, the tools created to index these records are created mainly by Mormon developers who donate their time.
Interesting story about Mobile apps for indexing: http://tech.lds.org/blog/455-new-familysearch-indexing-app-n...
Disclaimer: I'm a big fan and member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormon)
They have a neat program for organizing volunteer efforts:
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. :-(
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.
But I think some heaven simply don't extradite residents... ;-)
I made the point that its my decision an I don't want someone making it for me after I die. Apparently that wouldn't work, so I'm 'safe'.
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.
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.
We are objects, after all, and death returns us to an inanimate state.
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.
As far as you're away, the dead are dead, unless you have absolutely solved that.
I mean at a certain point doesn't this just turn into grown adults playing pretend?
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?"
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.
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.
It seems like they had an explicit "Black people cannot get this thing, and white people can". Which sounds racist.
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].
You can read more at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_people_and_Mormonism . You can find lds rationalizations at http://www.fairlds.org/fair-conferences/2002-fair-conference... .
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.
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_R._McConkie#Controversy
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:
http://www.amazon.com/Blacks-Mormon-Priesthood-Setting-Strai...
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.
A similar timeline happened with polygamy/plural marriages. Abandoned when it became politically unacceptable.
I wonder when they'll do same sex marriages.
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].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wives_of_Joseph_Smith,_Jr. - I have, in the past, found the same list on LDS-run sites like familysearch.org, but it appears to have been scrubbed
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Joseph_Smith
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illinois_Mormon_War#The_.22Mor...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1890_Manifesto#The_Manifesto
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Church_of_Jesus_Christ_of_... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pratt_family
[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.
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mormonism_and_polygamy#Modern_...
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.
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
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.
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.
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')
The efforts of the Church of Jesus Christ are all non-profit and publicly available at Family Search (http://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.
Disclosure: I'm a Mormon.
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.
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!
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.
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.
Ancestry.com for pets.
Gonna be HUGE.
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.
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.
Kudos.
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/is?s=ACOM+Income+Statement&an...
$400M is very close to the actual audited number for last year.
I have zero idea why the author failed to mention that is a bid to take an already public company private.
They spend $85 to acquire a subscriber.
see: http://ir.ancestry.com/secfiling.cfm?filingID=1193125-12-677...
[slaps forehead] Thank you. I should have checked.
25x trailing earnings. I'd say: Sensible.
This post is bad technology reporting, and terrible business reporting.
>"It does sound like the site has offers more than a lot of other Internet things these days."
Good god, this is the Atlantic. At least they could act like they're trying instead of just getting something out quickly for the pageviews.
Edit: a quick author search shows a ton of this half-assed blogging. Won't be going back to the Atlantic Wire any time soon. ( http://www.theatlanticwire.com/authors/rebecca-greenfield/ )
http://descrier.co.uk/technology/2012/10/ancestry-com-acquir...
>"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."
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.
"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.
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?
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.
> A bit like facebook for the dead :-/
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'.
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.
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.
http://www.findagrave.com/ "Search 88 million grave records"
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.
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.