Is Money Growing on Trees?
February 5, 2008
The business of tracing ones family tree through a genealogy website is a growing and profitable trend.
As seen in the Daily Deal:
Generations Network Inc., which owns genealogical site Ancestry.com, sold a majority stake to a group led by Spectrum Equity Investors for $300 million, including debt.
Generations Network, which changed its name last year from Myfamily.com, has more than 900,000 paying subscribers. It receives 8.2 million worldwide monthly unique visitors, a company statement said.
Revenue in 2006 was $150 million, up from $47 million in 2002, according to Sullivan.
“We’re growing and we’re profitable,” Sullivan said. “We’ve rebuilt and relaunched a new platform that will maintain and extend the lead for family social networks on the Web.”
Generations has also opened an office in Beijing. “We believe China is a hot potential market,” Sullivan said.
Mail on Sunday (London):
“A UK spokesman for Generations Network said the family history market here had grown enormously in the past few years due to the internet and media programmes. ‘Since we established an office here in 2004 we have had a 500 per cent increase in our turnover,’ he said. ‘The growth has been absolutely massive. The most popular collections for research are our births, marriages and deaths records and the censuses.’ Being owned by private equity groups, the company’s financial figures are not publicly available, but the financial success of other genealogy websites in Britain is undisputed.”
**
Free on-line sources:
www.familysearch.org. This site is run by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latterday Saints – or the Mormon Church – which requires its members to research their family trees to baptise deceased relatives.
http://www.squidoo.com/free-genealogy-websites
www.usgenweb.com Provided by a group ov volunteers for genealogical research.
www.iberia.lib.la.us/genealogy.htm
