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The Internet's most popular family history Web site Ancestry.com and its parent company The Generations Network will sell a $300 million majority interest to Spectrum Equity Investors, a private equity firm $4 billion in invested capital, the companies announced  yesterday. The Generations Network is a privately held company that includes a group of properties which combined has more than 900,000 paying subscribers, and last year the company had revenues of roughly $150 million. The properties attract 8.2 million unique visitors each month according to August, 2007 figures from Web usage tracking company comScore. As interest in family history continues to grow, Web sites such as Ancestry.com have played a major part in placing the pursuit of family roots second only to pornography for overall usage of the Web. The acquisition is subject to regulatory and closing conditions and is expected to be finalized before the end of 2007. Once finalized Spectrum's Vic Parker and Ben Spiro will join Tim Sullivan, The Generations Network's president and CEO, on a new board of directors, and the current management team will continue to lead the company. The Generations Network does not release its net profits, and additional terms of the transaction were not disclosed. Spectrum's Managing Partner Parker expressed his excitement at the acquisition. "As an investor in The Generations Network for the past four years, we have watched the company revolutionize the family history category by leveraging the power of the Internet  to make it more accessible and easy for anyone," said Parker. "Ancestry.com and myfamily.com are clear category leaders in the growing and rapidly evolving family history and family networking markets. We are excited to partner with The Generations Network management team to continue growing this truly unique company that has the power to impact users at a very personal and emotional level." The Generations Network's Sullivan showed equal optimism over the acquisition. "Spectrum Equity has been an incredibly supportive and strategic-minded investor in our company for several years, so I am thrilled to have them acquire this majority interest in The Generations Network," said Sullivan, who also looked towards what a future with Spectrum might look like. "2007 has been the company's most successful and profitable year to date, and 2008 looks even more promising as we grow our core businesses further, expand our global presence, and innovate with new products and services that help us realize our mission to connect families across distance and time. I appreciate Spectrum's vote of confidence in our direction and vision, and I am excited to work even more closely with Vic Parker and Ben Spero to continue to transform this amazing and unique business into a truly great company." In an interview with popular family history technology writer Dick Eastman, Sullivan is quoted as saying that Spectrum is "putting their money where their heart is and are backing what we do. There will be no major changes in what we are doing. Spectrum likes what we are doing and also likes our plans and performance. Spectrum thinks this is a good thing for the community." To ease concern among some in the family history industry that the announced sale may break the company up or have other detrimental effects to researchers, Sullivan noted how he expects things to remain largely the same. "The Generations Network remains as an independent company serving the same community as we always have," Sullivan told Eastman. "There will be very few changes in how we run the business and now one of the largest private equity firms in the world is enthusiastic about what we do," Sullivan said. The Generations Network Properties Along with the leading family history resource Ancestry.com and its seven international specialty Web sites localized for each country, The Generations Network owns several additional Web, print and software properties, including: - MyFamily.com
- Rootsweb.com
- Genealogy.com
- Family Tree Maker software
- Ancestry Magazine
- More than 50 book titles
These have combined to make the company one of the largest and most profitable subscription-based online businesses, according to yesterday's announcement. Ancestry.com has more than 2.5 million active members who use the service's subscription-based and free family history  databases to access information about more than 5 billion people from the Web's largest collection of historical source material.  The site uses a proprietary search engine regarded as the most powerful in the industry, allowing full text searching even for common names such as Smith simultaneously within thousands of databases. In past year alone Ancestry.com has added significantly to its already massive online family history collection, with additions since July, 2006 including roughly: - 3.5 million member-uploaded photos, stories and scanned documents
- 330 million new names added to the Ancestry Family Trees™ project
- 3.8 million new family trees
The company is based in Provo, Utah, and employs roughly 500 people. Additional investors in the company include Sorenson Media and EsNet Ltd., both Utah-based companies. Ancestry's Own Ancestry The roots of The Generations Network go back to 1983 when it was founded as a print company by John Sittner. In 1997 Sittner sold the company to CD ROM publishing company Infobases, Inc. headed by Paul Allen (no relation to Microsoft co-founder Paul  Allen), who along with Dan Taggart turned the company into Ancestry.com. According to Allen within one year the company had more than 20,000 subscribers to the then $49.95 service. During Ancestry's first six years Allen saw the company's MyFamily.com service labeled as the "Geocities of Families", in reference to the popular early Web hosting service begun in 1994 and now a Yahoo company. This helped the firm attract large investors and led to MyFamily.com registering over 1 million users in its first 140 days, according to Allen, an all-time record at the time. At the peak of the company's growth as many as 30,000 new user registrations were coming in each day, according to Allen. MyFamily.com is regarded by some as the first social networking Web site, one which began in the 1990s and survived the dot com bust. Allen continued leading the company until 2002, and now operates World Vital Records along with several members of the original Ancestry team. According to Allen, "family is the most important consumer value worldwide." Spectrum Equity Investors Spectrum, which is based in Menlo Park, California and Boston, has been a shareholder in The Generations Network since 2003. Founded in 1994, the private equity firm has also had investments in a variety of companies involved in financial services, media and communications, including: - Demand Media
- NetQuote
- RiskMetrics Group
- iPay Technologies
- Interbank FX
- Seisint / Reed Elsevier PLC
$300M Buys Majority Stake in The Generations Network The Generations Network also operates RootsWeb.com, one of the Web's oldest and most respected free genealogy properties.  While the initial reaction of some RootsWeb users has been to question whether the service will remain free, Sullivan has expressed his wish to keep the service free, telling Eastman "we will strongly support RootsWeb." Sullivan also told Eastman that figures from comScore have shown that as popular as Ancestry.com is, RootsWeb.com receives roughly the same number of visits. Each visitor to RootsWeb is presented with advertising for and links to the mostly subscription-based Ancestry.com, which represents a powerful advertising system The Generations Network is likely to keep in place. Ancestry's Services Ancestry.com has amassed the largest online collection of family history data including both digital images of original source documents and indexes to information available to researchers using traditional methods. Among the major family history resources available online only at Ancestry.com are: - Completely indexed and scanned online U.S. Federal census collection spanning 1790 to 1930
 - Completely indexed and scanned online U.K. census collection spanning 1841 to 1901
- Indexed and scanned passenger lists, including New York spanning 1820 to 1957
- Indexed and scanned World War I and II draft registration cards
Ancestry recently launched a service allowing family historians to use DNA in their research, called DNA.ancestry.com™, and is the publisher of the top-selling family history software package called Family Tree Maker. Additional features of Ancestry.com include: - A digital publishing platform for creating professionally printed family history books, called
 AncestryPress™ - The largest online collection of African-American historical records
The Future of Ancestry In a recent article in the Salt Lake Tribune, Sullivan is quoted as seeing a bright future for The Generations Network. "The board determined that given the strong performance of the company of the past 18 months and the bright prospects ahead of us, now was the time to consider several options," Sullivan said. With yesterday's announcement The Generations Network seems well positioned to build on its already strong position in the family history industry and Internet as a whole. Related Links:
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10:32 am on Oct. 18, 2007 (utc 0)
