Ancestry.com sells for $1.6 billion

[iowadawg]

A European private equity firm will pay a 10% premium for the genealogy and family tree titan.

http://money.msn.com/top-stocks/post.aspx?post=ed4df8a0-0ba0-4287-b369-10b1aed6f1ee

 

[webdomain]

Incredible.

 

[iowadawg]

Probably very little as it was not the domain only they bought, but the business.

 

[lll]

That's a lot of money :\

 

[www.AmCy.org]

These valuations are ridiculous. Reminds me of the Internet boom of the late 90's. Companies that make no money AND are burning millions per month are selling for billions. CRAZY.

 

[lothos]

These valuations are ridiculous. Reminds me of the Internet boom of the late 90's. Companies that make no money AND are burning millions per month are selling for billions. CRAZY.

Ancestry.com makes 400 million dollars a year.

 

[www.AmCy.org]

Ancestry.com makes 400 million dollars a year.

I'll bet my balls they are still cash flow negative

 

[lothos]

I'll bet my balls they are still cash flow negative

Where's my hatchet?

"Last year, it earned $62.9 million, or $1.29 per share, on nearly $400 million in revenue."

 

[hopkism]

I'll bet my balls they are still cash flow negative

Actually that's not true. The company is in very good financial shape. Cash flows are positive, income to sales are positive, the company has no debt and is actually on a three year trend to continue zero debt and increasing positive cash flow.

Ancestry.com sells for $1.6 billion
A European private equity firm will pay a 10% premium for the genealogy and family tree titan.

It's hard to say though that this is a domain name purchase for 1.6 billion... The buyer is receiving so much more than a website and domain name. Think of how valuable the collection of millions upon millions of digital versions of century old documents are.

Not to mention the employees and infrastructure. They likely hold some patents of value.

Consider to that the sale will probably include ancestory.co.uk, ancestory.ca, ancestory.ua, ancestory.de, ancestory.fr, ancestory.it, and ancestory.es. I'm not sure if they own any others...

One final element here is the subscribers. They are quality and targeted, passionate users. That is a valuable thing to have and definitely something worth paying for.

This was a great purchase.

 

[RaiderGirl]

Probably very little as it was not the domain only they bought, but the business.

Exactly.. Interesting how some domainers assume it's only the domain, It comes from being a domainer I guess.

I'll bet my balls they are still cash flow negative

For your sake, I hope your considering gender reassignment.

 

[FPForum]

That sure is a pretty nice chunk of change. The site is really good though. They've put allot of money into it and for those of us who live in the United States, I'm sure you've seen at least one of their commercials.

It's not a bad move to see this going over to a European company..Most paying members on the site are probably in America and most Americans have ancestors that are from somewhere in Europe.

Nice share iowadawg! I bet the previous owner and the small clan that had private shares are taking nice vacations as I type this..lol

 

[hopkism]

That sure is a pretty nice chunk of change. The site is really good though. They've put allot of money into it and for those of us who live in the United States, I'm sure you've seen at least one of their commercials.

It's not a bad move to see this going over to a European company..Most paying members on the site are probably in America and most Americans have ancestors that are from somewhere in Europe.

Nice share iowadawg! I bet the previous owner and the small clan that had private shares are taking nice vacations as I type this..lol

Actually it's been a publicly traded company before the sale for 3 years now. I owned a basket of shares several months ago before selling them.

It had a very affordable IPO, much better than something like FB.

 

[mrstealth99]

Yeah, they have worked really hard to build a "brand" both online in traditional media such as tv. Yahoo had been looking at buying it at one time with the money they got from alibaba.

I think we will see a lot more acquisitions - tripadvisor, maybe hulu

 

[hopkism]

Hey guys, I wrote a quick write up on the Ancestry.com domain on my blog to clear up some misconceptions on the company and value of it. If you would like, maybe we could get some discussion going.