I see that Ancestry.com has completed thier 100 Million dollar purchase of Archives.com – and that they lost 6% of their stock value in heavy trading today. Interesting…
The following is from Marketwatch.com:
PROVO, Utah, Aug 17, 2012 (GlobeNewswire via COMTEX): Ancestry.com Inc. ACOM -4.34% today announced the completion of its acquisition of Archives.com, a leading family history website, for approximately $100 million in cash and assumed liabilities.
“Archives.com is a great addition to the Ancestry.com family. It is a fast-growing business that has expanded the addressable family history market through a simple and affordable approach,” said Tim Sullivan, President and Chief Executive Officer of Ancestry.com. “We are excited to increase our ability to help more individuals discover their family history.”
Archives.com was owned and operated by Inflection LLC, a Silicon Valley-based technology company. Since Archives.com‘s launch in January 2010, the site has rapidly grown to more than 440,000 paying subscribers who pay approximately $39.95 a year. Archives.com offers access to over 2.2 billion historical records, including birth records, obituaries, immigration and passenger lists, historical newspapers, as well as U.S. and U.K. Censuses.
Ancestry.com plans to operate Archives.com separately, retaining its brand and website. Many Inflection employees, including key marketing, product and engineering executives, will join the Ancestry.com team.
And they are going to charge members of Ancestry.com to use that too (last I read anyway).
If Ancestry keeps gobbling up all their competitors, it may soon be time for some anti-trust action.
I did not plan to subscribe to Archives.com again, as (at least for me) they had very few records that were unique to them. Most of what I could find there could be found on Ancestry (to which I subscribe) or on free sites.
This is very bad news…….
I wonder how much it would cost to get memberships to all these companies that have genealogy databases, probably close to $2000 a year at the rates that are published. I would think that if you subscribed to ancestry, you ought to at least get a discount to their other sites, probably not though.
So how is going to help genealogical researchers?