Ancestry.com and Google Marriage?

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ancestry.com

Although I don’t see it, perhaps it is from my perspective of genealogy and family history rather than looking at it from the information services perspective.

Today’s article over at The Street – entitled Ancestry.com’s Growth May Attract a Suitor – does a good review of Ancestry.com’s growth in terms of revenue, subscribers and profits. It also spectulates that Ancestry.com is ripe for the picking especially from a company like Google which is sitting on $32 billion in cash.

I also wonder how much of the speculation is this: one of the co-founders of Google, Sergey Brin, has a connection in the genealogy and family history industry with his wife Anne Wojcicki being one of the founders of the genealogy DNA company 23andMe.

Disclosure: please see Disclosure Statements for more information on my material connection with Ancestry.com and other genealogy vendors.

©2010, copyright Thomas MacEntee

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5 thoughts on “Ancestry.com and Google Marriage?”

  1. I’ve come to appreciate Ancestry.com for archiving records such as the tattered Gretna Green, Scotland records that took 6 months to flatten out before they could be scanned.

    Google has done a marvelous job with Google Books, Google Maps, etc.

    It would be a perfect match if you ask me.

  2. Even form an information services perspective, this would be a unique move for Google to make. Such a pairing doesn’t find any equivalents in Google’s previous acquisitions. Compare this chart:

    http://www.scores.org/graphics/google/

    In this list you’ll find no high-premium niche content companies with a subscription model. Merely the energy it would take to switch Ancestry.com’s business model, as I think would be imperative for Google, would be enormous. Does Google want to invest so much energy in such an effort? Unlikely.

    I would personally like to see such a deal done (the search function at ancestry.com has a personal hatred of me, I know it). However, I have difficulty seeing how this match is truly a no-brainer, as the referred article suggests.

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