Is The Ancestry.com IPO For You? (ACOM)

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Published
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This week came a filing for online family tree site Ancestry.com.  The company plans to come public in an initial public offering and no formal financial terms were disclosed.  While most internet companies have free and subscriptions revenues, this is a subscription-based online community for researching family history.  This one has applied with NASDAQ to trade under the stock ticker of “ACOM.”

The filing is for up to $75 million in common stock in the IPO.  Ancestry.com is a Provo, Utah-based company.  The trailing 6-months show roughly $99.903 million in revenues and $8.183 million in net income for holders after taxes.  The company’s revenues have increased from $122.6 million in 2004 to $197.6 million in 2008, a compound annual growth rate of 12.7%.

Morgan Stanley and BofA Merrill Lynch are the lead underwriters; co-managers are listed as Jefferies, Piper Jaffray, and BMO Capital Markets.

Believe it or not, this company has almost 1 million paying subscribers globally as of June 30, and its registered users have created over 11 million family trees containing more than 1.1 billion profiles.  The company is beginning to deploy tools and technologies to facilitate social networking and crowd sourcing to provide subscribers with an expanding family history collaboration network.

Unfortunately without terms and without fully diluted shares, this one is fairly hard to evaluate for growth and value per share.  If you wish to do further research on your own, here is that full SEC filing.

JON C. OGG
AUGUST 5, 2009

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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