Ancestry.com reveals company vitals

Ancestry.com Inc. on August 3 filed a preliminary registration statement with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. This is preliminary to issuing an initial public offering with the objective of raising $75 million. Together with appendices the document is more than 150 pages of financial tables and legalese; mostly not exciting reading for a genealogist.

Some items of interest I picked up in a first scan:

From the company overview statement:
Ancestry.com is the world’s largest online resource for family history, with almost one million paying subscribers around the world as of June 30, 2009.
Over the past three years, registered users have created over 11 million family trees containing more than 1.1 billion profiles. They have uploaded and attached to their trees over 22 million photographs, scanned documents, written stories and audio clips.
Revenues have increased from $122.6 million in 2004 to $197.6 million in 2008, a compound annual growth rate of 12.7%.

Competitive advantage:
Approximately 45% of subscribers have been with the company continuously for more than two years as of June 30, 2009. In the six months ended June 2009, visitors to the company websites spent an average of 19.1 minutes on their websites per usage day.

Financials:
Total revenues for the company in 2008 were $197,591.000. The total cost of revenues was $43,614,000. The total operating expenses were $138,257,000, the largest single component of which was $52,341,000 for advertising and marketing.

Transcription:
In 2008 Beijing Formax, based in Zhongguancun Science Park, Beijing, China, performed a majority of the company's data transcription as measured by cost.

The company considers its competition to be:
• FamilySearch, and its website FamilySearch.org
• Commercial entities, including online genealogical research services, library content distributors, search engines and portals, retailers of books and software related to genealogical research and family tree creation and family history oriented social networking websites.
• Other non-profit entities and organizations, genealogical societies, governments and agencies that may make vital statistics or other records available to the public for free.

Employees and compensation:
As of June 30, 2009, the company had approximately 570 full-time employees and approximately 100 part-time and contingent employees. None of our employees is covered by a collective bargaining agreement.
All but one of the 13 directors and executive officers are male. Their ages range from 33 to 61. Nine are in their 40s.
For 2008 Timothy Sullivan, President and Chief Executive Officer, received total compensation of $ 2,242,482 on a base salary of $ 350,000. total compensation for the other company executives was: Joshua Hanna $1,219,890; Andrew Wait $778,871; David Rinn $620,925; Michael Wolfgramm $473,175.