Well, to be more precise, I own a little piece of Ancestry.com (ACOM). I decided to make an investment today into Ancestry.com for a number of reasons, but unfortunately none of them have anything to do with in-depth stock market research. On of the reasons was I'm always looking for a cheap gimmick to base a post on, and this gives me something interesting to write about (this is the first fresh idea I've had in a long time). Being a stock owner also gives me a good reason to visit Salt Lake City every year to attend the annual shareholder's meeting (I guess I should say Provo). Wouldn't it be fun to complain about Ancestry's search function in person during a shareholder meeting instead of just using comments on their blog?
I've checked out analysts opinions of the company and they are tepid at best. This article in the New York Times basically shows that while there are a large number of subscribers, about half cancel their account every year. This means they must aggressively acquire new customers every year to replace the old just to maintain the numbers - costly churning like this makes it hard to grow revenue and earning (here's another interesting article in BusinessWeek). On the plus side we are still at the beginning of the baby boomer retirement tsunami, and WE are going to need something stimulating to do when we have all that time on our hands.
Is it a good investment? I have no idea, but it's going to be fun watching it all happen. Being a public company means Ancestry.com will have to behave a bit differently from when they were closely held. Not only will the company have to deal with all of the search function complainers, but they will also have to deal with analysts and reporters digging into the performance of the business.
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