Ancestry Increases Subscriber Base by 31%

Now that Ancestry.com Inc. is a pub­lic com­pa­ny (ACOM: Google Finance), they are required to divulge more infor­ma­tion about their per­for­mance than they did as a pri­vate ven­ture.

For them, the news is good. Ear­li­er this week, they announced their year 2010 fig­ures, which includ­ed notably sub­scriber growth of 31% year-over-year and a 34% increase in rev­enue year-over-year. (At the end of Decem­ber there were 1,395,000 paid sub­scribers of Ancestry.com.) Total rev­enue for the year was $300.9 mil­lion. EBITDA (earn­ings before income tax, depre­ci­a­tion, and amor­ti­za­tion) was $101 mil­lion.

Month­ly churn (mem­ber­ship turnover) is 3.9%, which is basi­cal­ly equiv­a­lent to the 3.6% in the fourth quar­ter of 2009, and the 4.0% in the third quar­ter of 2010.

For 2011, Ances­try expects to have 1,700,000 t0 1,725,000 sub­scribers and bring in rev­enues of $370 — $375 mil­lion, lead­ing to an EBITDA of $125 — $130 mil­lion.

These are very healthy num­bers and bode well for the geneal­o­gy indus­try. While a lot of us have some qualms about the size of Ances­try, as well as some of its busi­ness prac­tices, it’s still impor­tant that this major play­er is healthy and con­tin­u­ing to invest in dig­i­ti­za­tion and tech­nol­o­gy.