WebProNews

You may or may not know about The Generations Network, but one of its properties has been a huge help to amateur and professional genealogists everywhere.  And now Ancestry.com, along with the rest of The Generations Network’s properties, has a new owner: Spectrum Equity Investors.

Spectrum didn’t perform an outright acquisition; instead, Spectrum used $300 million to buy a majority interest.  By all accounts, that’s a favorable price, as Business.com sold for $350 million due mostly to its domain name.

In contrast, comScore suggests that the whole of The Generations Network receives 8.2 million unique visitors per month.  Also, The Generations Network claims to have over 900,000 paying subscribers, and Michael Arrington states that it earns around $150 million in revenue per year.

That’s the business side, then.  So what will this deal mean to the average Ancestry.com user?  Nothing bad, from the looks of things.  Official statements only made vague mentions of growth, market share, and new products and services, and industry experts at both the Genealogy Insider and Eastman’s Online Genealogy Newsletter seem unconcerned by the buyout.

Look for more developments on this front, however - the move does appear to point to something bigger.