I guess you 
could class London-based private equity firm Permira Advisers LLP as ‘British’. In which case we have no difficulty in reporting that they have just bought Ancestry.com for $1.6b – a 10% premium on Friday’s closing value. They claim to be ‘the world’s largest family history site’ with over 2m users. Ancestry had revenues of $400m and profits of $62.9m in 2011. Revenues grew by 18% yoy in Q2 2012.
Last month Ancestry.com bought 1000memories which converts old photos into digital form. Although I seem to handle that quite simply with my old scanner!
We have a family member who is a great ancestry.com fan. Actually the subscription model is one that we like greatly. He keeps trying to get me to join so I can add my ‘branch’ of the family. But you have to pay…Once you get hooked it is really difficult to abandon all that research so you just keep paying the monthly fee. Ancestry.com is already strong in US, UK, Canada and Australia – so Western Europe seems a logical extension.