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Our mission is to help everyone discover, preserve and share their family history.
Ancestry.com LLC is the world’s largest online resource for family history with approximately 2.7 million paying subscribers across all family history sites. Since starting as a publishing company in 1983, we have been a leader in the family history market for over 30 years and have helped pioneer the market for online family history research. We believe that most people have a fundamental desire to understand who they are and from where they came, and that anyone interested in discovering, preserving and sharing their family history is a potential user of Ancestry.com. We strive to make our service valuable to individuals ranging from the most committed family historians to those taking their first steps towards satisfying their curiosity about their family stories.
The foundation of our service is an extensive and unique collection of billions of historical records that we have digitized, indexed and put online since 1996. We have developed efficient and proprietary systems for digitizing handwritten historical documents, and have established relationships with national, state and local government archives, historical societies, religious institutions and private collectors of historical content around the world. These digital records and documents, combined with our proprietary online search technologies and tools, enable our subscribers to research their family history, build their family trees and make meaningful discoveries about the lives of their ancestors.
We have built the world’s largest online community of people interested in their family histories, and we believe that this network is highly valuable to our subscribers. Our community is a large and growing source of user-generated content uniquely focused on family history. Our registered users have created more than 60 million family trees containing more than 6 billion profiles. They have uploaded and attached to their trees over 200 million photographs, scanned documents and written stories. This growing pool of user-generated content adds color and context to the family histories assembled from the digitized historical documents found on Ancestry.com. Our subscribers also have attached to their trees over 3 billion records from our company-acquired content collection, a process that is helping further organize this collection by associating specific records with people in family trees.
In addition, we are beginning to deploy tools and technologies to facilitate social networking and crowd sourcing, a means of leveraging collaborative efforts. These tools and technologies are intended to provide our subscribers with an expanding family history collaboration network in which insights and discoveries are shared by relatives, distant and close. Our service also provides a platform from which our subscribers can share their stories. Subscribers can invite family and friends to help build their family trees, add personal memories and upload photographs and stories of their own.
We provide ongoing value to our subscribers by regularly adding new historical content, enhancing our websites with new tools and features and enabling greater collaboration among our users through the growth of our global community. Our plan to achieve long-term and sustainable growth is to increase our subscriber base in the United States and around the world by serving our loyal base of existing subscribers and by attracting new subscribers. Our revenues have increased from $166 million in 2007 to $562 million in 2013. The company is majority owned by Permira funds, along with certain minority co-investors.