Ancestry.com Inc. Reports Third Quarter 2011 Financial Results

...
In the press release, Ancestry.com Inc. Reports Third Quarter 2011 Financial Results, the company highlights the financial results and the content additions made on the website. 

The highlights about subscribers included:

1)  Subscribers totaled 1,701,000 as of September 30, 2011, growth of 24% from the end of the third quarter of 2010 and 2% since the end of the second quarter of 2011.

2)  Gross subscriber additions were 274,000 in the third quarter of 2011, compared to 252,000 in the third quarter of 2010 and 322,000 in the second quarter of 2011.

3)  Monthly churn was 4.2% in the third quarter of 2011, compared to 4.0% in the third quarter of 2010 and 4.6% in the second quarter of 2011.

The subscriber totals continue to steadily grow;  in the third quarter they averaged 91,000 new subscribers per month.  However, the monthly churn rate continues to be about 4%,  This means that Ancestry.com loses about 70,000 customers each month...and must replace those and add more to increase their subscription count.  It's no wonder that they advertise so much!

The highlights about website content included:

1)  Launched 61 content collections during the quarter with records from 9 countries. Collections of note include:

** California Voter Registers, 1866-1898, with over 3.6 million records;
**  U.S. School Yearbooks, 100 million records added to the yearbook collection;
**  The Sons of the American Revolution Membership Applications, 1889-1970;
**  The 1930 Mexico National Census, the most comprehensive publicly available Mexican census;
**  Our largest ever Irish collection with over 25 million vital records, including civil registration, baptism, marriage and burial records; and
**  German World War I casualty lists from 1914-1917, encompassing more than 5.2 million records.

2) Ancestry.com has reached an agreement with the Landesarchiv Berlin (State Archives in Berlin) to digitize a collection of German vital records. This is part of a program to aggregate German records from 1875 to 1920, an important period in German history and a time of significant immigration to the United States.

3)  In August, Ancestry.com was the first entity to formally place an order for the 1940 Census images with the National Archives and Records Administration. When complete, more than 3.8 million original document images containing 130 million-plus records should be available to search by more than 45 fields, including name, gender, race, street address, county and state, and parents' places of birth. It is expected to be Ancestry.com's most comprehensively indexed set of historical records to date.

4)  Launched Family Tree Maker (FTM) 2012 with TreeSync^TM, which enables users to easily bring their desktop trees online to share with invited guests, engage with the broader community and continue their research from wherever they are. Bringing these incremental trees online will also benefit the overall Ancestry community by allowing additional collaboration using data previously stored only on individual desktops.

5)  Released a beta version of the Ancestry Content Publisher platform, which provides a suite of free tools that enables small- to mid-size archives - such as libraries and genealogical societies - to preserve their historical documents online while providing digital access to the materials in their collections to their users and Ancestry.com subscribers.

From the item 3) above, it appears that Ancestry.com will purchase the 1940 U.S. Census images and will not be the "host" for the National Archives.  I'm not surprised! 

The financial reports tell me, as an interested observer, that Ancestry.com is a stable and profitable company thriving in a weak economy, while adding significant new content and products on a regular basis. 

What do you see in this report that I've missed?

Hat tip to Joel Weintraub for the link!