Bigger genealogy fish Ancestry.com bought the smaller fish, Archives.com, for $100 million.

While Archives offers subscribers access to over two billion historical records, Ancestry offers nine billion; Archives has 380,000 customers against Ancestry's 1.8 million.

Reportedly, the takeover is not a hostile one. Archives.com CEO and founder Mathew Monahan said the two companies harbor "complementary" views regarding their market, and admire each others' work. The plan is to maintain the two websites separately but rearrange the employee hierarchy.

The following is purely speculation, but the merger may have something to do with the fact that the smaller competitor, Archives, “teamed with the U.S. National Archives to provide free digital access to the recently released 1940 U.S. Census,” according to the Associated Press (News - Alert).

This is a pretty big deal. The 1940 census contains information on over 132 million people. Privacy advocates like the ACLU worry that public access to this information could conceivably become "intrusive" if used improperly. To the partial relief of those worried about how the information could potentially aid identity thieves, the archive will not include Social Security numbers or birthdates.

When the National Archives first posted access to these archives, their site got jammed with 22.5 million hits in the first three years, rendering the site virtually inoperable. National Archives spokeswoman Susan Cooper said the release contains close to four million images of handwritten census pages. The census archives contain valuable information regarding both The Great Depression and World War II.

It seems likely that from the perspective of Ancestry, the access that their smaller industry contemporary gained to the 1940 census made them enough of a potential threat that, suddenly, it made more sense to absorb them than to allow the future possibility of stiffer competition. Should this theory prove correct, it would not reflect poorly on the business ethics of either company. Rather, it would simply provide another illustrative example of how venture capitalism works.