Monetizing People Search: MyLife.com CEO Jeff Tinsley (Part 4)

SM: Essentially, you have created a search engine for people where you crawl the Web and put information together?

JT: Correct. You can run a search in one place to get information about anyone. You can also find your own record and find out who has been searching for you. Some people who search for you may even leave you messages. We have done all the hard work of putting this information in place.

Most people do not know that the people search market is enormous and that nobody owns it. There are 7 billion searches in the United States for people each month. The market is very fragmented. People search on Google, Facebook, MySpace and WhitePages. Google, however, is not great at finding information about people. They are very good at finding documents and things like that.

Facebook and the social networks are not the answer, either. I do not necessarily want to become someone’s friend in order to know more about them or where I can find them. The guys like WhitePages have a lot of traffic, but there is not a lot of information about people. They provide addresses and phone numbers, but you need to have a general idea of where [the person you are looking for] is first.

SM: Who subscribes to your service?

JT: We are registering 1.5 million to 2 million new people each month. It is a freemium model. We are not attracting kids; 95% of our audience is at least 25. Close to 70% are over 35 and 60% of the registered user base is female. The most valuable customer is a female over 35 years old.

SM: Why are they coming to you?

JT: There really is not a reason to search in multiple places if you are looking for someone because we have everyone in one place. They have come into the service to find ex-coworkers and classmates or people they want to hire. They may be looking for a relationship or relatives. It is a really broad people search function. The other service that draws a lot of people to our site is our ‘whose searching for you’ feature. We can tell you who has been looking for you, even if it was years ago.

SM: Who is willing to pay for this?

JT: A lot of people. A lot of the services on the site are free, but then to get more details on the service you need to have a premium subscription. We have just under 1 million paying, active subscribers.

SM: What is the profile of your paying customers?

JT: The types of people and their reasons are very broad. Some people are using it for career background searches. Others are using to get reacquainted with long-lost friends. Others are dating through our service. We have asked our customers how they are using it, and the answer has come back in very, very broad patterns. That is one of the things I actually like about our business.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Monetizing People Search: MyLife.com CEO Jeff Tinsley
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