Monetizing People Search: MyLife.com CEO Jeff Tinsley (Part 5)

SM: I have to believe that you could tell us what the top five reasons people pay to search on your site are.

JT: Very broadly, the two primary reasons people search are because they want more information about a person and they want to get in touch with a person. About 60% of our subscriptions are people trying to get information about others. Most of the searches on our site are by name. We have fewer searches to find people that are related to companies.

SM: What is your pricing model?

JT: It is a subscription model. The average initial transaction is in the $65 range. Subscriptions are a bit more than that at $90 a year. LinkedIn charges a lot of money to get access to its very valuable database, but we definitely have people using our service to find professionals at a much more reasonable cost. We are targeting the broad based consumer market.

SM: That is a substantial amount of money for consumers wanting to get reacquainted.

JT: It is. We find that people join because they want to get access to the directory and get more information about people, which accounts for 60% of the business. The other 40% of our transaction is to provide a service that tells our subscribers when somebody is searching for them as well as who has already searched for them. Subscribers do get both features with one subscription.

SM: What kind of information is in this database?

JT: We have pulled as much data as we can find. We know where people have lived as well as where they live now. We show them where else people are on the Web. If they have LinkedIn or MySpace accounts, we can tie that to the profile. We hide email address information, but we do allow people to send messages through our blind email messaging system so we do not compromise anyone’s email.

We also find a lot of people contribute information about their lives to the database. We encourage people to put in information of importance. Do you have children? Did you get married? Where did you go to school? We encourage them to put in the important piece of information about your life. We discourage people from inputting the chit chat. The food they ate for lunch or the fact that they just washed their car is not the information that needs to be a part of MyLife profile.

SM: Help me understand the psychology behind what is going on? Why are people interested in keeping this type of profile in a searchable database?

JT: We have surveyed our users on this. First of all, they know that people are constantly looking for others because they are constantly losing touch with others. Part of it is that a huge percentage of the population moves every year. People change email addresses. There are people out there who do want to be found. Not everyone wants to be found, but most people do. They want to make sure that when people do find them that the profile about them is proper and a comprehensive representation of who they are.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Monetizing People Search: MyLife.com CEO Jeff Tinsley
1 2 3 4 5 6 7