Monetizing People Search: MyLife.com CEO Jeff Tinsley (Part 6)

SM: What is the benefit of having a paid personal profile?

JT: By having a profile you can get access to the actual directory for your own benefit and be notified when people search for you. The demand for people finding each other is so huge it is shocking. The people who have gone out and found people quickly realize that we are the best at finding people. We have everyone in one place.

SM: How do you resolve duplicates? I went to your site and did a search for my name, and it came back with 13 results. All of them are profiles of me.

JT: It is a lot of work. We have over 1 billion records. The best records are probably at the top. We do a lot of work to pull this information together. The hardest work we have been doing is pulling the right kinds of records together. We want to tie the correct public record to the correct social profile and enhance that with user- generated data. We are not perfect at it, but we do have enhanced profiles from over 205 million individual adults in the United States alone. Those are clean base records of individuals which have gone through a painstaking process to ensure they are correct.

SM: How do people learn about MyLife? Do you do advertising?

JT: Fortunately, as we have a business that generates profit, we have been able to fund organic growth. We have been able to use the capital to advertise quite a bit in the marketplace. We get a lot of word of mouth and traffic from Google that we do not have to pay for. We run a lot of ads on the Internet and a lot of display. We have run a lot of Google AdWords as well.

You can even find us on WhitePages. If you do a search there you will see us below. We are willing to spend a lot of money to generate traffic and subscribers. We will spend more than $30 million in marketing this year.

SM: Where do you advertise?

JT: We are lucky in that we can advertise everywhere. We do advertise in the obvious spots where we know people are looking for people. That is the case with WhitePages and Google when people type in names. We have a mass marketing option which in the next three weeks will include television. We are going to have a campaign to let people know about the service.

We are able to fuel growth in this business because we generate a profit. In 2008 we grew 90% to $46 million in revenue. Last year we grew 41% to $63 million even though the consumer market environment was really tough. Now things are really picking up in the business because the service is better than ever.

SM: So you increased revenues by 41% to $63 million last year?

JT: We did. That was a tough year when a lot of people were down. We were fortunate enough to keep growing.

SM: Are you public?

JT: No. We raised capital a few years ago from Oak Investment Partners. We raised $25 million in our Series A. Fortunately, by the time we were interested in raising capital we had scaled the business and were growing very well organically.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Monetizing People Search: MyLife.com CEO Jeff Tinsley
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