You may have heard it from the news…the people search industry profits are rising consistently. You have companies like Intelius who has clients who are in the Fortune 500-1000 category. That isn’t a small deal. Various people use services like Intelius to look up long-lost friends, do a background check on somebody or find a specific type of public records. There are various reasons why people are looking for such information.
Do you know that Intelius, which is currently one of the top 100 most visited websites in the world, recently bought the second most visited website of this kind, US Search? It was a rather surprising acquisition and not many mainstream media outlets reported on it (despite of its enormous significance for the people search industry). One person from Intelius described that US Search is a business in a healthy form which means they’re consistently getting more profitable.
Now, the main competitor of Intelius and US Search (which are the same company basically) are PeopleFinders and WhitePages. PeopleFinders is also a very healthy business which grew from 9-10 to over 50 employees in 2009 alone. Whitepages is in the top 100 most visited websites in the world. They took quite a hit when Intelius acquired US Search because Whitepages was basically an ‘affiliate’ to US Search and (according to many people) a big percentage of their revenue came from there. After the acquisition, I now see that WhitePages partnered with PeopleFinders and offer their services as a ‘premium’ for the free people search results they have.
Maybe the ultimate proof of the profitability of the people search industry are MyLife and Classmates, 2 companies who say they specialize in people search (this is far from the truth). In fact, they’re nothing more than a website like Facebook, the only difference is that you have to pay here for membership, on Facebook you get all features for free. MyLife and Classmates promise to help you reconnect with friends with social networking but their whole social network is smaller and more expensive overall. I’ve noticed that in big industries there are a lot of deceptive companies like these 2 who somehow get away with some small lawsuits. They will fail sooner or later, though.
I leave you to make the final decision ultimately. This whole industry seems to have a huge potential and only the people who will realize the potential can reap the biggest rewards.
Learn more about the people search industry by visiting this website on how to find people for free, FinderMind.com.