People Search: Should You Invest In It?

Have you heard about the people search industry? The truth is, this industry and the main companies are to be making bigger profits consistently. Some companies (Intelius, for example) are or serve clients that are in the Fortune 500-1000 list. People use these people search services to find and reconnect with school buddies / lost members from the family and so on.

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.

You may have heard of WhitePages and PeopleFinders which are now the only decent Intelius competitors (I wouldn’t be surprised to see if the one company acquire the other, something like this happened in the search space where Microsoft acquired Yahoo Search to get a decent chance of competing with Google). Anyway, WhitePages was significantly affected by the US Search acquisition because the majority of Whitepages revenue came from them (by advertisements and referring visitors to get more extensive information the person they’re searching for). Now, when US Search are owned by the main competitor (Intelius), WhitePages partnered with PeopleFinders to offer more extensive results. On the other hand, PeopleFinders is still an ‘independent’ company not owned by any third party and is in the same category as Intelius in offer public record search services.

Companies like Classmates and MyLife are great examples of the potential of the people search industry. Not very positive examples, though. These companies, in reality, are nothing more than smaller versions of Facebook. The trick is, they present themselves as a way to reconnect with friends/classmates via social networking. You’ll have to pay to view the profiles of that ‘someone’ you’re searching for. Compare that with Facebook, which has a large database of people all available to contact for free.

Ultimately it’s up to you to decide. There is a big, very big potential in this people search industry and someone needs to become aware of it and invest some money.

Feel free to visit this site on how to find people for free which covers various people search trends & news.