Spock, ZoomInfo, and Wink presented at tonight’s SearchSig. The event was hosted by Google on its Mountain View campus, and moderated by Michael Arrington of TechCrunch. Each startup presented their own vision of personal search, with Spock collecting all sorts of personal information from public Internet sites, ZoomInfo crawling various directories and corporate sites in order to create a business-oriented people directory, while Wink is also parsing all sorts of public sites in order to aggregate a single profile, which they then allow the user to own.
If you like Arrington as TechCrunch writer, you’d definitely love him as panel moderator. He’s not confrontational, but he definitely cuts through marketing bs in order to get his questions answered. All participants kinda stumbled around monetization, but then agreed that currently they maintain somewhere between $1.50 and $2.00 CPM. ZoomInfo also sells premium subscriptions to some of the business-related information, and currently is profitable.
Not too many people are sure how to monetize the people search – you generally can show some contextual ads on the celebrity profiles, since you roughly know what the visitors are looking for, but search for a relatively generic name (your former coworker, classmate, etc.), and that opportunity is hardly monetizable. The Wink demo was particularly attesting to this, as the CEO was browsing the site, the only contextual ads that would show up on the right would be dating ads served by Google AdSense.
At the same time, many agreed the opportunity is there – anywhere between 1.5 billion and 2 billion searches a month are for people. If you saw Dustin’s slide from Facebook tech tasting, you know that Facebook alone generates 600 million searches a month (with actual share of people searches not being disclosed). Spock seemed to think it’s going to be great to allow people to tag other people, and Arrington pressured them into the scenario when someone would be tagged as “pedophile” or “unethical”, at which point the CEO did a little of arm-waving, referring to the “community process”. I want to see that tested when thousands of diggers would get a chance to tag anybody employed with RIAA/MPAA, or thousands of slashdotters get to tag an employee of SCO or Microsoft. It didn’t look like anybody had any good idea on dealing with tag spam, malicious tagging, or misrepresentation by claiming someone’s profile on Wink or Spock.
Overall, looks like the industry is in fairly early stage, with more questions than answers. Pressured by big search engines from one end, and social networks from another, people search engines need to come up with some winning value proposition that makes customers either reach for their credit card, or spend more time on the engines themselves, consuming some ads meanwhile.
