Anytime a new web 2.0 service launches, bloggers blog like there’s no tomorrow, and news organization can’t write enough about it.
That’s what happened last week with the unveiling of Spock, a self-proclaimed “people specific search engine,” which crawls the web, including My Space profiles and the like, for information on search subjects. But as the media show began, another site was watching quietly in the wings: WhitePages.com, at more than 10 years old perhaps the mother of all people specific search sites.
With Spock, and rivals Wink, Pipl, and PeekYou, grabbing the spotlight, WhitePages is sprucing itself up in the hope of gaining a little web 2.0 notoriety for itself. This week it announced that it will include work-related information alongside the residential listings it serves up when users search on someone’s name. Late last month it took the wraps off a fee-based service that provides the email addresses of some search subjects. And in October it plans to sexy up its somewhat dated phone directory–style format and compete directly with Spock and its ilk by adding images, blog mentions, and web indexing to the data it provides.
“They need to refresh the presentation of themselves,” said Greg Sterling, analyst with Sterling Market Intelligence. “They are due for an upgrade. It’s like a car that’s been selling well but is in need of a redesign.”
As Mr. Sterling suggests, WhitePages has something its younger, flashier competitors may lack: a solid user base. The site gets 23 million unique visitors a month, according to comScore, and it powers an average of 150 million searches per month, numbers Mr. Sterling called “significant.” WhitePages, he said, is more reliable and extensive than the newbies in the field. Its database of U.S. residents should include information on about 160 million people by the end of the year, said founder and CEO Alex Algard, and it already features contact information for 50 percent of the U.S. adult population and is trying to reach 70 percent coverage by the first quarter of 2008.
More importantly, perhaps, WhitePages “has revenues that will make these [web 2.0 startups] jealous,” said Mr. Sterling. The company, which makes money from advertisers (and hopes to add to that with fee-based services), had $52 million in revenues for the year 2006, and revenues are growing approximately 50 percent annually, according to Mr. Algard. This year WhitePages expects to make $70 million in revenues, and right from the start it’s been cash-flow positive and profitable, said Mr. Algard, who wouldn’t specify annual profits but said they’re growing faster than revenues.
And though WhitePages lacks the dynamic look and feel of the new sites, Mr. Sterling thinks it can use its 411.com property as a basis for a makeover.
“411.com has more of a sizzle in the world of popular culture,” he said. WhitePages also owns Address.com, PhoneNumber.com, and WhitePages.ca.
WhitePages’ e-mail service costs $0.95 per address. It’s similar to the 411 assistance help line, which offers telephone numbers of people and businesses for an average fee of $1.57. WhitePages currently has a database of 32 million email listings, said Algard, which it gathers by crawling the web. The work listings introduced Monday include a phone number, street address, company name, and job title. WhitePages builds this database with the help of listings from phone companies, marketing lists, and data compiled by crawling the Web. The site has 17.8 million such listings, according to Mr. Algard. The company is also introducing age information this month.