Spock, Yasni, 123people -- Who's Got the People Search Buzz? [UPDATED]

Over the last half year, the people search crowd have been slugging it out, if our experience at BNET is any indication. Back in October, we had a chat with Spock.com co-founder Jay Bhatti, at the company’s request, the emphasis being its growing nature. Then during the winter, Yasni.com founder Steffen Rühl wanted a conversation, also to discuss the company’s growth — or, as I found from looking at the data, growth still waiting to happen. Now 123people.com has asked for a conversation, citing statistics that show it the leader. However, when I checked the referenced sources, the numbers came to only a fraction of what the company claimed. So perhaps instead of another Q&A, it might make sense to sort through the comparative numbers of many of the people search engines: Spock, Yasni, 123people, iSearch.com, Wink.com, and Pipl.com. (Be sure to check the updates at the bottom.)

I decided to look on two comparative systems: Compete.com and Quantcast.com, because each has been cited by at least one of the engines. We’ll start with Compete and look at Spock, 123people, iSearch, Wink, and Yasni.

Note that Compete has a low sample size for Yasni, which is why I’m also including a graph from Quantcast, which directly measure’s Yasni’s traffic:

Right away you can start to see the difficulties in trying to rank any sites: traffic estimations. Yasni is the only site to my knowledge providing a verifiable count. As Rühl said back in December (though the Q&A appeared in January), if his site could reach 500,000 monthly unique users by the middle of 2009, he’d consider the progress successful. Global use of the site has maxed at 299,000 in a month, meaning that his company has a significant way to go.

Spock’s Bhatti had said that their traffic was growing by 25 percent a month. Both Compete and Quantcast would suggest otherwise, at least for many months. Traffic has started to grow again, but we see the limitations of estimations given that one site pegs them at over 2 million unique visitors and another has them at roughly 1.3 million.

A 123people PR representative had emailed me last week, claiming that the site “receives over 16 million unique visitors per month.” Quantcast says that it doesn’t have enough data to compute a global traffic figure, but 123people suggested that I check on Compete or Alexa. Looking at the former, as you can see by the graph, the traffic was about 766,000 unique visitors in April, meaning that the company-supplied number is inflated by about 21 times. Oops.

Bhatti said that Spock’s serious competition was from iSearch, Wink, and Pipl, so here’s a graph with them:

And, given the apples-to-apples comparative differences between Compete and Quantcast, here’s a graph from the latter showing Spock, Yasni, and Pipl.

From this view, Spock and Pipl are roughly equivalent, suggesting that a rough order might put Spock first, follwed (possibly closely) by Pipl, with other people search players significantly behind. And just to be thorough, here’s a graph from Alexa:

In this view, Spock is still ahead, though second place is a tougher call. Unfortunately, Alexa puts everything into estimates of percentages of global page views, and there’s no way to directly compare and see whose numbers might seem wildly off.

[UPDATE: I received an email from MyLife.com -- the result of Reunion.com purchasing Wink last fall and rebranding itself. The rep from the site said that ComScore pegged them at 15 million unique visitors a month. Since I don't have access to ComScore data other than what comes out in press releases, I went to both Compete and Quantcast and checked MyLife's unique visitor numbers, which were, respectively, about 8.3 million and 2.1 million in April.

Furthermore, Compete showed subdomains, all of whose traffic was aggregated. The www.mylife.com domain represented the largest portion at about 5.7 million and the second biggest amount, almost 2.5 million, was affiliates.mylife.com. That further makes me wonder whether some number of people are being funneled through the subdomain via partners and, thus, effectively double-counted. Then the other sites include mailservice.mylife.com and help.mylife.com, which, I'd think, would only be visited by people going to the main site. So I'm guessing that the real number is between 2 and 5 million, still suggesting that MyLife is ahead even of Spock by some significant amount. When I double checked Spock's subdomains in Compete.com, all but a tiny amount of traffic was counted under the main site.]

[YET ANOTHER UPDATE: I heard from yet another people search company -- suggesting ample evidence that this is a category screaming for consolidation. In this case, it's PeopleFinders.com, which positions itself as having a 40 year history of records to give some additional accuracy and/or perspective. Congratulations to the PR person for not claiming numbers. I did check both Compete and Quantcast. The former estimated the April unique user traffic as 2.8 million, while the latter had a "rough estimate" of 3.5 million. In any case, that makes it sound as though PeopleFinders is right in there with Spock and possibly a little ahead. That would make the top few roughly:

1. MyLife
2. PeopleFinders
3. Spock

]

[AND STILL ONE MORE UPDATE: I swear, at this rate I'm going to assume that there are more people search sites than there are people to use them. Just heard from Zoominfo.com. Compete listed its April traffic as around 1.7 million. Quantcast has 2.9 million in the US, 4.2 million globally, but that's directly measured and not estimated. So let's rework the listing:

1. MyLife
2. Zoominfo
3. Either PeopleFinders or Spock

Hopefully that will be it. And if not, the companies should know where to find me -- after all, that's their business.]