From his office on the top floor of a Brentwood high-rise, Jeffrey Tinsley has a view of tens of thousands of people who live in Los Angeles’ sprawling Westside. And if any of them want to find any of the others online, Tinsley hopes they come to his Web site.
Reunion.com Inc., a nascent search engine company where Tinsley is chief executive, is a leader in what analysts said is a large but mostly untapped market: people search. While search engines like Google Inc. excel at finding information and Web sites, Reunion focuses on finding people where they are and what they’re up to.
Now, the company is positioning itself to dominate the market thanks to its recent acquisition of Wink.com, a Bay Area startup search site that should catapult Reunion to the upper echelons of the people-search sector.
Reunion searches work this way: Users who type in a query send the company’s technology trolling through public documents, social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook, and other Internet resources. Reunion then compiles all the results on one screen.
“The chance of finding anybody on the Web is greatest here,” said Tinsley, wearing jeans and a beat-up black baseball cap with his company’s name stenciled across the top. “You’re not going to find them on Google. You’re not going to find them on MySpace or Facebook.”
Before it acquired Wink, Reunion had the capability to find about 225 million people online. Now it can sort through more than 700 million. By comparison, people-search engine Spock Networks Inc., a close competitor of Reunion, can search about 500 million profiles.
But while the Wink deal should help Reunion’s reliability, the company can’t yet claim to be the de facto people-search engine on the Web, said Debra Aho Williamson, an analyst with Emarketer.
Williamson said Reunion must still vie with other people-oriented search companies while also dealing with users who go to behemoths like Google as their default choice for search.
Reunion’s trip toward the top hasn’t been without bumps.
The company came under fire over the summer when a search revealed the name of a 4-year-old child. The result came from public records, even though Reunion has a policy against revealing public record data on minors.
Tinsley, who called the incident an “anomaly,” said the company is acting to prevent that from happening again.
Also, three individuals filed a class-action lawsuit in July against Reunion alleging the company engaged in “false and deceptive” marketing practices by sending e-mails that purported to be from other Reunion users inviting the recipient to join.
A federal judge dismissed the lawsuit earlier this month, but the plaintiffs have amended the complaint and refiled it.
Williamson of Emarketer said such lawsuits can dent a company’s credibility with new users. “Negative word of mouth spreads very quickly over the Internet.”
Tinsley declined to comment on the lawsuit.
A new look
As he gave a tour of Reunion’s offices, Tinsley practically bounced with energy. While walking past rows of computer screens, he stopped often to greet workers or quiz them on progress. A sign taped to one wall advised employees to “Take big swings.”
Reunion, which is privately held, expects to bring in $52 million in revenue this year and $100 million next year, of which $20 million to $25 million should be profit, Tinsley said.
The company makes money from advertising and charging a handful of its 50 million registered users for premium services, like the ability to find out who is searching for them.
It’s a long way from Reunion’s startup days in 2002. Tinsley, a Web entrepreneur, decided he wanted to compete with Classmates.com, owned by Woodland Hills-based United Online Inc., for the high school alumni social-networking market.
He bought two relative unknown sites HighSchoolAlumni.com and PlanetAlumni.com for about $1.4 million, using his own money and some pooled from a small group of investors. He then combined the two sites to form Reunion.
Shortly after, Tinsley and his team saw users were searching for people other than high school friends. A light bulb switched on.
“We thought, Wow, why should we be just this high school search site? We should be helping people find everybody on the Web,” he said.
Now that it’s acquired Wink, Reunion plans to change its name to better reflect its specialty.
“Frankly, it’s a change we should have done a long time ago,” Tinsley said. “We want to get away from being a high school classmate search. We’re a general people search now.”
