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Spokeo Blog

Spokeo tracks your friends across multiple social networks. This blog talks about the Spokeo news, our experience in entrepreneurship, and our thoughts on where social networks are heading.

Paypal Payment Processor IssuesNovember 9

As you might have noticed, we use Paypal for our payment processor.  What does this mean?  It means that Paypal handles all our transactions and credit card processing.  When you enter your credit card to buy a Spokeo premium account, we pass all that info right to Paypal, and then Paypal takes care of the rest.  Paypal (an Ebay company) is a reputable brand known for their data security, so we chose Paypal for that extra peace of mind.

Paypal has been experiencing a big problem since Thursday (11/6), and they are not processing payments correctly for all their merchants (yup, this is a big problem affecting a lot of people).  Since we don’t store any of our customers’ financial info, there’s nothing we can do at the moment other than to wait for Paypal’s resolution.  We have been talking to Paypal since Friday morning to resolve this issue, but Paypal has yet to come up a solution. 

We are giving all affected customers complimentary premium accounts right now, so most of you should not notice any problem or service hiccup.  That said, if you notice anything wrong, please let us know right away, and we will resolve all issues as soon as Paypal fixes their problems.  Thank you for your patience and understanding.

Ad Model vs. Premium ModelOctober 6

As most of you would agree, the Web 2.0 era is long over.  Web 2.0 was categorized by ad-based business models.  Everything has to be free, and advertisers would somehow pay the bills.  We entrepreneurs chased after user counts, and the ad dollars were assumed to flow in.

We started Spokeo with the standard "Google AdSense" ad model.  We thought that if we’ve built something cool that people like, we would earn enough to cover our operations and someone would buy us out.  This sounds naive, but that’s what we were dreaming, and I bet that’s what every TechCrunch reader was thinking back in 2006.

The pursuit of user counts works fine if the ad CPM (cost per thousand impressions) stays at the 2005 level.  Back then, advertisers hadn’t figured out that user-generated content converts poorly into sales, so these advertisers paid more for the benefits of the doubt.  Take Google as an example.  Google paid MySpace $900 million dollars in 2006 to take care of MySpace’s ad inventory, and all Google got in return is the lesson that user-generated content doesn’t monetize.  Advertisers aren’t dumb, and they won’t pay for ads that don’t work forever.  CPM for user-generated content took a nose dive around 2007, and all Web 2.0 sites with ad-driven business models were affected.

Spokeo cannot escape this fallout.  We ran ads for 3 months in the beginning of 2008, and we quickly realized that even if we grow the traffic by 100 times, we

Spokeo is down due to data center’s power outageSeptember 23

Spokeo has been down since 4am PST this morning due to the power outage at our data center.  This power outage has affected many sites, and our data center provider is fixing this problem right now.  Spokeo should be back online this morning. 

Update: The power at our data center is back up after 6 hours of outage, so Spokeo is up and running now.

Recent unplanned downtimeAugust 31

If you’ve been trying to check Spokeo People Search or our blog recently, you may have been told that it was down.  Unfortunately, this weekend, our ISP has been having a lot of technical issues which directly affected us.  We’re sorry for this recent extended downtime and will be working with our ISP to ensure that this does not happen again. 

Since then, we have moved our blog to another ISP to prevent this from happening again.  Thanks for your understanding and have a great Labor Day!

People search is “the new black”August 12

Remember when you first googled yourself? You didn’t know want to expect, but you’ll have to admit that it was pretty darn cool to see yourself as a result.  You were, in fact, someone who Goggle felt important enough to index and share to the world. But after you goggled yourself (and of course others) you came to realize that there wasn’t much to it. Googling yourself and others became boring. There was no excitement in finding out what you likely already knew about yourself and others: college attended, a photo here or there, company employment roster, formerly authored school report, etc.

Where was all the "good stuff?"

The "good stuff" was being mined by people search companies like Spokeo People Search. Today, companies like this allow users to simply import their email contacts and obtain deep, comprehensive results. Full of photos, videos, blogs, and shopping lists, Spokeo People Search gives you true insight into someone’s lifestyle without jeopardizing privacy norms.  Check it out on Spokeo.com.

In essence, search has changed. Googling yourself and others has evolved into a specialized people search.

The great Benjamin Disraeli once said "Change is inevitable. Change is constant."  Searching yourself and others will never quite be the same.