Q&A with Yasni Founder and CEO Steffen Rühl
Yasni, a big name in people search in such countries as Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, got its start in 2007. When the company saw that roughly 100,000 of its users were from the U.S., it decided to make a push, starting last November, into this country and the U.K. with targeted English-language versions. We chatted with founder and CEO Steffen Rühl back in December, and followed up on one question yesterday, about the experience of expanding a web-based business outward from Europe.
BNET: Yasni.de gets significant traffic -- within the top 2,000 rank as measured by Alexa.com. Spock.com has recently hit those numbers, and Alexa shows Yasni.de as having even more page views. And yet the market size is smaller. Why is people search of so much interest to German-speaking audiences? Steffen Rühl: I think there are some cultural [particularities]. The purpose of Yasni is to check and find everything that is published about a particular name. It's not the best source for celebrities or well-known person. It's intended to find everything from over a hundred sources for every name. Most information is not available to the public. You can find information that other people have published about your name -- and also the names of colleagues, neighbors, and family. We have some data security issues in Germany, and Europe as well, which increase the concerns about [personal[ data published. In Germany, we have different laws in privacy and security. I think the opportunity to manage your own personal profile is very important. That's what people are looking for, especially in Germany.
In the US market, people are used to having their data online. But for most data, you have to pay. They know if people pay, they can get my data, but most people won't pay for it. In Yasni, the data is for free. You can see which data is available for free on the Internet for everybody. We see it now with our users.
BNET: Why not expand more in Europe first? SR: We already had users from the US. If you use Yasni.de, you see that more than 100,000 users from the US are using Yasni.de. That was the main reason. The second reason is language. With English, you can enter the US and UK market very easily. For France you need French and for Italy you need Italian. Because we had higher demand from the UK and US, it was logical for us.
BNET: How are you approaching the expansion? SR: The approach we have is to implement local sources for every country. In the US, for example, we use Classmates.com [as one source]. I think that serves our success as well, that we ask ourselves from a user's perspective, why are customers looking for people for?
BNET: Your early PR set expectations of heavy success over the next year. What are your goals for success? SR: We are trying to repeat the success we have had in Germany. I think we will have by the middle of 2009 a million users in the US. Now it's comparable to the development in Europe. Our goal is to beat [people search vendors] Spock and Pipl. In the U.S., we will have about 200,000 [unique users] in December, [including] more than 100,000 users in the US who are visiting yasni.de. You can see it at quantcast.com.
BNET: I looked at the increase and it isn't growing anywhere near fast enough for you to hit a million by the middle of the year. I don't see how you can do it. SR: In Europe, in December last year, we had 100K unique users, and by April of 2008 we had 2.5 million. In the second half of December, it's not ramping up so much. Hopefully we'll see a jump in January. I know it from [experiences at other companies] that you have a jump from December to January. We had the same ramping in Europe last year. I'm hopeful that we can get to 1 million or more by the middle of 2009 because the market is big enough. But if it's only 500,000, then we're on a similar level to Pipl, and that would be successful as well. I cannot say how many users we will have. We think with our offering to manage your own reputation, we can have a successful entry in the U.S. and U.K.
BNET: The Quantcast.com numbers show that almost two-thirds of the total traffic on Yasni.com come from someplace other than the U.S. Doesn't that mean the traffic growth is a bit deceptive for a U.S.-based search engine and that you can't directly compare growth between it and the German version? SR: You're right, there are many users on Yasni.com who are not US-based. The reason is that ".com" is seen for users outside of US as "worldwide". It's the same situation with Pipl.com and Spock.com. According to Alexa.com, Yasni.com has 17.1% of its users coming from the U.S.. Spock 16.8%, Pipl.com has 44%, and Wink.com 40.7%. So, from my perspective, Pipl is [currently] number one based purely on US-users at the moment. [Number are based on Alexa.com results on January 13, 2008.]
If you look at traffic ramping at Yasni.com, it is comparable with Pipl.com end of 2007, so we are optimistic regarding coming traffic figures. Growth at Yasni.com comes mainly from U.S. Overall, though, I think it is too early to project numbers on this low level into the future.
BNET: Traffic numbers according to Alexa.com are much smaller. Why is that? SR: Alexa is toolbar-based [and it uses a sample]. Data is not so accurate as directly measured data.
BNET: What are the difficulties trying to expand Internet-based business? SR: From a technical point, it's not a huge difference, like you would have with [supporting] Chinese [characters]. We don't know exactly the culture. We've looked at Spock and Pipl and Wink and why they are used. We're a little astonished why the traffic is so low on these services, because the market is so much larger. The most difficult thing will be to understand the motivation behind people search in the U.S. In the UK, it's a different market as well. It's not the US and not Europe. It's in between. Ask the British people. You have Great Britain and you have the Continent. It's a problem that many U.S.-based companies have. They say, "Let's go to the U.K. and then we are in Europe," and that isn't true.
BNET: How do you make money? SR: At the moment, most of our revenue comes from advertising and commissions from affiliate partners. We get much more money from affiliate partners and corporations than from advertising. We get about half of our costs as revenues back. In the future, we want to offer paid services for reputation management, but we need more recognition first. We don't have break-even at the moment.
Graphs courtesy Alexa.com.