Now with 80% People Coverage!

Yes, that’s right. With 180 million people in our database, we now cover 80% of all US adults. Given that we started 2007 at just 40% coverage, which is where the rest of the directory assistance industry is at, the team here feels real good about ending the year with this milestone. After all, we have doubled the size of our database in just under a year.

What’s the significance of this? On most other directory assistance-like websites (as well as calling 411 directory assistance), you have approximately a 4-out-of-10 chance to find the person you’re searching for, whereas on our websites, you now have an 8-out-of-10 chance. That’s quite a different user experience. Looking at this milestone more broadly, this marks the first time ever that you can find 80% of the US adult population in a free, easily accessible service. Yet another perspective… compare us to some of the other leading online repositories of people data:

To be fair, this chart is not an apples-to-apples comparison, nor do we want want it to be an apples-to-apples comparison. After all, we are quite happy to differentiate in the sense that:

1. We provide instant gratification to our users who seek contact info (rather than first having to become “friends”).
2. We are free (unlike pay-per-lookup or subscription-based sites).
3. We have better coverage (as is evident from the chart above after all). Why? We aggregate data from multiple sources, including offline.
4. We serve a simple use case: finding and connecting people with each other. No fuss.

What do you think of the various improvements we have launched recently?