Jeffrey Tinsley
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| Information broker | |
| Founded | 2002 (as Reunion.com) |
| Headquarters | Los Angeles, California, U.S. |
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Key people
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Jeff Tinsley (CEO) |
| Owner | Privately held |
| Website | www.MyLife.com |
MyLife (or MyLife.com) is an American information brokerage founded by Jeffrey Tinsley in 2002 as Reunion.com. In addition to that name, it previously conducted business as Wink.com.
In 2007, according to a company press release, MyLife.com received $25 Million in venture funding from Oak Investment Partners. The company changed its name from Reunion.com to MyLife.com after merging with the search engine company, Wink, in the fall of 2008. According to Tinsely, the company's 2008 revenue was estimated at 52 million dollars with 90% of the firm's revenue coming from paid subscriptions. As of 2009, the company had acquired several smaller companies including: Planet Alumni, GoodContacts, HighSchoolAlumni, MyAddressBook.com. That year, Ancestry.com reported it had begun a data sharing partnership with MyLife.
In August 2007, the company described its website as the 6th most popular social networking site with 28 million users while a 2008 article in the LA Times criticized the company's "aggressive marketing approach." In February 2009 ComScore reported the company's website as having 18.2 million unique visitors that month and Tech Crunch characterized it as the 4th largest social networking website for January 2009.
In 2008, classmates.com was involved in a class-action lawsuit for sending spam emails to people claiming there was "someone looking for them" and then charging a fee to view the information, only to discover there was nobody searching for them; a subsequent 2011 lawsuit against MyLife stated that the company was engaging in the same practices and was simply a rebranded classmates.com. The suit also accused the company of false solicitation by offering monthly memberships and then charging member's credit cards at the annual rate. The class action also accused MyLife of spamming contacts improperly gathered from the address books of those visiting the site. U.S. District Judge Claudia Wilken ruled to consolidate the 2011 class-action lawsuit with two other fraud class actions against MyLife. The lawsuit was ultimately dismissed when classmates.com agreed to pay a more than $9.5 million settlement.
The Washington State Attorney General's Office also began an investigation in 2011 stemming from concerns that the company's TV advertisements may have violated the state's Consumer Protection Act, which prohibits unfair and deceptive practice. According to State officials the company resolved the issue by making an "assurance of discontinuance" and paid $28,000 in attorneys' costs and fees.
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Wikipedia