PayScale, Inc. or payscale.com is an online salary

Salary

A salary is a form of periodic payment from an employer to an employee, which may be specified in an employment contract. It is contrasted with piece wages, where each job, hour or other unit is paid separately, rather than on a periodic basis....

, benefits

Employee benefit

Employee benefits and benefits in kind are various non-wage compensations provided to employees in addition to their normal wages or salaries...

 and compensation information

Wage

A wage is a compensation, usually financial, received by workers in exchange for their labor.Compensation in terms of wages is given to workers and compensation in terms of salary is given to employees...

 company, which launched its service on January 1, 2002. It was founded by Joe Giordano, a former Microsoft

Microsoft

Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...

 and drugstore.com

Drugstore.com

Drugstore.com is an Internet retailer in health and beauty care products headquartered in Bellevue, Washington. Its web operations were launched on February 24, 1999....

 manager, and John Gaffney.

PayScale was developed to help people obtain accurate real-time information on job market compensation. The service works via the Internet

Internet

The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...

 by enabling individual employees to submit their job profile and salary data, which is then compared to others. Because a very large number (millions) of people utilize the service every month, the company claims it is able to use the volume of information statistically to determine accurate real-time salary information.

The company generates revenue by selling aggregate data and web service

Web service

A Web service is a method of communication between two electronic devices over the web.The W3C defines a "Web service" as "a software system designed to support interoperable machine-to-machine interaction over a network". It has an interface described in a machine-processable format...

s to employers, to aid in determining correct market rates for hiring, benchmarking and budgeting, and by targeted advertising to employees that visit its web site.

Recognition

• Top 10 Product of 2006 from HR Executive.
• Named in Lead411's Hottest Seattle Companies List.

External links

• PayScale web site
• New York Times by Damon Darlin The New York Times
  The New York Times
  The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
  
  (March 3, 2007)
• Review: How Much Money Do You Make? by Michael Arrington TechCrunch
  TechCrunch
  TechCrunch is a web publication that offers technology news and analysis, as well as profiling of startup companies, products, and websites. It was founded by Michael Arrington in 2005, and was first published on June 11, 2005....
  
   (October 12, 2006)
• PayScale shows you the money from The Seattle Times
  The Seattle Times
  The Seattle Times is a newspaper serving Seattle, Washington, US. It is the largest daily newspaper in the state of Washington. It has been, since the demise in 2009 of the printed version of the rival Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Seattle's only major daily print newspaper.-History:The Seattle Times...
  
  (August 29, 2005)