Hello, and welcome to Online Personal Watch’s Weekly News Roundup. I’m Mark Brooks, and here are the latest headlines from around the internet dating industry.
Match and Chemistry’s parent company, IAC, had a profitable third quarter, thanks to its asset sales. Yet revenue from Match and IAC’s dating sites dropped by $13 million to 81 million dollars. IAC attributed the decline to the absence of Match Europe, which was sold to French competitor Meetic last June. One bright spot for Match? Paid subscriptions grew by five percent to 1.4 million. Why is this? Match tell me it's basically because they're better at targetting users. Case in point, its interesting how they blanketed the Oodle.com classifieds site recently. Its tough for any other dating site to get a shoe-in on Oodle now that they've loaded 700,000 profiles from Match.com.
I talked with Merger Market this week about the possibility that FriendFinder Networks could sell its non-core businesses before the end of this year. It really was quite hypothetical. Sure, its unlikely but its possible. Properties that don't really fit the fold include Gradfinder and BigChurch. FriendFinder filed for an IPO last December in hopes of raising up to 460 million dollars to pay off its debts.
Noel Biderman runs Ashley Madison. He thinks FriendFinder would be wise to attempt to sell its international properties to companies focused on a particular geographic region. i.e. FriendFinder’s Latino dating site, Amigos, might have better success in the hands of a company concentrating solely on the Latino market. FriendFinder’s sites could bring in between 7x to 8x EBITDA, according to Noel.
Also in international news, statistics from September show singles in the U.K., Spain and Switzerland have had a change of heart regarding their favorite dating sites.
Here is a comparison of Nielsen’s U.K. unique audience rankings from this past August and September.
U.K., Nielsen Online/Unique Audience
August 2009
- Friends Reunited Dating (605,000)
- PlentyofFish (574,000)
- Match (468,000)
September 2009
- PlentyofFish (576,000)
- DatingDirect.com (520,000)
- Friends Reunited Dating (498,000)
As you can see, former #1 Friends Reunited Dating fell to third place after it lost 100,000 uniques visitors a month points in just a month. This drop-off allowed PlentyofFish at 576,000 uniques to move into the top spot, even though the free dating site’s unique audience ranking only improved by two points from August.
PlentyofFish also finished on top of comScore’s U.K. rankings for September. They estimated the site had 794,000 unique visitors. Why the difference between the comScore and Nielsen numbers? Well, I've run numbers with comScore and Nielson as far back as 2003 and seen as much as an order of magnitude difference between them. The differences are a lot less these days. Its really a matter of how from where they pull their numbers, and how they do their math. Ultimately, the best bet is to draw your conclusions on rankings from multiple competitive intelligence sources. Which is why I list them at Markslist.com. Just type in that domain and you'll see the latest rankings each month.
DateTheUK came in second to Plentyoffish.com in the UK with 733,000 uniques. Actually DateTheUK’s parent company, EasyDate, was honored this week by Deloitte as one of the fastest-growing technology companies in the U.K. EasyDate’s revenue increased 10x from 2004 to 2008. Deloitte ranked EasyDate at #30 on their annual Technology Fast 50 list for the U.K.
As mentioned earlier, there’s also a new #1 dating site in Spain, according to Nielsen.
Spain, Nielsen Online/Unique Audience
August 2009
- FriendScout24 (626,000)
- Meetic (442,000)
- TeEncontre.com (305,000)
September 2009
Casual dating site C-Date is now in first place after not even being ranked in the top three last month. C-Date saw 561,000 uniques in Spain for September.
FriendScout24 may have lost its #1 ranking in Spain, but the site did better over in Switzerland.
Switzerland, Nielsen Online/Unique Audience
August 2009
- Parship (72,000)
- FriendScout24 (67,000)
- Swissfriends.ch (54,000)
September 2009
- FriendScout24 (73,000)
- Swissfriends.ch (65,000)
- Parship (64,000)
Also of note: In Germany, eDarling and be2 replaced Loomin.de and Bildkontakte.de at #2 and #3, respectively.
Interestingly, many dating sites in Europe saw a general decline in their unique audience numbers during the month of September.
I asked comScore how many people visit dating sites worldwide and they were kind enough to share their latest worldwide number. In August 2009 there were 113 million unique visitors to dating sites around the world. Well there you have it. That's 113 million uniques. To put that number in perspective. That's more than the entire population of England, Spain and Portugal combined.
For more information, visit OnlinePersonalsWatch.com and click on the International Ranking sections, or you can just visit Markslist.com to forward into the rankings.
Over in China, there are more than 100 matchmaking Web sites. However, according to e-commerce site Alibaba.com, less than 10 Chinese matchmaking site have over a million subscribers. China's largest matchmaking site is currently Zhenai.com, which has 20 million registered users. The site’s membership plans range from free to $879 per year. iResearch predicts the overall online dating market in China in 2010 will reach 140 million users, generating approximately 176 million dollars.
Finally, you may have noticed that the Internet Dating Conference has a had a design refresh. Did you also notice the new iDate Awards. Nominations are now open. Members of the Internet Dating Executive Alliance will be nominating most of the companies over the next couple of weeks. You can also nominate companies that you feel are the best in category. There are 11 categories this year. Please go to iDateAwards.com to find out more. I'll be covering this more next week.
This edition of Online Personal Watch’s Weekly News Roundup has been sponsored by Iovation. Iovation, helping the internet dating industry to work together to beat scammers expose cybercriminals and fight fraud with device reputation.
That’s all for this week’s news roundup. Tune in again next week as we bring you the latest and greatest from the world of online dating. No ads, no fluff, just raw news and CEO interviews. I’m Mark Brooks. Thank you.