Mark Brooks: www.joingod.com started several months ago as a spin on Craigslist. The concept has merit…but the site is 'patchy' as it was pieced together on a shoestring budget.
Mark Brooks: www.joingod.com started several months ago as a spin on Craigslist. The concept has merit…but the site is 'patchy' as it was pieced together on a shoestring budget.
This “spiritual” singles concept has been tried multiple times before, with none or limited success, e.g. http://www.spiritualsingles.com or more recently, BeliefNet.com’s http://www.soulmatch.com.
These sites don’t work because they are not precise enough. What does “spiritual” or “ethics” mean, anyway, when it comes to singles? Who isn’t “spiritual” or “ethical” (well, who would say they weren’t)?
And, would a “spiritual” person only date another “spiritual” person, i.e. is there really a need for a “spiritually” based singles site?
Thus far, the market has said no.
Sam,
I’m not too sure if a “spiritually” based site will work, but always remember that Match.com didn’t work for several years until they figured out their business model. When Citysearch bought Match from Cendant, I believe they bought it for the brand and it’s critical mass, not it’s business model. Roughly a month later (to the best of my memory) they purchased OneAndOnly.com and virtually ignored that brand while relocating the San Francisco based Match.com dating operation to Dallas, where oneandonly.com was based. So, just because nobody has made a niche effectively work, doesn’t make it viable.
Your EBITDA claims are impressive. If you can prove you can really scale (meaning people see that what you have done is not just low hanging fruit) and you can become as virally dominant in the Christian space as JDate has become in the Jewish space, you could be the one talking about the IPO.
Congrats on your results so far.
Bill Broadbent
CEO
Instinct Marketing
Bill,
Thanks for the compliment. We are profit-focussed, and always have been, unlike everyone else in this business, it seems.
The low-lying fruit is nice and the plan is to grow. An IPO, though, is out of the question. It is too late, IMHO, in this space. No one can get the mega-growth rates anymore the market would want to support it. This is 2005, not 1999.
Concerning your Match.com example, with respect, you are comparing apples and oranges. Match.com’s market is ALL singles. It is not niche, and never was. Consequently, there is no comparison with a “spiritually” focussed site. Anything focussed, I would argue, is niche, by definition.
I was merely making the point that “spiritual” is not enough of a niche (assuming it can even be defined) to make such a dating site in this space work from a business point of view.
I disagree with your statement that “Match.com didn’t work for several years until they figured out their business model.” Their business model was obvious right from the get-go: make money off of subscriptions.
It was bought by CitySearch because it was doing well financially, and the future looked bright (yes, it was also bought for its branding and critical mass).
Unfortunately, while Match.com’s revenue has increased dramatically since then, its new owners (Barry Diller & Co.) have managed to spend virtually all its profit just running the thing. It hardly makes much now. So much for its potential.
Mind you, consider how other generic one-size-fits-all dating sites are doing: AmericanSingles.com has never made money, and only exists because of JDate.com.
True.com is a massive money-pit, and will never make it.
Yahoo personals is a success story, but this is due to the fact that is is owned by Yahoo, and the branding and marketing costs are marginal, as it is their own and they can promote it as much as they want.
You boast about making $100k/month profit and dismiss Match.com 3 Million a month profit as nothing. I fail to see the logic.
These major sites are winning the war, and all these second tier sites are dieing. Cupid.com is being funded from its classifieds business, and has started plastering advertising all over its site.
Date.com has started plastering advertising all over its site as well, and in what seems to be an attempt to stay in business. Even the advertising of these sites is deceptive.
http://www.onlinedatingmagazine.com/history/date-com-history.html Anyone who visits date.com and does a search or looks at profile is considered a member.
The point is 2 years ago these second tier dating sites were making a fortune, now they are lucky if they break even at the end of the month. The competition for the general market is intense and once the battle for the general market is over these niche will face an assult from the likes of match.com and americansingles which have millions to spend.
I would say the niche market is already coming under attack. Hitwise currently shows christiancafe.com having half the traffic of christianmingle.com/americansingles and its share is rapidly growing. I think in the future niche sites will only exist as a part of a larger general market network, and those that don’t will go out of business.
Marcus,
How much money do you make with your free site;-)? My math tells me $0 from subscriptions. What kind of car do you drive? Or, do you? And, how’s that one-bedroom apt? (Relax, just having a bit of fun with you, hehe, but making a point, all the same).
We do rank lower than ChristianMingle.com in Hitwise, and are also lower than BigChurch.com. That’s because Hitwise measures traffic to homepages. It doesn’t measure what happens inside your site (as that part is password protected). Compare our “who’s on” versus those two (we show in real-time; they do not, and, we are stil more active).
If we spent like the above-mentioned and bid $3.00/click, we could get a high ranking, too. Mingle spent $3M to make $2.5M last year – and was $1.78M in debt.
I am not following their logic. Perhaps they will someday have 3 times as much traffic with Spark? That’s like the joke about the airplane losing its engines one at a time. Each time the captain tells the passengers that they will be delayed.
When they have only one engine left, a man turns to his seat-mate and says, “At this rate, we’ll be up here all day!”. Uh, yeah.
I disagree with you that our market is coming under attack. I also doubt the competition for the general market will be over anytime soon. There remain too many fools out there who think that it is all about who has the most traffic to their homepage.
Meantime, guys like me will continue to make – what was it again? Oh yes, you said $100K/month.
I own 40+ websites it would matter little difference if my dating site lost 100k/month.
Hitwise measures ALL traffic to a site and all activity in a site. Every night they get a huge export from ISP’s which they process. Basically they have your server logs. The only real problem they have is over estimating a sites real traffic when they take into account popup traffic.
My point is you are playing a short term profit game, they are trying to play a long term game in which they win based on brand power and marketshare. Most Venture Captalists will tell you that a company will only start showing profits after 4 or 5 years.
I suspect your revenues at the moment are protected because a lot of your membership is based in canada where competition is a lot less. Speaking of canada, are you losing any marketshare to me? I think i’m only taking lavalifes members, but you never know.
Marcus,
Sorry, what kind of car do you drive, again? I didn’t catch that part. With your 40+ sites, you must making, what, $0/year in subscription revenue? What’s the fear in telling us all what you do with that $0?
I guess this is because your focus is clearly not about money:
http://www.plentyoffish.com/about.aspx
“Money? Who Cares”
“I am well aware that Plentyoffish.com could make millions of dollars per month as a subscription service. I couldn’t care less about how much money Plentyoffish.com could make; this site is different…”
Yeah, you could make millions of dollars per month, but you choose to make $0 because you rise above all that?? PUHLEASE!
I know all about Hitwise – we used them for all of 2004. We left because we grew tired of their inaccurate data-gathering methods. We are clearly more active than any of our competitors (we showed them the proof and they agreed), yet they were showing that we were not. They admitted to us that they could not track what was happening behind our password-protected members side.
Consequently, they could only measure what was happening in our free (guest) side, i.e. we were simply not driving as much traffic to our homepage as that of our Hitwise higher-ranked competitors.
We don’t spent $3.00/click, which explains their higher ranking. ‘Nuff said.
Speaking of country traffic, we are a US-centric site, and always have been. Canada has only ever (since we launched in 1999) represented a small percentage of our traffic. Any traffic from there is from the “spill-over” effect from our US marketing efforts.
Interestingly, though, our percentage of Canadian traffic has been going up recently. You need you try harder with that free, generic, non-focussed site of yours, to compete with a niche site like ours that has the branding and credibility to serve the conservative Christian market. Oh yes, and one that charges for subscriptions.
With all that $0 in revenue, I would suggest investing more in your efforts.
Sorry, I forgot to mention: our “short-term profit” has been going on for over 6 years now. Should we have listened to those VC’s you mentioned and tried to lose money for our first 4 or 5 years instead?
Or, is that your strategy? Sorry, I forgot, you choose not to make millions.
No one told us bumble bees at ChristianCafe.com we can’t fly. Shhhh! We may realise we shouldn’t be making $$ and go out of business! Or, maybe we could just make the site free to save ourselves!
STEP RIGHT UP FOLKS!
Sam and Markus are squaring up at iDate 2006! Not a boxing match, a wrestling match in those big rubber summo outfits. DON’T YOU DARE MISS IT.
LOL
I’m thinking Marcus drives a ’74 Gremlin…