Think Partnership to Sell Its Online Dating Properties
Posted on March 23, 2006
BUSINESS WIRE — Mar 22 — Think Partnership (CGI Holding) will sell its online dating and online education businesses (Cherish, Personals Plus and Vintacom, and Real Estate School Online) to MWXI to Mountains West Exploration for $21 million cash and $9 million unregistered common stock. The subsidiaries were acquired by the Company during the past two years, for $23,125,000 ($10.7 million cash, $11.2 million common stock of THK, and $1.2 million in notes).
Mark Brooks: And the core business of Mountains West Exploration… Marketing? Internet? Matchmaking? Anything remotely similar? Nah. Profile "The principal activities of the Company is to acquire, explore and develop coal bed methane in the South Central Colorado region. The Company has approximately 4,740 gross acres of oil and gas leases rights in South Central Colorado, located in the southwestern part of the Raton Basin." ???
12 thoughts on “Think Partnership to Sell Its Online Dating Properties”
That’s clearly seems to be a spinoff/reverse merger into another shell. Same concept as Think – maybe they will be trying to roll up other dating businesses.
Here’s the key yahoo statistics of the acquiring company. http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=MWXI.OB
They did $168k in revenues from those leases Mark. I imagine its a relatively clean or controlled shell. So the game goes like this – they spin off from their spin off another shell – set the price and add better looking assets to the Think balance sheet. I imagine in the background is the promoter. They like to call them “Investor Relations” firms. They pump the industry to the public – it’s sexy remember – and the public buys the stock. Now more than likely – they (the team and friends) control all or most of the float. The guys with the shell and the float sell in small pieces – and the stock goes up amazingly cause there is limited supply. Just watch – these guys are pretty good. Where they are better then most – is they have some legit businesses – where most of the guys in this game have nothing.
They sold the thing for a 2 million loss.
Relationship exchange via dreammates, singleme, cupidjunction along with lavalife used to be huge in canada. Plentyoffish.com has basically killed them off by taking most of their traffic.
As bill said, they vended this into another shell they owned and are getting ready for a pump and dump.
“Kill” would be a too strong word, but the impact of competion is obvious. The number of dating sites probably has grown 10 times since 2001.
But there is a bright side. I’d guess that the conversion ratios are much higher now. It can be attributed to a number of factors. The most important one is a higher popularity of online dating. And the second one is (for Markus only) a filtering effect of Plentyoffish.com. POF sucks in lots of low quality users unable or unwilling to pay for any reason. The POF’s janitor’s effect is clear.
Is it possible for you to get any more bitter? It is obvious that your business failed, but that is hardly the fault of plentyoffish.
Any dating executive or site of any note would know that my site has far higher credability and satisfaction scores then any paid dating site. In the united states 68% of my signups have been or are paid members of other sites, this would seem to conflict with your fantasy that no one on my site wants to pay.
If the facts you claim turned to be true even remotely, I’d be sincerely happy for you as your fella Canadian.
Could you reveal the source of the information.
As for “…it is hardly the fault of plentyoffish…”, I dunno, Markus. Can you prove such a statement or opposite?
The traffic is diluted. That’s for sure.
So you are saying these reports which say free dating sites and myspace have no effect on paid services are bogus? http://www.emarketer.com/Report.aspx?dating_mar06
So the 50% decline in traffic for lavalife, and dreammates.com, singleme and the sale of vintacom at a 2 million loss are all the result of plentyoffish?
Are you basically saying that paid dating is no longer viable in canada because of plentyoffish?
What do you mean by diluted? Big sites are reporting increases in conversion not decreases.
Wonderful reference. It actually confirmed everything I have said about the conversion ratios and POF being rather a sample of a Social Network and so on. Everything! Thx Markus.
The traffic dilution is sharing the same amount of traffic by a higher number of active sites. As you could see from the chart, Mate1 raised at the expence of True and Sparkle, while the overall traffic changed insignificantly just merely 10%.
Right, that report is based on comscore data which says mate1.com has 14 times my traffic, hitwise.com says i hve 3 times as much traffic as mate1. So for ever visitor mate1 records hitwise is recording 42?
Well Markus your site may look good on the surface but sadly the nasty nature of the Moderators sours the experience.
Its a shame that you allow them to terrorize the forums the way you do. If this is normal behavior on your website then I cannot see it lasting for very long. Word of mouth is important on the internet, and I am seeing more and more posts about the negative behavior on PlentyofFish. I hope you improve things there as the site has potential. But I doubt I will bother going back there.
That’s clearly seems to be a spinoff/reverse merger into another shell. Same concept as Think – maybe they will be trying to roll up other dating businesses.
Here’s the key yahoo statistics of the acquiring company.
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=MWXI.OB
They did $168k in revenues from those leases Mark. I imagine its a relatively clean or controlled shell. So the game goes like this – they spin off from their spin off another shell – set the price and add better looking assets to the Think balance sheet. I imagine in the background is the promoter. They like to call them “Investor Relations” firms. They pump the industry to the public – it’s sexy remember – and the public buys the stock. Now more than likely – they (the team and friends) control all or most of the float. The guys with the shell and the float sell in small pieces – and the stock goes up amazingly cause there is limited supply. Just watch – these guys are pretty good. Where they are better then most – is they have some legit businesses – where most of the guys in this game have nothing.
They sold the thing for a 2 million loss.
Relationship exchange via dreammates, singleme, cupidjunction along with lavalife used to be huge in canada. Plentyoffish.com has basically killed them off by taking most of their traffic.
As bill said, they vended this into another shell they owned and are getting ready for a pump and dump.
“Kill” would be a too strong word, but the impact of competion is obvious. The number of dating sites probably has grown 10 times since 2001.
But there is a bright side. I’d guess that the conversion ratios are much higher now. It can be attributed to a number of factors. The most important one is a higher popularity of online dating. And the second one is (for Markus only) a filtering effect of Plentyoffish.com. POF sucks in lots of low quality users unable or unwilling to pay for any reason. The POF’s janitor’s effect is clear.
Is it possible for you to get any more bitter? It is obvious that your business failed, but that is hardly the fault of plentyoffish.
Any dating executive or site of any note would know that my site has far higher credability and satisfaction scores then any paid dating site. In the united states 68% of my signups have been or are paid members of other sites, this would seem to conflict with your fantasy that no one on my site wants to pay.
If the facts you claim turned to be true even remotely, I’d be sincerely happy for you as your fella Canadian.
Could you reveal the source of the information.
As for “…it is hardly the fault of plentyoffish…”, I dunno, Markus. Can you prove such a statement or opposite?
The traffic is diluted. That’s for sure.
So you are saying these reports which say free dating sites and myspace have no effect on paid services are bogus?
http://www.emarketer.com/Report.aspx?dating_mar06
So the 50% decline in traffic for lavalife, and dreammates.com, singleme and the sale of vintacom at a 2 million loss are all the result of plentyoffish?
Are you basically saying that paid dating is no longer viable in canada because of plentyoffish?
What do you mean by diluted? Big sites are reporting increases in conversion not decreases.
Wonderful reference. It actually confirmed everything I have said about the conversion ratios and POF being rather a sample of a Social Network and so on. Everything! Thx Markus.
The traffic dilution is sharing the same amount of traffic by a higher number of active sites. As you could see from the chart, Mate1 raised at the expence of True and Sparkle, while the overall traffic changed insignificantly just merely 10%.
Right, that report is based on comscore data which says mate1.com has 14 times my traffic, hitwise.com says i hve 3 times as much traffic as mate1. So for ever visitor mate1 records hitwise is recording 42?
wow! Markus, you eliminated your brutal call to slaughter all the dating site!
You are growing, my man!
I fill like I’m contributing to your success 🙂
Well Markus your site may look good on the surface but sadly the nasty nature of the Moderators sours the experience.
Its a shame that you allow them to terrorize the forums the way you do. If this is normal behavior on your website then I cannot see it lasting for very long. Word of mouth is important on the internet, and I am seeing more and more posts about the negative behavior on PlentyofFish. I hope you improve things there as the site has potential. But I doubt I will bother going back there.
The enforcement of the image rules appear to be based only on how homophobic Marcus is.