TELEGRAPH.CO.UK – Mar 5 – Badoo is a social network that allows users to seek out new friends nearby. Ask its users, and they are more likely to tell you it’s a “hook-up site”. Like Grindr, the gay dating app, it uses location tracking systems in smartphones to enable customers to search for suitors close by. Badoo founder Andrey Andreev insists that the two services are miles apart. Badoo is more like a “telephone bar”, where he first hatched the idea, he says. In the telephone bar, customers are seated at numbered tables with telephones, which they use to ring up anyone else in the bar that attracts their attention. “There are more people that you don’t know than that you know,” Andreev says. “It is mainly about meeting new people for any type of adventure. According to Badoo, 12% of users have got into a serious relationship with someone they’ve met on the site, and 2% have subsequently got married. The app is free to use and there is no advertising, per se. Instead it makes its money from users effectively advertising themselves. A £1 payment will shoot them to the top of the site until the next user knocks them off – usually a couple of seconds – or they can pay to push their way up other users’ inboxes of messages by buying a virtual present. Its annual revenues now tip over $150m (£95m), and it has been in profit for the last two years. Andreev insists he has no intention of selling. “We are not sure about IPO, but never say never.
by Katherine Rushton
See full article at Telegraph.co.uk