WLD – May 10 – Global Personals acquires Smooch, the 7th largest dating site in UK (Experian Hitwise), alongside its parent company WooWise. The acquisition also includes Mancentral.com, which will help Global Personals grow its gay dating division. Martin Bysh and Marcus Hamilton will remain as advisors to the business. The financial terms of the purchase were not disclosed.
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Thanks for covering this Mark – we’re really pleased.
The team at Smooch are a great fit with us and what was particularly pleasing was that Smooch weren’t short of suitors and chose us for the reasons Martin revealed in the release.
The two biggest disrupters of the last decade in the online dating industry have been white label platforms and free dating – we’ve now got both of these in place.
Our focus now is fully on the customer – we’ve got some great new functionality launching later this month which no other dating company has tried yet. We’re really excited – it should be a total game changer.
Ross
Thanks for covering this Mark – we’re really pleased.
The team at Smooch are a great fit with us and what was particularly pleasing was that Smooch weren’t short of suitors and chose us for the reasons Martin revealed in the release.
The two biggest disrupters of the last decade in the online dating industry have been white label platforms and free dating – we’ve now got both of these in place.
Our focus now is fully on the customer – we’ve got some great new functionality launching later this month which no other dating company has tried yet. We’re really excited – it should be a total game changer.
Ross
Ross, can you categorize the acquisition? Talent, database, revenue, etc? New functionality, sounds interesting, Facebook Connect or Friends Matching Friends? 🙂
Ross, can you categorize the acquisition? Talent, database, revenue, etc? New functionality, sounds interesting, Facebook Connect or Friends Matching Friends? 🙂
The acquisition was to help add freemium to our business model and provide partners with sites where we can cross-sell members who don’t pay on the subscription site onto a freemium site to monetise them with smaller payments, then onto a free site to monetise them through advertising income.
There’s a great team there and the software is up and running already.
We’ve got some plans to improve the social element of Smooch.com naturally and I think most people will be able to see the power of such a virtuous circle for our business and that of our partners.
We now have genuine niche dating, white label and free/freemium models – that’s more than Match, Meetic or Cupid can offer. And we’ve got the best team in the industry to boot 🙂
The acquisition was to help add freemium to our business model and provide partners with sites where we can cross-sell members who don’t pay on the subscription site onto a freemium site to monetise them with smaller payments, then onto a free site to monetise them through advertising income.
There’s a great team there and the software is up and running already.
We’ve got some plans to improve the social element of Smooch.com naturally and I think most people will be able to see the power of such a virtuous circle for our business and that of our partners.
We now have genuine niche dating, white label and free/freemium models – that’s more than Match, Meetic or Cupid can offer. And we’ve got the best team in the industry to boot 🙂