NOAH CONFERENCE – Nov 10 – CEOs of Parship, EliteSingles and The Meet Group were interviewed at the “Future of online dating” panel during the NOAH17 conference in London. They spoke about the past, present and future of online dating.
Parship – two brands – Parship & ElitePartner that operate in the matchmaking segment, €120M annual revenue (mobile revenue €35M), ~50% of registrations are via mobile, 100k babies
EliteSingles – renamed to Spark Networks, predicted 2018 revenue $122M, EBITDA $22M, 500K paying members
The Meet Group – 15M monthly active users, 4.5M daily active users (DAU), 190K new members every day, acquired Lovoo and Tagged; focus on live video streaming, 20% of DAU use live streaming every day.
Q: Are people on your platform looking for a relationship?
Geoff: Half of Meetme users would say dating, half would say friendship. On Lovoo, ¼ of users say they are looking for entertainment.
Tim: Serious relationship, people go through our questionnaire that takes 30-40 minutes.
Jeronimo: We have very similar product as Parship, our questionnaire also takes 30-40 minutes.
Q: What’s your view on Bumble?
Geoff: It is a great success story. Tinder introduced double swipe to unlock the chat, Bumble amped it up with the female initiating the conversation after double swipe.
Tim: It helps them a lot to be part of Badoo.
Q: How much do you spend on TV ads?
Jeronimo: It is a double-digit million number. 2/3 of our marketing budget goes into offline media, 1/3 goes to online&digital.
Geoff: 70% of our revenue comes from advertising today, that was 85% before Lovoo. We believe live streaming is going to change that. People can send gifts to the streamers. The gifts could be purchased with our virtual currency.
Q: Do you see the younger demographic declining on your platforms because they don’t watch TV with ads?
Tim: No, we have actually seen the biggest influx in the younger demographic (25+)
Jeronimo: We are shifting our advertising from TV to online. We are shifting to where our audience is. So I don’t think shifting away from TV will impact our business.
Q: How global is your business?
Geoff: 80% is international.
Jeronimo: Half North America, half the rest of the world, mostly Europe.
Tim: We are mostly focused on the German-speaking market and we are very comfortable.
Q: What is going to happen in 5 years?
Tim: We will continue with consolidation.
Geoff: I think if you stand still, you’ll die. The competition is big.
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Summarized by the Courtland Brooks team