FOX BUSINESS – June 15 – Gary Kremen founded the Match.com as one of several online classified ad businesses he planned to develop. The idea for the revolutionary platform came to Gary Kremen while he was in the shower. "I thought it would be really interesting to use the Internet for relationships, and to do it right," he said. By 1994, he owned the domain Match.com. The website went live in April of 1995. In 1997 Match was sold for $7M to Cendant, a Connecticut consumer-services company. In 1999, IAC acquired Match.
by Daniella Genovese
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Mark Brooks: Not quite true. Webpersonals was started by Andrew Conru in 1994, and sold to the company that would become Lavalife in Canada. Webpersonals was the first. Not Match.com. Dr Conru then went on to start FriendFinder in 1996.
First, online personals started in the bulletin board days prior to my launch of WebPersonals in mid 1994. I started the first web development company called Internet Media Services in 1993 while still at Stanford (our department had one of the first websites in late 1992). Since the Internet was still new, it was hard to get clients to understand the potential of the “World Wide Web” so I built a few example websites: an online restaurant guide (dine.com) with zoomable maps, reviews and collaborative filtering, a real-estate directory, and an online dating site first appearing at https://hamilton.netmedia.com/date/ It was live about six months before Match.com. Gary invited me up to their San Francisco office in an attempt to acquire the site. It was interesting that he had charts on the wall of our membership count and was tracking how long it will take for their count to surpass ours (I think they raised $10M to our bootstrap). Gary and I are still friends. He maintains that he gave me the idea of creating the site but I had already been working on it based on newspaper personals, alt.personals newsgroups, and a local VHS dating company. In 1995, I sold the website to Telepersonals for about $100k and a 1 year non-compete. The day after it expired, I started coding up Friendfinder.com. You can see what WebPersonals looked like in 1993 here: http://conru.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/webpersonals-internet-first-online-dating-website.png
First, online personals started in the bulletin board days prior to my launch of WebPersonals in mid 1994. I started the first web development company called Internet Media Services in 1993 while still at Stanford (our department had one of the first websites in late 1992). Since the Internet was still new, it was hard to get clients to understand the potential of the “World Wide Web” so I built a few example websites: an online restaurant guide (dine.com) with zoomable maps, reviews and collaborative filtering, a real-estate directory, and an online dating site first appearing at https://hamilton.netmedia.com/date/ It was live about six months before Match.com. Gary invited me up to their San Francisco office in an attempt to acquire the site. It was interesting that he had charts on the wall of our membership count and was tracking how long it will take for their count to surpass ours (I think they raised $10M to our bootstrap). Gary and I are still friends. He maintains that he gave me the idea of creating the site but I had already been working on it based on newspaper personals, alt.personals newsgroups, and a local VHS dating company. In 1995, I sold the website to Telepersonals for about $100k and a 1 year non-compete. The day after it expired, I started coding up Friendfinder.com. You can see what WebPersonals looked like in 1993 here: http://conru.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/webpersonals-internet-first-online-dating-website.png