OPW – Nov 25 – I talked with the Chairman of Manhunt to find out more about Manhunt's acquisition of Jack'd, announced last week. Here's the summary of insights Jonathan Crutchley was kind enough to share.
Jack'd was started in early 2010 by Yosuke Matsuda, a young Japanese engineering student who was working on his master's degree at Cornell University. Yosuke programmed Jack'd from his dorm room while at school and launched it with the Apple and Google stores as a hobby. Yosuke now works for a company in Seattle, Washington. He decided to sell Jack'd to Online Buddies, Inc. when his hobby (Jack'd) made overwhelming demands on his time. He was the sole employee of Jack'd, and he just didn't have time to run the app as well as keep up with the demands of his daytime job.
As far as financials and numbers go, Jack'd is a very new product. Its best days are ahead.
Manhunt signed the acquisition deal about 6 months ago, when Jack'd had over 2 million active accounts and about 1 million daily unique users.
~Half of Jack'd daily users are in Mainland China, and those numbers are growing fast.
Jack'd was bought for its traffic rather than its revenue.
PR NEWSWIRE – Nov 13 – Online Buddies, the company behind Manhunt.net, acquired Jack'd, a location based gay dating app. Jack'd, Manhunt, and the Manhunt Daily blog receive a combined 2M unique visits daily, making Online Buddies the largest gay dating company. Jack'd launched in 2010 and since then 5M men have installed the app.
HUFFINGTON POST – Dec 14 – Manhunt new ad campaign features three rotating billboard ads, situated near the southeast corner of Broadway and 47th Street in Manhattan, and will run through New Year's Day.
JON BOEDE, CO-FOUNDER MATCHMAKER: In 1984, my friend and I were running [dating] bulletin boards. The Internet obliterated the bulletin board world. Boede converted the business to a website. Lycos bought for $44.5 million. By 2004 there wasn’t much left of it.
GARY KREMEN, FOUNDER MATCH: I started Match in ’93. I needed to get married. I wrote some software that matched people through email and attached profiles. Kremen partnered with VCs who sold Match.com to Cendant for $7m in 1998. Nine months later, Cendant sold it to IAC for ~$50m.
JONATHAN CRUTCHLEY, FOUNDER MANHUNT.NET: Jonathan was a successful Boston real estate investor. In 1992, he bought half of a popular gay telephone chat line that became Manhunt.net. Phone-line revenues peaked ~year 2000. We organized events at gay bars and advertised in gay newspapers in new York and Philadelphia.
ANDREW CONRU, FOUNDER FRIEND FINDER: In 1993 I started WebPersonals.com. It had ~150k members by the time I sold it in early ’95. Conru then focused on FriendFinder. People started uploading risqué photos. I put a link on the site: “If you’re looking for erotic relationships, click here” to a duplicate of the site, AdultFriendFinder. Conru sold for $500m in 2007.
MANDY GINSBERG, PRESIDENT MATCH: I don’t know how to prove it, but there’s been a shift. We started to see a lot more people who felt comfortable putting out personalized things, commenting on things, uploading their own pictures of things.
SAM YAGAN, CO-FOUNDER OKCUPID: We’re helping erode the stigma for the entire industry. I think it helps that we’re free, which makes it all seem less intentional.
MARKUS FRIND, FOUNDER PLENTYOFFISH: The reason for our success is that we actually helped people meet. Our mobile traffic was around 6% in the under-30 category. Now it’s sitting at 70%.
The future of online dating might very well be its own demise, a movement toward a place where the distinction between meeting in the real world and meeting online no longer exists.
by John Ortved The full article was originally published at Bullet, but is no longer available.
OPW INTERVIEW – Sep 18 – Manhunt.net is gay and adult. Apple doesn’t do adult. After trying a PG app Manhunt decided to take a different approach. Here’s my interview with the CEO, Adam Segel, and their head of Product, Tim Feeley. – Mark Brooks
You've taken an unusual approach with Manhunt with mobile. You've actually gone with m.manhunt. Why did you go the online route instead of the native route? We are an adult dating site and there are a lot of content restrictions to be in the Apple Store and the Android Market.
How is the conversation with Apple? Apple is elusive. They don’t' really have conversations with you, they just tell you no. We see 40% of our traffic using mobile, I'm glad that we don’t' have to pay 30% of our revenue to the Apple Store. People are paying us directly on the phone and it's terrific.
How does that work? Well they just use their credit cards. They go through our regular credit card processing, we just made a mobile version of our page.
The element you're missing out on is the element of discovery. People going on Google Play and the iPhone store and looking for apps like yours and not finding you. They are probably looking directly for you, but they'll discover you on Manhunt.com. They'll know about m.manhunt.com? Yes. Fortunately we have a tremendous brand throughout the world so we're able to get the word out about our product. But you are correct, we do not have that advertising platform.
So how have you dealt with location with HTML5? Luckily, HTML5, especially on mobile platforms, does support querying for a mobile users GPS coordinates. Technically, there's a degree of precision that's a bit less when you are requesting via HTML5 versus a native app. But for our intents and purposes, it's perfectly suitable.
Most people, when it comes to mobile dating, don't really want specific location from what I'm hearing. Vicinity is of more interest. As long as you're within a 20 minute drive, it seems reasonable really. Or a 15 minute walk if you're in the city. For our users, it's more like a 5 minute walk, but still that's within the scope of what we're able to offer.
What limitations have you found with HTML5 versus a native app? The largest limitations is the notifications systemthat come with iPhone and Android and that we're unable to have. When people get new messages or when a friend of theirs is online, they can't get that push notification. The other is the ability to upload photos. It's perfectly fine on Android, but Apple has blocked that. There is no way through a browser to upload a photo. So our solution to that is a third party applications that facilitate that.
Have you got a solution for Blackberry? You can use Manhunt on the Blackberry, but it's a pretty rudimentary, very old mobile system that isn't pretty and doesn't have location and all that. Every time we query our members, it's really members abroad that have Blackberry. In the States, they don't really seem to have it as much or really care. It is something that we're thinking about, it is on our radar, but top priority is Android and iPhone.
How about international? Have you seen particular growth of mobile in international markets? Our number one biggest international market for mobile is Australia, where just short of 60% of our logins come from mobile devices. We also have great adoption in Spain and England.
In the USA, in terms of modes of payment; have you got a preferred provider you could recommend? We use Litle as our credit card processor – a combination of Litle and Global Collect. Global Collect helps us with all of our international billing and Litle does our domestic.
When did you launch the mobile app? It was less than a year since we've had the m.Manhunt out there.
How did you get the word out? Fortunately for us, there were two primary ways. One was when people started accessing Manhunt through mobile browsers, we took them directly to the mobile version. We also message all of our customers.
What features are you most proud of? I think that we're still rapidly improving to this day, but I'm proud of how we are able to integrated our millions of desktop members who aren't yet using mobile or choose not to use mobile, and exposing them on the Manhunt mobile experience. From a feature set, we try to be very much on par with Manhunt and extend that experience to your mobile device.
What's your thoughts on the iPad? How does that fit into your product roadmap? We are available on the iPad. We are seeing a slight, but steady increase in iPad traffic.
Have you really seen much difference between the demographic of your mobile users versus your usual online users. Does the age skew younger at all? A tiny bit, but not really noticeably. We're really seeing a broad user base of the mobile, just like the desktop. We're seeing guys in their 50's and 60's using their mobile apps, just like we are the 21 year olds to 28 year olds.
In terms of user acquisition as well, are you finding that you're acquiring via mobile? Are you actively advertising and marketing out to mobile as well? We are. We are advertising through our Google channels and we advertise mobile separately. We haven't found any tremendous mobile channels on which to advertise. Our competitors don't allow us to advertise on their apps, so it's been a little bit difficult. But we are seeing a steady increase in people joining through the mobile phone.
We've probably got a few of them watching this interview. What message would you have for them regarding advertising and swapping advertising? I can't really pressure them to let us advertise on their app because I probably wouldn't let them advertise on mine. But I would tell them that they do a great job and I'm very glad for them because it's helped us all to evolve to a much better mobile place for users to be able to have the solutions available.
Who do you hold in high esteem? Who else out there do you think is doing a good job on mobile? I think Grindr obviously started the trail and did a really nice job with it. I also think Scruff do a terrific job of having the app readily accessible and easy to use.
How would you say Manhunt mobile is going to look in a year's time? What's your goals and vision for the mobile product? We're making it easier and easier to offer your precise location coordinates. We've always kind of struggled with “are users willing to travel the extra 5 miles to find a guy that's exactly their type?” We found that they won't go 5 miles. They'll take a lesser guy who is closer than a hotter guy who's farther.
Also as people are using our apps more and more, they are asking us for some of the features that we haven't yet incorporated into the app; so this our next step.
I went to a conference recently and saw Windows Mobile exhibiting and I was very impressed. They've done a nice job with it. What's your thoughts on the future? How do you think they're going to be easy to work with? We haven't really looked into designing for that platform yet. Once we're able to discover the best way to approach that, we're looking forward to bringing Manhunt to all of the devices.
EDGE – July 25 – Online Buddies, the parent company of Manhunt.net, has launched an ad agency to help digital marketers reach Manhunt users after they’ve logged off. Men visiting Manhunt are automatically tagged as gay. Manhunt is calling its new advertising offshoot Gay Audience. Its website states its purpose: to allow advertisers to reach gay men beyond websites offering gay-related content. The company boasts that an ad agency can reach men when they’re visiting a mainstream website such as Huffington Post using a retargeting technology called "audience extension." The 2012 Berkeley Privacy Census revealed that tracking consumers across the Web is increasing dramatically. Of the 25K most popular websites in the study, almost 90% dropped cookies. Online Buddies CFO Richard Scott said that he considers this type of retargeting fairly standard offering among large websites.
CAMPAIGNLIVE – June 13 – An outdoor ad for manhunt.net that features two topless men about to kiss has escaped censure by the advertising watchdog, despite a flurry of complaints that it was overtly sexual. In its ruling, the ASA said it had noted that Online Buddies and Primesight had given the poster's location careful consideration, so as to avoid schools and businesses that provided children-based services. The ASA ruled the ad was "sexually suggestive", rather than overtly sexual, and concluded the ad was not socially irresponsible and the ad could continue to run.
INSTINCT MAGAZINE – Apr 26 – According to the popular gay dating site Manhunt.net, its Facebook page was taken down without notice on April 4. This isn't the first time a gay related Facebook presence has been suspiciously moderated. A month ago Facebook mods came under fire for taking down an innocuous picture of two men kissing in protest of homophobia. Though Manhunt's content may have been a little more charged, did it warrant being banned without notice?
by Jonathan Higbee The full article was originally published at Instinct Magazine, but is no longer available.
PINK NEWS – Mar 1 – 31,714 Gaydar members in the UK have opted in for the Sexual Health Messaging Service in the three months since it launched on 29 Nov last year. The messages are also available on Fitlads, Recon and Manhunt. The Sexual Health Messaging Service, sometimes referred to as Partner Notification, is funded by a grant from the Elton John AIDS Foundation. Men diagnosed at a participating clinic can be given a unique code for use on the website. There, contact information for recent partners can be typed in: mobile phone numbers, email or a profile name from a participating dating website. They are then sent an automated message, alerting them to the fact that they should get themselves checked out. The messages can be anonymous, but backers say recipients are more likely to take action if the sender is identified.
MUMBRELLA – Jan 27 – Gay dating website Manhunt has launched a billboard campaign in the Paddington area advertising its new mobile product that helps gay men hook up. The campaign was devised by Pink Media Group, a gay media specialist that also works with gay hook-up app Grindr. Manhunt has 65k users in Australia.
OPW – Nov 25 – I talked with the Chairman of Manhunt to find out more about Manhunt's acquisition of Jack'd, announced last week. Here's the summary of insights Jonathan Crutchley was kind enough to share.
