FINANCIAL TIMES – Dec 12 – Richard Griffiths, the former chairman of Evolution Securities, has raised his stake in Cupid to above 10%, as the company nears a crucial vote on December 23 to offload its websites and turn into a shell company. Cupid has proposed to sell its dating websites, including Cupid.com and Uniformdating.com, to Tradax and Together Networks, which are chaired by Max Polyakov.
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FT – Mar 20 – Tech companies in Silicon Valley are facing the most competitive rush ever to secure US work visas for their foreign employees. Starting in April, the US will accept applications for this year’s quota of 85,000 H-1B visas. Last year, that allotment went in the first few days after applications opened. “The supply of tech workers just doesn’t meet the demand right now,” said Shayan Zadeh, the Iran-born founder of Zoosk. When Mr Zadeh first got a visa to the US, he had to hitchhike part of the way from Iran across the border to Turkey to submit his application at the embassy there. Now he is a US citizen and trying to get visas for 3-4 people the company wants to hire. Part of the challenge is the uncertainty of the process, as visas are given out by lottery.
FINANCIAL TIMES – Dec 12 - Shaadi.com was launched in 1996 when founder Anupam Mittal’s mother was trying to arrange a marriage for him. Shaadi.com now attracts ~10K new members every day. The registration form asks for users community, sub-community and the colour of their skin. Some 20% of registrations are done by a friend or relative. Shaadi also opened physical retail centres across India to boost registrations. The matchmaking industry generates $32.3B every year.
by Avantika Chilkoti
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FT – Nov 11 – While Match has profited from the boom in internet romance, IAC’s largest business, web search, is slipping. Mr Diller has a reputation for building and then spinning out business that go on to thrive – Expedia and TripAdvisor, for example. So after a quiet few years at IAC, it is just a matter of time until Match is out on its own. Match.com could have $500M of annual cash flow by 2016. It will generate ~$300M in cash this year, compared with $400M from search and apps. Match.com could trade above 10 times cash flow.
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FT – Sep 27 – Ivan Fatovic came up with a matchmaking website for people desiring a parenting. “There were a few sites that provided anonymous sperm donors for lesbian couples but no service for people who wanted to meet a like-minded person with whom they could have a child.” After raising $150K from friends and family, he and three co-founders launched Modamily.com. Since then several similar sites have sprung up, including PollenTree.com, Coparents.com, Co-ParentMatch.com and MyAlternativeFamily.com. Modamily costs $29.95 a month. The site also offers a “personal concierge service” that makes personal introductions, costing $149.95 for three months.
FINANCIAL TIMES – July 6 – Cupid, the online dating company, plans to expand its presence in the US, where it hopes to target niche markets such as Christians, ethnic minorities and older singles. Cupid, which operates sites including benaughty.com and girlsdateforfree.com, said it planned to invest an initial £1m in setting up an office on the US West Coast next year. Cupid focuses onniche markets such as expat Indian dating and single parents. Cupid said revenues for the last six months in its new markets – USA, Canada, France, Italy, Spain and Germany – were expected to reach £22M, more than double the £10M achieved in the first half of 2011. Revenues from established markets such as the UK and Australia should grow at or above the rate of 5 to 10%.
by Christopher Thompson
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FT – Feb 5 – Greg Blatt is talking fast and loud. So loud that, after a while, your ears begin to hurt. But as the CEO of IAC – the company behind Match.com – enthuses about his business, his big voice ricochets around his glass-walled office with a view of the Statue of Liberty. “It’s been a great year,” he booms. Mr Blatt is excited because it has indeed been a good first year on the job. Full-year results, released last week, showed annual revenues up 26% to $2.1bn, with profits up 75% to $174m. He is unmarried – and has even cancelled his subscription to Match.com. “I’m a single guy,” he says. “I have a bunch of friends in the city. I date ladies from time to time.” Blatt helped Diller spin off the companies that didn’t fit, starting with Expedia in 2005, and continuing with Home Shopping Network, Ticketmaster and others in 2008. “We disaggregated to a group of businesses that have far more commonality among them,” he says. After six years as general counsel, Mr Blatt was tapped to run Match.com, and in 2010 he took over as CEO. Likewise, he does not see Facebook as a direct competitor. Yet the skyrocketing valuations of internet start-ups, led by that company’s pending IPO, has made it harder for IAC to find acquisition targets to fuel its growth. “I went to law school because I didn’t know what I wanted to do,” he says. “If someone had asked me if I would be working in the internet after law school I would have said: ‘What’s the internet?’”
FT – Nov 11 – Kelly Hitchcock works as a virtual dating assistant. She is penning profiles and making contact with potential matches on behalf of men and women who are too inept, too strapped for time or simply unwilling to do so themselves. Ms Hitchcock is employed by Scott Valdez, who launched Virtual Dating Assistants in 2009. The US census calculates that of the nation’s 87m singles, 40m have tried online dating. Annual revenues from dating sites are $1.2bn in the US and $3.5bn worldwide, according to Courtland Brooks, an internet dating consultancy. Mark Brooks, a consultant to dating sites, believes virtual dating assistants have a future. “A significant proportion of people don’t have time to filter through online matches. They are cheaper than matchmakers, who typically charge between $5,000 and $50,000”. Virtual Dating Assistants charges $147 for a basic profile, while $600-$700 a month will buy you date selection and correspondence.
FINANCIAL TIMES – July 31 – With the number of paying subscribers using Match approaching 1.8M, the company has had to develop ever more sophisticated programs to manage, sort and pair the world’s singles. Codenamed “Synapse”, the Match algorithm uses a variety of factors to suggest possible mates. While taking into account a user’s stated preferences, such as desired age range, hair colour and body type, it also learns from their actions on the site. Academics call this “dissonance”. Amazon uses similar technology to recommend new products for people to buy, Pandora learns from likes and dislikes to customise its internet radio stations, and Netflix famously offered $1m to anyone who could improve the effectiveness of its algorithm by 10%. Match began “weighting” variables differently, according to how users behaved. For example, if conservative users were actually looking at profiles of liberals, the algorithm would learn from that and recommend more liberal users to them. The Match algorithm is constantly at work behind the scenes, scouring terabytes of data and working to find possible matches.
FINANCIAL TIMES – Mar 18 – The basket of goods and services chosen by Britain’s Office for National Statistics to calculate inflation provides a geek’s-eye view of the way we live. Each year the list is updated to reflect spending habits, providing a glimpse of the nation’s changing soul, as expressed through its wallet. This week, online dating was included for the first time. Dating agencies were once the place losers went to date other losers. But now internet dating is YouTube to conventional dating’s three-channel TV.