REUTERS – May 30 – InterActiveCorp's Match.com unit offered to buy all of the outstanding shares of Meetic for 15 euros a share. Match.com already owns 27% of the French online dating service. Meetic is valued at 347 million euros, or $497 million. The offer is 7.3 times EV/EBITDA, with a PE ration of 13.9. Match has no plans to delist Meetic.
Category: Outlets – Reuters
Athens Ranked As Most Flirtatious City By Badoo.com
REUTERS – Mar 1 – Athens topped a “World Flirtation League,” which ranked cities by the number of online flirtations initiated per month by the average user in each on Badoo.com. Moscow came second, while Rome placed 8th and Madrid 31st, Paris 38th, London 57th, Berlin 79th, and New York 89th in the study of nearly 200 cities across the world in which Badoo analysed 12M flirtatious contacts made during a month, with 108M users chatting and flirting in 180 countries.
by Paul Casciato
The full article was originally published at Vancouver Sun, but is no longer available.
Dating Sites For Entrepreneurs
ENTREPRENEUR – Feb 14 – Looking to explore the online dating industry, Benji Kurtz launched a handful of niche dating sites in 2001 focused on everything from religious backgrounds to physical stature, such as height and size. Over the next 10 years, Kurtz's love businesses grew to include more than 1,000 sites in about 100 different niches. In 2005 that Kurtz recognized the need to launch an entrepreneur-specific dating site, which he aptly named EntrepreneurDate.com. Today there are 160K members on EntrepreneurDate.com. Kurtz uses a freemium business model. MatchmakingInc.com is another site focused squarely on entrepreneurs.
The full article was originally published at Reuters, but is no longer available.
In The Dating Game, Speaking Styles Count
REUTERS LIFE – Feb 2 – American researchers have found a new way to predict the success of a relationship — compare the speaking style of a couple. In a study of college students they found that couples whose language was in sync were almost four times more likely to want to see each other again than those who did not use similar language, said Professor James Pennebaker, of the University of Texas, who headed the research team. The researchers focused on function words — which are not nouns or verbs but the words that show how those words relate. For example: a, be, anything, that, will, him. "We found that function words are a powerful reflection of somebody's psychological state," Pennebaker said. "You can tell when people are in the same state or are on the same page." ~80% of the couples whose conversational styles were similar were still dating three months after the experiment, compared with 54% of couples whose styles were markedly different. FULL ARTICLE @ REUTERS LIFE
Spanish Women Are The Most Flirtatious
REUTERS – Nov 2 - Spanish women are the most flirtatious in the world online, according to a survey by Badoo.com. The average Spanish woman initiates 1.33 contacts with a man per month, compared to Britain (0.78), France (0.69) or U.S. (0.63). FULL ARTICLE @ TORONTO SUN
Italy Hosted Divorce Fair
REUTERS – May 5 - Italy hosted its first divorce fair, offering services such as life coaching and beauty advice to a booming number of separating couples in the Catholic country. The fair, which was held in Milan on May 8-9, aimed to help divorcing people start a new, happier life. A growing number of Italian couples file for divorce every year, according to Italy's statistics agency ISTAT. More than 130,000 couples split or got divorced in Italy in 2007, up more than 3% from the previous year, ISTAT said. On the other side, the number of marriages nearly halved since 1972 to ~246,000 in 2008. FULL ARTICLE @ REUTERS
Watch Out For That Philandering Friend
REUTERS – Feb 16 – BeNaughty.com, a British dating site, has revealed
that half (46.9%) of the unfaithful men it polled for a survey on
affairs admitted to having a fling with a friend's wife or
girlfriend. "Attractions develop very easily between men and women who
see each other often, in the same circles. And it is often easier to be
together without arousing any suspicions", said Marketing Manager Sean
Wood. FULL ARTICLE @ REUTERS UK
Adult Site Operator FriendFinder Shelves IPO
REUTERS – Feb 5 - FriendFinder Networks Inc indefinitely shelved its planned $220M initial public offering on Friday. The company did not say when it might again try to price the IPO, but said in a statement it would not proceed "until market conditions improve." FriendFinder intended to sell 20M shares for between $10 and $20 each and use the proceeds largely to pay down debt. FriendFinder first filed for the IPO in Dec 2008, and initially sought to raise as much as $460M. FULL ARTICLE @ REUTERS
$60 Million Initial Offering For Avid Life Media Delayed
REUTERS – Feb 2 - A planned $60M IPO for Avid Life Media, which runs adult dating websites including one that facilitates extramarital affairs, has been delayed. Avid Life, which was being advised by GMP Capital, had planned to use the funds raised from the offering to acquire another company.
The full article was originally published at Financial Post, but is no longer available.
FriendFinder Sets IPO Terms
REUTERS – Jan 10 - FriendFinder set the terms of its initial public offering on Friday, cutting its size by more than half. FriendFinder's properties range from AdultFriendFinder.com to BigChurch.com and SeniorFriendFinder.com. It also publishes pictures and video, and the magazine Penthouse. FriendFinder plans to sell 20M shares for $10 to $12, each. At the midpoint that would raise $220M. The company filed for an IPO in December 2008 of up to $460M, but did not disclose details. FULL ARTICLE @ REUTERS