WSJ – Jan 28 – FriendFinder Networks rescheduled its date with IPO investors Wednesday, and realtor chain IFM Investments cut its asking price. FriendFinder was supposed to begin trading under the symbol FFN on the New York Stock Exchange on Thursday, but is now launching the deal next week. FULL ARTICLE @ WSJ
Category: Outlets – Wall Street Journal
IAC Reverses Year-Earlier Loss
WSJ — July 29 – IAC/InterActiveCorp posted Q2 earnings of $40.8m compared with a year-earlier loss of $421.6m. Earnings before amortization in the media and advertising segment, which includes the Ask.com search engine, dropped 56%. The Match unit posted a 25% profit gain despite a 5% revenue drop and a 13% subscriber decrease. Excluding Europe, subscribership was up 9%. FULL ARTICLE @ WSJ
Marriage-Maker Claims Are Tied In Knots
WSJ — July 29 — eHarmony has twice commissioned studies from Harris Interactive to estimate its impact on marriages. The first, in 2005, found that 90 people a day married because of the site. The second, in 2007, found that the number had surged to 236. Using Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data on marriages, eHarmony estimated that it could claim credit for 2% of marriages in the U.S. A Match.com media kit claimed that 12 marriages a day trace their roots to the site, but the company now says it's inaccurate. Markus Frind, CEO of PlenyofFish.com, says his site creates 800,000 relationships each year, according to exit interviews with departing members. ~100,000 marriages per year. The only statistic Mr. Frind knows with certainty is the number of members who have self-reported success stories on his site — now ~ 2,000. FULL ARTICLE @ WSJ
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Spark Networks Loses Online Daters’ Love
WALL STREET JOURNAL — June 10 — Spark Networks is losing subscribers even as Internet dating as a whole is growing. Spark said it's trying to rebalance its portfolio to be less reliant on JDate. However, its segment weighting seems to be shifting more because of the relative speed of subscriber losses. Stock is down about 9% year-to-date and ~47% over the last 52 weeks, reflecting the prolonged poor performance, and has a market capitalization of $47.1 million. "I live in hope for them," said Mark Brooks, editor of the blog OnlinePersonalsWatch.com and an industry consultant. "But quite consistently, they've shown not particularly enthralling results." Spark's Q1 revenue dropped 20%. Meanwhile, revenue at Match slid just 1%. Ad-supported free sites like PlentyOfFish.com, which saw unique visitors nearly double to ~2.9 million in April from a year earlier, are a threat. Spark is focusing ad spending on a handful of its niche sites to bring them to scale and has all but given up on AmericanSingles.com.
Mark Brooks: Spark Networks acquired Engage.com a few months back, and acquired Hurrydate in February 2007. What should Spark Networks do next? Your comments please.
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eHarmony’s Same-Sex Dating Site Launches
WSJ — Mar 31 – In response to discrimination litigation, eHarmony will launch the gay version of its heterosexual match-making service on Tuesday. The site, Compatible Partners, was developed as part of a settlement last fall with the New Jersey attorney general. Patrick Perrine, founder and CEO of myPartner.com, an online dating site for gay men, remains skeptical about eHarmony’s new venture. He says the compatibility system on his site, matching men with other men, wouldn’t work for lesbian women. “They’re very different populations that have very different needs,” he said. FULL ARTICLE @ WSJ
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PlentyofFish Adds Pay Option For “Serious” Daters
WSJ — Mar 6 — PlentyofFish announced plans to add a pay option aimed at customers who want to show that they’re serious about meeting someone. In a February report, Sanford Bernstein analyst Jeffrey Lindsay called it “the most successful of a new generation of ‘free’ or advertising-supported dating sites,” and one whose growth could pose a “Craigslist-like disintermediation” threat to established players like Yahoo Personals and IAC’s Match.com. PlentyofFish’s approach to a paid option is different from Match and Yahoo Personals, which charge users when they sign up or attempt to contact someone. “Paid sites monetize on impulse,” Markus Frind wrote on his blog. “PlentyofFish is going to monetize on user intent. I believe we will have far more members that are serious than paid sites.” FULL ARTICLE @ WSJ
Deciding To Ditch A Successful Ad Campaign
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL — Feb 23 — eHarmony's successful five-year ad campaign was bringing
in millions of users and was so well-recognized that "Saturday Night
Live" parodied it. But eHamorny's CEO Mr. Waldorf worried the format – which featured
several daters per ad talking about the site – might be too
superficial. He wanted a way to focus more closely on individual
couples. He considered new commercials that featured one couple per ad
talking in-depth about their relationship. FULL ARTICLE @ THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
EHarmony Settles Dispute Over Gay Matches
WSJ — Nov 20 – A settlement between eHarmony and the New Jersey attorney general requires the online heterosexual dating service to also cater to homosexuals, raising questions about whether other services that target a niche clientele could be forced to expand their business models. eHarmony denied violating discrimination law and said its business had been based on years of researching opposite-sex marriages to understand what makes such couples compatible. EHarmony attracted nearly 2.6m unique visitors in October, a 28% jump from a year earlier, according to comScore. Consumers are expected to dole out nearly $1 billion in fees for online dating sites this year, according to Forrester Research, and the market is expected to expand by 10% in each of the next five years. FULL ARTICLE @ WSJ
Drilling Through Data
WSJ — Sep 15 — Book review of The Numerati. The world is buried in data. Computer programs drill
through it all to pick out patterns and trends that may be useful to
marketers. The Numerati are taking over dating services, too. How do
you find that special one in a million? By mining the data of the
million. The Numerati are even mining the output of bloggers. FULL ARTICLE @ WSJ
The Cut-and-Paste Personality
WALL STREET JOURNAL — Feb 15 — Among the 125 million people in the U.S. who visit online dating and social-networking sites are a growing number of dullards who steal personal profiles, life philosophies, even signature poems. Hugh Gallagher, a 36-year-old writer in New York, is one of the copied. Match.com has more than 50 profiles with parts of Mr. Gallagher's college entrance essay. In a recent Engage.com's survey of more than 400 online daters, 9% of respondents copied from another person's profile. A search on Match.com brought up more than 90 profiles with such lines as: "I want an opposite. A yin to my yang," or "You know that woman who is the first person on the dance floor at every party? That's me." They were cribbed from sample profiles posted at E-Cyrano.com by dating coach and profile writer Evan Marc Katz. JDate.com's recently released online dating tips include the advice: Look at what everyone else is saying and then SAY SOMETHING DIFFERENT".
The full article was originally published at WSJ, but is no longer available.