MARKET WATCH -- Greg Waldorf is a founding investor and CEO of eHarmony.
Has the cost to acquire subscribers gone up now people are more comfortable meeting on social networking sites?
I don't think social networking sites have affected our acquisition costs. If anything, the social networking sites give people a taste of what it's like to be like online and it allows them to clearly differentiate a social service vs a more serious approach to online matching.
Match.com grew sales 22% to $80 million in the recent quarter. Are you growing faster than Match.com?
We're growing at about the same rate as Match.
How are you going to grow your revenues next year?
Most likely through more people coming onto the site. Between 15 and 30 million people will be a unique visitor to one of the major online dating sites. At any given time, only several million people are actually subscribing. There's a high degree of interest, and now we need to get more of them to convert.
How many subscribers did you sign on this year and what do you expect for next year?
Many hundreds of thousands. 14 million subscribers since inception.
What is the average lifetime value of a subscriber?
Well over a $100.
