Jonathan Crutchley, ManHunt.net Chairman - OPW Interview

OPW INTERVIEW -- Apr 22, 2007 -- Manhunt is racy and gay and growing fast. It's Americas leading casual gay dating site. (MyPartnerPerfect.com sits at the other end of the spectrum as the gay eHarmony, with Patrick Perrine). I talked to Jonathan Crutchley ManHunt's chairman of the board. - Mark Brooks

What’s the founding story of Manhunt.net?
I have a business partner, Larry Basile, who invited me to be his business partner in 1992 in a gay telephone chat service in Boston, Dial Information Services. I bought out his existing partner and we went into the telephone chat line business together, in Boston. He founded the business in 1987.

It’s a local business that made a reasonable amount of money but around 2000 we noticed that our youngest users, 18 to early 20’s, weren’t using our service as much as they had. Boston has 300,000 college students and a good part of our market was young people 18 – 22. Whenever they arrive for school in the fall we advertise in the gay magazines and newspapers locally to tell the newcomers about our chat line service and they weren’t responding. We figured it was because they were using the Internet.

We made a decision to get a website launched, persuade people to use it and then persuade people to pay to use it.  At that time most people didn’t believe in paying. 

By trial and error, mostly error, we got some people to design a website for us. Neither my business partner nor I knew anything about the Internet. Then we advertised locally. It took about 2 years to grow to 10,000 users for free services at www.manhunt.net. Then at one point in the year 2002, we sent all of our users an email and said, “We hope you’ve enjoyed using Manhunt these past 2 years but now we’re going to ask you to pay $10 a month for the service.” We held our breath, sat back and to our great surprise they paid. People told us that they appreciated the service so much it was worth paying for and that they understood.

After we found out that people were willing to pay for this, we realized the Internet goes everywhere not just Boston. So we decided to open up the website to users in New York City, Miami, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, coast to coast USA. We promoted it with advertisements in gay magazines and newspapers, held events at gay bars and nightclubs. I started traveling to various locations promoting our website and it caught on coast to coast in the USA. Now we have over 600,000 US members and 900,000+ members worldwide. We’ve translated Manhunt into German, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Japanese, and Italian is in process. We’re in Europe and Asia and Australia and North and South America. So it’s really taken off.

I’m quite surprised at the massive popularity of Gaydar in the U.K. Hitwise ranks them as the top dating site in the U.K.
They were there first. If you noticed, they’re way behind us in the USA. I admire them. They offer an excellent service to their members, but eventually, just like Pepsi caught up with Coca-Cola, it took them 100 years, and I don’t know how long it’s going to take us to catch up with Gaydar but we’ll catch up to Gaydar sooner or later in the U.K.

To what do you attribute your successes so far with Manhunt.net?
What our members tell us is it’s easy to use. We have very prompt customer service. I’ve got 30 guys who work shifts 24 hours a day and speak all these different languages answering emails and calls on our 800 number. If guys have a problem, guys have a question, credit card billing issues, and things like that, they send us an email and in 10 minutes they get an answer. If you go on most other dating websites you’ll find they’ll say, “We’ll get back to you in the next 2 or 3 days to answer your question.”

We’ve invested in customer service because the gay community is a community and people are comfortable using our site because there’s somebody on the other end they can talk to and they have the confidence to use our site and subscribe to it.

How fast is the site growing at this stage?
Let’s just say that revenues are growing 50% a year now. Sooner or later that’s going to level off but we keep going to new countries and they think we’re the best thing since sliced bread.

Does the gay dating market tend towards being casual or does it tend towards being long term relationship oriented?
Obviously, this question is not being asked by a gay man. I have to explain this frequently to straight people who ask me this. It’s casual. When I compare our dating website with a boy meets girl dating website, what happens on a boy meets girl dating website is boy meets girl, boy dates girl, boy marries girl because many of these sites are inclined toward promoting marriage, which is fine.

The difference between that and my website is boy meets boy, boy dates boy, tomorrow night boy dates another boy, the next night boy dates another boy. Especially with the younger crowd from age 18 to 40 that’s the way young gay men live. They get out and about, they go out to bars and nightclubs and they see a lot of people. Whereas, with Match.com or True or eHarmony, once a couple has met and dated and married, that website has lost two customers. But once I get a customer, if they like us and they subscribe, they just put their credit card on automatic rebill and they renew and renew and renew and we grow.

The reason I asked was, Gayparship.co.uk launched recently and they did a survey (1,000 responses) and found that 47% of gay men were looking for a serious, long term relationship compared to just 16% that were looking for casual flings. That didn’t quite ring true.  What are your thoughts on that?
They may be looking for Mr. Right but Mr. Right Now will do. I would say that most gay men are probably looking some day for a long term relationship. Sooner or later we all settle down for a while but then they still subscribe to my website and look at the pictures. But still in the meantime, gay men will casually date.  Also, we estimate that as many as 30% of our users are married men.

Which of the mainstream sites is most popular amongst the gay audience?  I heard that Yahoo Personals is popular amongst the gay audience.
I honestly can’t imagine that, I don’t understand why. Gay men are looking for their own community and I’ve gone and looked at, for instance, Match.com and Yahoo Personals and we do market research with these others, but a website operated by straight people just does not register with gay men. The questions, when you fill out their questionnaires the questions that a woman would ask a man when she’s looking for someone to marry, like how much money do you make, do you want children? These are ridiculous questions, a gay man could care less how much money you make, could care less about wanting children. They want to know your physical attributes, they want to see pictures, they want to know what you’re into.
My website is an adult website and men pose in adult photographs, they post naked pictures of themselves and some guys will subscribe just to look at the pictures rather then go to the newsstand and buy a magazine and see the pictures. So that’s what men are interested in and the people who run straight dating websites with a gay niche in it have no clue. I don’t think that they’re serious competition.

You’re ranked by Hitwise as the 10th most trafficked dating site in the U.S.A., and gay.com is 14th. How so?
Gay.com doesn’t consider themselves a competitor of ours. They’ve said they’re going in a different direction. They’re going into the magazine publishing business, they’re going for advertising revenues, they’re going into the travel industry, they chartered the Queen Mary. They’re looking for the Fortune 500 to advertise in their properties, their magazine or their website properties. That’s what they want to do.
We stick to our knitting and we’re just in the personals business and the personals business only. I have no cruises up and down the Danube or Atlantic crossings from New York to Southampton. I have none of that.

Do you believe in offline advertising or do you believe in purely online?
We’re an Internet business but actually we did promote and we do promote our website in gay magazines and newspapers, but the trouble with that is if you pick up the newspaper and you want to connect to our website you can’t push a button on the page to get there. The way you get traffic is on the Internet. It’s generally more effective for word-of-mouth to get people to come to your site and create links to your site, and things like that.  If someone has no clue as where to find a date and enters gay dating on Google they’ll find us.

What are your goals for 2007 for Manhunt.net?
To grow the business, it’s a big, big world and I only have around a million members and there are billions of people in this world.

Are you going to the Shanghai conference in China?
Oh yes, definitely. I’ll be there. Actually I’ve made contacts already in China that tell me that Gay.com and Gaydar are already marketing there. We plan to offer our service in China. We plan to offer our service in India. We are international and I’ve got a lot of work to do in the next 20 years.

Comments

[Jonathan Crutchley]

We at Manhunt.net have no current plans to expand the website under different domain names. However, the current website is growing very rapidly with 1 million registered users now. International expansion is fueling this growth. As far as the "straight" market is concerned, we have always debated as to the number of "straight" or married men who use Manhunt. Some guesses are that as many as 20% of our members are married men or have girlfriends. In some foreign countries the percentage of married users may be higher. Some Chinese tell us that as many as 90% of "gay" men in China are married to women. As to other parts of the gay community, if you do a member search of different gay lifestyles such as "bears" or "leather," you'll find these groups are well represented among the Manhunt members.

[Patrick Perrine, myPartnerPerfect.com]

The tremendous growth of ManHunt.net is a clear demonstration of the need for gay focused dating sites. mPartnerPerfect.com recently launched to provide comprehensive online dating and private matchmaking services exclusively to gay men. Like ManHunt.net, around 20% of our members have been in long term relationships with women. The difference with our site is that the men on our site are looking to establish a new long term relationships with a man; regardless of their current or previous relationships with women. There are many online dating sites on the web that cater to the straight community, but the benefit of ManHunt.net and myPartnerPerfect.com is that they focus exclusively to a niche population that has long looked for a place to find what they are looking for...one on immediate needs, one on long term needs.

We have often been asked to provide similar services for the lesbian community and have plans to eventually reach out to them as well.

[John Doe]

Well

This is what makes me glad I am not active in the Gay community in any sense of the word, Yes I am Gay but being Relationship oriented my entire life and believing that sex is something one does with someone they love has made me a social outcast, a weirdo and a freak or so I have been told by my Gay encounters and I am glad I am such.

The mere thought of having sex with a man that I just met a moment earlier on a gay line or an internet chatroom makes me about as sick as the thought of having sex with a woman or a child does, Its Gross, I see no purpose.

And

As far as those questions such as how much money does one make or does one want children, these are important questions if you are seeking a serious live in relationship, would be nice to know if the man I am dating wants us to adopt or have a woman have our baby someday wouldnt it?

Maybe I am the only gay man who feels this way, I am certainly the only one I have met in my 33 Years of life on this planet...

I am Glad I found this interview though, thanks, I was invited to a party tommorrow and wasnt sure if I should go, I thought, maybe I will meet someone sincere there but there is a large part of me that knows that he doesnt exist for me, Men want sex, thats what men are into, commitment, monogamy, relationships arent real, I need to face that fact and move on as far away from The 'Gay lifestyle' as I can!

:(

[Jesse Archer]

Dear John Doe (your anonymity reveals much about you),

With an attitude like that, you'll never find what you want. Sure other gays like you exist. Our community is as diverse as it is stereotypical, but you're not going to find what you're looking for if you refuse to look for it. Get out there, instead of sitting home and sulking about how he "isn't real."

[Renee]

Not an entirely accurate comparison as straight people seeking "sex dates" use AdultFriendFinder and not eHarmony, Yahoo Personals, etc. They post explicit pics and sexual requests on AFF & similar sites. It's that straight people fall into two groups, either looking for relationships or sex, whereas the gay world is primarily looking for a "right now" encounter.

Yep, sex sites that cater to a specific audience will be successful (if done right). People want what they want--and most likely can find it online.

[Mark Brooks]

Please note, interview comment threads are protected threads. We don't allow any derogatory comments towards our interviewees.

If you choose to comment on news posts, derogatory comments can remain as long as they are not anonymous.

[Maurice]

Stop editing your content in favor of manhunt....you make it so blatantly obvious you're working for them.

it's pretty patetic that you'd both support those who'll cart us off to a concentration camp and deny others the same rights you enjoy.

Betcha won't post a boycott of OPW....but we can post it everywhere else.

[Mark Brooks]

Thanks for your comment Maurice. It pains me to delete comments from interview threads. But on the other hand Online Personals Watch is for those in the internet dating business community. As a courtesy to interviewees, derogatory comments are deleted from interview threads. Feel free to posted elsewhere on the site, but anonymous comments and comments clearly hawking products/services may also be deleted, I should note.

If your comment adds to the professional and courteous discussion of the business of internet dating, it adds something to the community and will not be deleted.

Please keep your comments professional and courteous, with constructive criticism and your comments will be very welcome here. Thanks for your consideration gentlemen.

Mark Brooks
Editor, Online Personals Watch
212-444-1636

[Mark Tolman]

It is such a shame that everyone has been so quick to judge Jonathan based solely on his donation and the label "Republican".

I worked with Jonathan at Manhunt for many years, in fact I wrote most of the code for the site. While he and I have not always seen eye to eye, I can tell you he's no idiot. He choose the Republican party for his own reasons, which are none of our business.

[Geo]

Yes Mark it is our business when Jonathan earns his money from the gay community then uses that money to support a group who does not see gays and lesbians as equal human beings. Just look at the record of his Vice Presidential nominee, Sarah Palin. She vetoed a gay rights bill. BOYCOTT MANHUNT and spend your gay dollars elsewhere!!!

[Mark Brooks]

Above all else I support and respect freedom of choice.

I also respect your choice not to.

Mark Brooks
212-444-1636
[email protected]

[kelly b. thomas]

As a Lesbian there are no legitimate site to find a LifePartner/one night stand etc,i suggest a venture to start the same concept only for lesbians this way they have to pay to find quality and be safe at the same time, contact me via e-mail or home phone;415-504-5802
the demand is great.
regards
kelly b. thomas

[Jonathan Crutchley]

Online Buddies, Inc. owns the domain name of www.womanhunt.com, and several years ago we explored the idea of launching a dating site for women only. We were talking to several female entrepreneurs about a partnership; Online Buddies would provide the technical support, and our women partners would provide the creativity and content. Sadly, the enterprise never got off the ground, but I would be happy to discuss its revival with Ms. Thomas or anyone else.

[[email protected]]

i just dont know why the "new manhunt" 1st we lost a few days in the site for improvements... a few days into IT, still very slow and yet sometimes cant even see my messeges... i am sure some glitches, but come ON.... NO EVEN CUSTUMER SERVICE to the rescue!!! hope we/you can get it together why fixed if it worked!!!
thank you Ramon NYC

[Gil]

Would you have Larry contact me. Larry and I have also been business partners and I miss him very much My name is Gil Bartee [email protected]

[antoanvegas]

Yes, this the impressive foundation story of a very successful today project called ManHunt. And this is how the things just happens an good idea and than a lot and hard work. But as we know if we work hard and believe in what we are doing there is no other way than full success.
I wish to you to have at least a peace of ManHunt success in life.

Take care