THE DEAL - Mar 11 - OkCupid CEO Sam Yagan said he was surprised private equity firm Great Hill Partners made an offer to acquire the remaining 56% stake of Spark Networks it does not own. Spark is the parent of online dating sites JDate, BlackSingles.com, and ChristianMingle.com. The proposal, valued at $3.10 per share, is not receiving much love from some shareholders. Yagan gives his thoughts on the offer in the video below.
The full article was originally published at The Deal, but is no longer available.
I'm curious if anyone knows OkCupid's revenue? It seems free sites like POF have far lower revenue than top subscription sites like JDate.
Posted by: Joe | Mar 12, 2010 at 12:28 AM
Sam is great expert in dating obviously with his revenues 10 times smaller then SPARK :-)
Posted by: max | Mar 12, 2010 at 02:25 AM
I like Sam. He's a very smart guy and has a great site. However, "free" site guys telling us paid site guys that their model is superior and that "free" is where it's at is just them (him) promoting their (his) model.
Sites like eHarmony and Match don't make $500,000,000+ annually between them year after year because the paid model is dying. Smaller sites like ours don't continually generate revenue (and profit for people like me) year after year after year (we're into our 12th year doing this) unless consumers find value. Clearly, they do.
(Companies like Spark experiencing problems doesn't have anything to do with the subscription model. It has to do with mismanagement and other issues.)
Contrary to Sam's (great) site and POF, no other dating sites based on the "free" model work (at all). And, when you factor in all the millions of $$ in investment into OKCupid, I would venture to say that *that* site doesn't make money (profit), either.
That leaves POF. As I have said repeatedly in past posts here and elsewhere, POF is a statistical anomaly. It works great for Markus, but no one else in the "free" space makes anything - just him.
So, paid isn't dead (in dating). Free is.
Sam
P.S. Speaking of POF, when you factor in the amount of traffic that site generates, vs. its revenue, and then compare it to a site like Match.com (or other paid sites), it *vastly* under-performs, on a revenue/user basis. POF may have twice the traffic (or something like that), but it has a fraction of the profit.
So, even, in the one case when "free" works, it has tremendous financial inefficiencies.
Look at facebook for another example. $1B in revenue from a 300,000,000 user-base?
Posted by: Sam Moorcroft, ChristianCafe.com | Mar 12, 2010 at 01:12 PM