4TRADERS - July 25 - Meetic's revenue for the 1st half of 2012 is 82M Eur. The number of subscribers decreased 13.2% to 733,158. Net profit for the 1st half of 2012 came to 11.9M Eur giving a net margin of 14.6%, compared to 6.5% for the 1st half of 2011.
« June 2012 | Main | August 2012 »
Meetic Results For The 1st Half Of 2012
| |
Lunch Actually Plays Cupid To Wealthy Singles
THE STRAITS TIMES - July 25 - Lunch Actually, the high-end matchmaking service, is on the expansion path. It has built up annual revenue to S$1 million ($793K) in eight years and head count to about 30. It recently launched Lunch Actually Platinum. The premium matchmaking service targets people earning more than $397K a year. Lunch Actually has also partnered with MeetnLunch.com, a matchmaking and online dating service in Thailand.
by Yunita Ong
The full article was originally published at The Jakarta Post, but is no longer available.
| |
Match.com Survey Reveals Singles' Dating Behaviors
PR NEWSWIRE - July 24 - Match.com surveyed ~3,000 singles across six countries, including the U.S., France, U.K., Australia, Japan and Canada to learn more about each nation's particular dating norms and beliefs. See the infographic. 76% of U.S. singles have gone on two or more dates in the last year, followed by Canada (70%) and the U.K. (68%). Australia and Japan came in last place at 47%, showing singles in these two countries focus on quality over quantity in dating. Aussies are the most likely to kiss on the first date, while the French take their time. Japanese ladies take the gold for the highest percentage (16%) of women who said they pay the tab on a date all the time, with Australia, France, U.K. and U.S. ladies all lagging behind in second place at 4%.
The full article was originally published at MarketWatch, but is no longer available.
| |
MeetMe To Speak At The Social Discovery Conference
MARKETWIRE - July 24 - MeetMe, the public market leader for social discovery, will present at the SocialDiscovery.org conference on August 6-7, 2012 in San Francisco. Geoff Cook, COO and President will cover people discovery and the opportunity to build a mass market brand for meeting new people by engineering serendipity. Social discovery has emerged as the latest trend in social media and social networking, as users join networks to find people, places and things based on their specific interests.
The full article was originally published at MarketWatch, but is no longer available.
| |
Cupid Ties The Knot With French Peer
THE SCOTSMAN - July 24 - Cupid has bought French peer Assistance Genie Logiciel (AGL) from private equity fund Financiere PES for €3.7M (£2.9M). AGL’s 25 staff in Paris run three websites, two of which – Amour.com and SeRencontrer.com – follow traditional models, while the third, Ulla.com, is “somewhat racier”, analysts said. Cupid does not disclose revenue by country but it is estimated that the revenue run-rate in France prior to today’s acquisition was ~€6M.”
by Peter Ranscombe
See full article at The Scotsman
This post also appears on InternetDatingInvestments.
| |
Interview With Romain David, CEO Of Meexo, The First Mobile Dating Service To Perfect ‘Reverse Social Graph’
OPW INTERVIEW - July 24
You've been working in mobile for ten years. You've worked for Orange and Apple. What was it like at Apple in 2007? You were one of those responsible for the launch of the iPhone.
It was absolutely amazing to be part of the experience.
Did you meet Steve?
I hadn't met Steve, but I had seen him many times. I did attend a few of the keynotes he gave.
It's an amazing product culture there. How has that rubbed off on Meexo?
Before iPhone launched, very few people really felt this emotional connection with the device. The online dating industry is at the same point. We have yet to see products that people really love. This is what we wanted to build.
People love Apple products. What do you think they love and hate about mobile dating?
There's a lot of creepiness associated with mobile dating, especially for women. The creepiness is typically sharing your location with strangers. Women don't necessarily want to meet guys anytime, anywhere. Mobile is not only about location. It's about all the things that make the platform unique. We limit the number of profiles per device to one. No more fake profiles. If you do misbehave, we can not only block your account, but also block your device.
You've been working with Meexo a little over a year now. What's your founding story? What led you to start Meexo?
When I considered online dating there was not a product that I wanted to try willingly. I was very uncomfortable with the way people could join and expose their profile to anyone. We introduced a product at TechCrunch Disrupt called the Reverse Social Graph. It prevents your profile from being exposed to all of your direct connections on social networks.
There seems to be two schools of thought here. One is that your friends should be matchmakers for you. A few apps have taken this approach. So you're taking the opposite route. There is the ability when you sign up to only allow certain kinds of friends or acquaintances see that you're on the app. But I'm not sure everybody knows that or really uses that.
Exactly. We obviously let you see friends of friends, because in real life, this is how people meet their partner. We decided to file a patent because we think this is definitely something that is going to be huge in the future.
Would you describe Meexo as a mobile dating app or is it more friends-making?
Our goal is really around relationships. The online dating industry should be called online introduction industry. There's another world that starts when you actually meet the person face to face. We are trying to provide value beyond the introductions.
Can you tell us about ‘Us’?
If you meet someone on Meexo, you have the opportunity to connect your phone to your date's phone to see what music you have in common with theirs. You see the albums floating on the two screens. You can start a conversation this way. So we provide these ways to break the ice and come up with some potentially interesting things to say.
What features are you most proud of?
Reverse Social Graph is definitely one of them. The other thing is scarcity of communication. Men tend to message a lot and women tend to be overwhelmed with these messages. The app is free and you only pay if you want to initiate conversations. You can reply for free. We want people to be very picky and thoughtful about what they say instead of spamming all of our users.
Are you charging for points yet?
We are.
You launched at TechCrunch Disrupt and SXSW. Which one was better for you?
When we announced our product at TechCrunch Disrupt, we were very lucky. We were very proud to be one of these companies that took stage as part of the final round. Unfortunately, we could not launch our product at TechCrunch Disrupt, it was just too early for us. We launched at SXSW. We were also very fortunate to be one of the finalists in the mobile category of SXSW.
What was some surprising feedback that you got?
The Reverse Social Graph was something people never really thought about and that resonated with a lot of people. We did make some adjustments based on what we learned.
How do you deal with geo-location?
We use GPS to know the city where you are, but we don't share your exact location with people you don't know.
What other mobile dating services do you hold in high esteem?
OKCupid and Grindr.
Have you actually developed the app in-house or did you use a third party?
We built everything in-house. We're using a company called Stackmob for our back-end that provides the technology so you can focus on your core product.
What are the technologies that it was built on? What choices did you make for tech?
For us, it's iOS, objective C. It's a native application. We wanted the app to be fast and take advantage of the device 's capabilities. That's why we didn't want to do a mobile web version. It was very important to focus on the user experience.
HTML5 has great days ahead of it. In the case of LinkedIn, it makes sense. It's mostly a browsing experience. In our case, we wanted to be able to tap into the phone's camera API. We wanted to tap into the location API. We wanted to use the core capabilities of the device that HTML5 sites could not access. HTML5 in the future? Yes. HTML5 now? I don't think it's ready for what we want to do.
Let's fast forward a year. What makes Meexo standout for membership? Where are you at in a year?
I think we're going to see a lot of things around this concept of meaningful relationships. This is the one aspect of social networking that has been left behind. We think there's opportunity there. We started focusing on dating, but this is part of this meaningful relationship concept.
| |
eHarmony CEO Job Is A Good Match For Jeremy Verba
LA TIMES - July 22 - Jeremy Verba, 49, became CEO of eHarmony in August 2011, replacing Greg Waldorf. Verba received a bachelor's degree in architecture from MIT and an MBA from Harvard Business School. As a 10-year-old, Verba worked as a newspaper boy. He later worked as a salesman at a hardware store or as a waiter and a garbage collector. "Every work experience teaches you something about yourself. I learned a lot about people and jobs that aren't necessarily fun." After getting his MBA, Verba held several positions in technology and media, including CEO of Piczo and GM of Zynga. "I've always migrated to businesses that have big impact, and that's what attracted me to eHarmony", he said. After noticing that many eHarmony users access the site from their smartphones and tablets, Verba has been working to grow the company's social media presence and improve its mobile platform. Mobile traffic now accounts for a third of eHarmony's activity.
| |
Grindr Crashed Due To Overuse
PEOPLE - July 22 - Grindr crashed within minutes of the first Olympic athletes arriving in London, due to the volume of demand, say experts. It took 24 hours for the app to get back up and running. London is the most popular city for the app, with 350K registered users. The website advertises itself as a way to find “a new date, buddy or friend”. Founder Joel Simkhai said: “Our tech team worked around the clock to solve the problems and to whip Grindr back into shape.”
| |
Ashley Madison Rates South Africa At The Top
NEWS24.COM - July 21 - South Africans are rated the "hottest lovers" when it comes to outdoor sex, according to AshleyMadison (AM), an infidelity dating site. AM claims to be the second-fastest growing social network in the world after Facebook, and currently has 14M users world-wide, with ~80K in South Africa.
| |
theComplete.me CEO To Speak At The Social Discovery Conference In SF
WEBWIRE - July 20 - Brian Bowman, CEO of theComplete.me, is scheduled to speak at the Social Discovery Conference in San Francisco. He will cover trends in social discovery and mobile, including business models and consumer usage. The conference will be held August 6-7.
| |
ChatRandom Emerging As An Alternative To Online Dating
PR NEWSWIRE - July 20 - Video chat website ChatRandom is experiencing rapid growth as an alternative to traditional online dating. The service replaces the time consuming process of online dating with quick video chat sessions similar to speed dating. It's Multi Chat feature connects up to four users at once. Users can select connections from a list rather than receive random connections. The site has 200,000 users and has facilitated 21 billion connections.
| |
New Breed Of Indian Dating Sites Using Scientific Matchmaking
THE TIMES OF INDIA - July 20 - Traditional matrimonial sites in India use markers such as caste, community, and horoscope to determine matches. New start-up TwoMangoes.com is leveraging self-learning behavioral matching algorithms to determine compatibility. The site claims 1,000 new sign ups per day. Social dating start up MyMitra is ranking people by achievement and commitment using scientific matching. It has signed up 500 users. Another site using scientific algorithms is DateIITians. It has over 10,000 registered users, 40% of whom are IIT and IIM students and graduates. Group dating site StepOut.com has over 4 million registered users in India.
| |
MaritalAffair.co.uk Running A Contest To Cover Divorce Costs
DAILY STAR - July 19 - Extra-marital dating site MaritalAffair.co.uk is running a promotional contest where the prize is the company covering the legal fees for a divorce. The site has come under fire from family campaigners such as the Chrisitan Voice for profiting off of the collapse of people's marriages. Office of National Statistics figures show that the UK's divorce rate is 200 times higher than it was 100 years ago.
by Kevin Widdoop
See full article at Daily Star
| |
Guardian News & Media Is Seeking A Digital Shop For Soulmates
CAMPAIGN LIVE - July 19 - Guardian News & Media is in talks with several agencies to provide the digital account for its Soulmates dating site. The company is looking for an agency to support and grow the dating site's business. The process is being managed by the company's marketing department.
| |
Smartphone Users Still Prefer Text Over IM & Social Networking
THE DRUM - July 18 - According to Acision's 'Psychology of SMS' research, 92% of smartphone users prefer texting over instant messaging and social networking on their devices. The survey polled 2000 UK and US respondents. Men send texts to an average of 17 contacts, while women send texts to 13. 94% of 18-35 year-olds use SMS, sending and average of 133 messages per week. Researches believe people stick to what is reliable and familiar over all of the new services and applications.
The full article was originally published at The Drum, but is no longer available.
| |