NY TIMES - Mar 10 - Grindr is approaching its fourth anniversary and has amassed ~5M users who spend ~90 minutes each day using the app. Billions of messages fly across the service every year, and 76% of the company’s revenue comes from money generated by Grindr premium users. Jamie Woo, author of the book, Meet Grindr, How One App Changed the Way We Connect, says Grindr’s main purpose is to facilitate hookups that are “spontaneous and intimate". He said the primary appeal of Grindr is its simplicity. The app also focuses on proximity rather than location.
LA TIMES - Mar 10 - Tinder, a new free dating app that, in a twist on the "hot or not" game, matches users with potential partners in their area without the risk of rejection. Since October, the app has helped make ~20M matches, the company said. Tinder is financially backed by InterActiveCorp's business accelerator Hatch Labs. After downloading the app, Tinder syncs to your existing Facebook profile and integrates public data about you to rate your compatibility based on your shared friends, interests, networks and location. If you're interested in a person, you swipe left; if you're not, you can move on to the next candidate by swiping right. It's all anonymous until both Tinder users say they like each other. Then they can chat using the app.
WSJ - Mar 10 - OkCupid asks male and female users to rate the attractiveness of members of the opposite sex on a six-point scale, in which 0 is the least attractive and 5 is the most. The light line in the nearby chart shows the distribution of female attractiveness as rated by men. As you can see, it is close to a normal distribution--call it the belle curve. That is, the average woman's looks are "medium," or 2.5. Male beauty turns out to be distributed quite abnormally. Women rate an incredible 80% of guys as worse-looking than medium. One possibility is that women are simply pleasanter to look at than men. The OkCupid ratings measure how men see women and how women see men.The heavy lines in the two charts
measure the behavior of the rating sex. When it comes to actual messaging, women shift their expectations only just slightly ahead of the curve, which is a healthier pattern than guys' pursuing the all-but-unattainable. And what the divergence between the charts really shows is that looks matter far less to women than to men. That women remain interested in men at all, despite finding most of us aesthetically repugnant, suggests that the attraction has some other basis. It is men's looks that are socially constructed, while female beauty is a force of nature.
PRESS RELEASE - Mar 8 - SparkNetworks 2012 revenue increased 27% to $61.7M. Q4 '12 revenue totaled $16.3M, also a 27% YOY increase. The Christian Networks segment was the primary driver of that growth. Christian Network 2012 revenue increased 101% to 31.6M and average paying subscribers grew 80% to 168K. Q4 company-wide average paying subscribers grew 31% to 279K. Net loss in the Q4 was $10.5M compared to a net loss of $1.1 in Q4 2011.
The full article was originally published at Spark.net, but is no longer available.
THE MOTLEY FOOL - Mar 8 - The shares of Cupid climbed 3p to 120p during early trading this morning after CEO Bill Dobbie revealed he had invested £1M in his firm. This week, Cupid's 2012 results showed sales up 51% to £81M.
PRESS RELEASE - Mar 8 - MeetMe reported $46.7M in revenue in 2012, which represents a 31% increase over the $35.6M of Combined Revenue of Quepasa and myYearbook during the same period of 2011. Q4 Revenue totaled $11.6M, which represents a 23% increase over the $9.5M of Combined Revenue of Quepasa and myYearbook during the same period of 2011. Mobile revenue grew 25% sequentially to $2.2M in the Q4 2012 and 355% compared to the same period of 2011 and 355% compared to the same period of 2011. “This year was foundational for the company,” said John Abbott, CEO of MeetMe. “We look to continue mobile revenue growth in 2013 through a combination of a new mobile subscription product, MeetMe+, and new premium advertising placements in our mobile feed." MeetMe averaged 5.51M monthly active users (MAUs) on the core MeetMe platform in the Q4 2012, an YOY increase of 85%.
THE NEXT WEB - Mar 8 - Monthly revenues for the social networking category on the App Store jumped 87% YOY in January, according to a new study from App Annie. The social networking apps category is now the third highest in terms of monthly revenue, behind games and productivity. In terms of downloads, social networking was sixth overall among categories on the App Store in January. According to App Annie, monthly downloads were up 30% YOY and now account for 5% of total downloads. Globally, the list of top social networking apps with respect to downloads was predictably dominated by Facebook, Apple’s Find My Friends, Twitter and Skype. Dating apps like Zoosk, Badoo, Grindr Xtra and eHarmony also proved capable at monetization.
OPW INTERVIEW - Mar 6 - Teligence knows voice chat, and mobile dating (white label), and has a customer service outsourcing offering as well (On Q). They’ve been busy. Here’s a quick spotlight interview with the GM, Jeff Prete. (Full Disclosure: Teligence is a client of Courtland Brooks)
Tell us about Teligence, what do you do? We’ve been in the voice-chat industry for 22 years. We’ve branched out into the web and to white label mobile apps.
How big is the business? We’re $50 Million+ a year in revenues with a high degree of profitability.
If a dating company comes to you and says we want voice chat, can you help? Yeah, absolutely. Voice chat is the easiest one to set up right now. It's a 22 year old platform that monetizes at a very high rate. You can be up and ready in 2 weeks.
What's the revenue split? It's 50/50. The more you market it, the less our share is.
You can also help with customer service outsourcing, I understand? We've got a voice customer service team, 24/7/365 email support as well as content moderation.
Are you multi-language? English, Spanish, and Portuguese are our strengths. We can staff up and get any other language that we need to.
And I think you have an announcement for us about your white label mobile dating platform? Yes, Here Media liked our white label dating infrastructure, so we worked with them to launch the new Gay.com website. It looks great – you should check it out. The next step is to launch their dating service on iPhone, Android, Windows Phone, and mobile web. They have a very active community and it’s been great to deliver them the next generation of services in the dating industry.
PR NEWSWIRE - Mar 6 - AreYouInterested? has launched of several new 'social' features designed to integrate a user's friends into the online dating experience. AYI users will now be able to view the friends in common when looking for potential dates, search for singles through their friends, and search for singles with mutual or related interests. AYI is also introducing robust interest searching in order to deliver more relevant matches for singles.
HERALD SCOTLAND - Mar 6 - Cupid has ordered a confidence-building independent audit of its member database. The move comes a month after the airing of claims that customers were lured into paying subscriptions to Cupid sites after receiving messages from users who disappeared when they signed up. Cupid will also seek an independent audit of its customers' experiences.
NY TIMES - Mar 6 - Marriage can take place from opposite ends of the globe over Skype. These are called proxy marriages, a legal arrangement that allows a couple to wed even in the absence of one or both spouses. They date back centuries. The procedure had been used infrequently in the US, usually by deployed members of the military worried about being killed and leaving loved ones without benefits. But it is increasingly being used in immigrant communities, where people are seeking to marry partners from their homelands without the expense of matchmaking trips abroad. Such convenience has also raised concerns that it will facilitate marriage fraud. Only a few states permit proxy marriages, and most require one partner to be in the military. But the United States generally recognizes foreign marriages as long as they are legally conducted abroad and do not break any laws here. George Andrews, the operations manager for Proxy Marriage Now, a company that facilitates such unions worldwide for a fee, said technology, like Skype, was driving the growth of proxy marriages. In the seven years the company has been in existence, business has increased by 15% annually to up to 500 weddings a year. The share not involving someone in the military has grown to 40%.
REUTERS - Mar 5 - Cupid Plc's profits rose 31%. Cupid Plc reported pretax profit of 9.2M pounds ($13.9M), compared to 7M in 2011. Cupid said it wooed 1.78M new subscribers to its websites last year, with particularly strong growth in France and the U.S. Revenues for 2012 increased by 51% to 80.9M pounds. Cupid's share price slid ~28% in February, the biggest monthly fall since the company was floated on London's junior AIM market in June 2010. Last month, the BBC published a report featuring claims from members who said that they suspected that fake communications had been used to encourage them to buy subscriptions. Cupid denied the claims and said that it only acted "in a legal and appropriate manner".
WSN - Mar 5 - With ~72M Internet users, a population of ~400M and aggressive mobile growth, the MENA (Middle East and North Africa) region is booming with opportunities for the personals industry. White label dating provider WorldSingles Networks realized that they are missing out on the majority of the addressable market due to their lack of Arabic language localization. As of today, their white label matchmaking solution and ArabLounge, the dating site for the Arab diaspora, are available in Arabic.
The full article was originally published at World Singles Networks website, but is no longer available.
BUSINESS INSIDER - Mar 5 - Let's Date, an app that launched out of beta last month, introduced a new feature called "Wingman." Everyone on Let's Date has a dater card, which features basic information like age, sex, and interest. Once you're in the app, you swipe through dating cards and if you like what you see, you can click "Let's Date." If that person hits "Let's Date" on your profile, the two of you will be able to chat and plan your first date. With the new Wingman feature, your friends can browse through the app to help find potential matches for you.
