FORTUNE - Sep 25 - Sam Yagan launched OkCupid in 2004 with friends. Before OkCupid, they started SparkNotes, an online alternative to CliffsNotes study guides, in 1999. It sold to iTurf, for $30M. After that he joined his friend Jed McCaleb to launch eDonkey, a P2P file-sharing service that they scaled fast but shut down after pressure from record labels. Only a year and a half after buying OkCupid for ~$90M, IAC made Yagan CEO of its entire Match division. That entire segment contributed $713M of IAC's 2012 revenue of $2.8 billion. Yagan gets emails on a weekly basis from people launching a dating site. He actually roots for new online dating competitors to launch, because he is the only buyer. Match buys so much that the list of significant e-dating competitors is short: eHarmony, Spark Networks, PlentyOfFish, HowAboutWe and Zoosk (rumored to be going public this year).
by Daniel Roberts
The full article was originally published at CNN Fortune, but is no longer available.
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