The Top 20 Things I Learned At iDate Cologne

OPW - Sep 20 - iDate Cologne had 120 attendees and was informative and fun. Here are the top 20 things that I learned at the conference…or go here to see The Top 67 Things That I Learned at iDate Cologne.

Germany

• There are 8.4m online daters in D-A-CH (Germany, Austria and Switzerland)
• The German iDating market accounts for 20% of European Internet daters and 25% of European revenues
• 10 million German Internet daters generated 246m Euros revenue in 2012.  Only the UK has similar numbers.
• 5 million German mobile daters generated 5-10m Euros in app revenues

Scandinavia

• The Scandinavian Internet dating market generates 60-80m Euros a year.
• Online dating adoption in Sweden is the highest in Europe at 50% of singles.
• There’s a high willingness to pay
• Motesplatsen is owned by a media company that is publicly traded and has 30 employees. 10m Euros revenues, and is subscription only. 

Netherlands

• There’s 2.8m singles in Netherlands and 1.5m people use idating regularly.
• The Netherlands idating market is 30-35m Euros a year.
• There’s no big free dating site. No POF. 
• Paiq.nl doesn’t pay for marketing. They have an interesting feature where users see blurred photos and have to text chat to unblur the photos. There’s no profiles, just a questionnaire, and no search function. ‘BattleDate’ is a fun game.

Poland

• There’s 38 million people in Poland, 25m internet users, and 10m Facebook users. 7m singles.
• Polish iDating annual revenues are ~15m Euros a year

Gamification in the Dating Industry

• The trick with gamification is to make what is boring and difficult into something fun and interesting.

European Casual Dating

• The proportion of people who have ever had sex with a stranger is rising rapidly in Germany and Switzerland.
• The more educated women are, the more sex they like to have.

Meetic

• Meetic is in 15 countries and has 4.7m uniques a month, Twoo has 5.1m monthly uniques.
• Meetic makes only 3.3% of its revenues from its mobile apps.  
• Building a brand is your main priority!  In the past Alistair Shrimpton ran Match and Dating Direct online advertising with exactly the same creative, in the same media, and the Match ads had 4 times the click-thru-rate of the Dating Direct ads.

Click here to see my full list, The Top 67 Things That I Learned at iDate Cologne, on the Courtland Brooks blog. – Mark Brooks