WSJ - Mar 16 - eHarmony has reached record subscribers, 778k members and makes 15m matches a day, up from 5m a year ago. Revenues are now over $275m.
Dr. Warren: Under CEO Greg Waldorf users started seeing us like the other dating sites Match and Zoosk, when we’re really a social science site. We’re really, really interested in long-term relationships. Tinder is great for us. ...it raises awareness that online dating and matchmaking exists.
Mr. Avedissian: We stopped offering some short-term subscription plans and introduced two-year and longer memberships, since it takes more than one to three months to find a soul mate. Users come to us when they’re willing to pay a lot more because they’re getting premium matchmaking. The average age of an eHarmony user has come down from the lower 40s and is ~4 years younger. 55% of new registrations are on mobile. ...Sequoia Capital and Technology Crossover Ventures invested $110 million in eHarmony in 2004. Dr. Warren came back and bought it back for $153.2 million. Now eHarmony doesn’t borrow capital.
Dr. Warren: We also want to help people find the right job. Our site, Elevated Careers, will be available by the end of June. We’re working on matching people according to 4 criteria: First, there has to be cultural fit between a person and a company. ...The second part is whether you have the skills for the particular job. ...Then we have two personality matches: One involves how you will match with your boss, the other is how you will fit in relation to your colleagues. ...We were failures in Europe after we invested $33m in eDarling which we sold back for virtually nothing. We didn’t have brand recognition in Europe. Now we’re going to run the whole thing from our current offices...and make sure our matching algorithm works in each country. We’ll translate our site, beginning with Spanish. We’ve also had a lot of interest from India, China, Korea. ...I feel that being gay could have easily been true for me. We make pretty good income from ‘Compatible Partners,’ even though we don’t advertise it a lot.
by Georgia Wells
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