Contributed by: Editor on Saturday, April 04 2015 @ 07:43 am
Last modified on
Back in December of 2014 Zoosk abandoned their IPO and hired a new CEO Kelly Steckelberg. This month she did an interview with Fortune[*1] in which she discussed the future of the dating service and how she plans to turn it around.
Zoosk earned over $178 million and was profitable in 2013. In 2014 the company earned more than $200 million, but they again slipped into the red and lost money. For this reason they let go 15% of their staff and canceled the planned IPO.
With her eye on Zoosk being profitable again, this pass November Kelly switched Zoosk to a premium model. This means a subscription is now required for Zoosk members to send messages. It is still free to create a profile and search for other Zooskers though and this is the same model that other companies like Match.com, eHarmony and Christian Mingle uses. Zoosk also plans to introduce a number of other new features for their premium service to entice more users to pay. This includes a photo verification system and a badge to identify members who have been verified.
So far it appears the turn around of Zoosk (or at least the start of it) has been a success. Kelly Steckelberg says Zoosk will soon announced that the first quarter of 2015 was profitable.
For more on this dating service you can read our Zoosk review.