Acquisitions

Yahoo is shedding assets so they can concentrate on their core business. It looks like Yahoo! Personals may be on the chopping block. On Wednesday Barry Diller, CEO of IAC (which owns both Match.com and Chemistry) noted that they are talking to Yahoo about acquiring their dating service. This information was gathered from a conference call regarding the IAC/InterActive Q1 2009 Earnings report (we will discuss Match.com's earnings in another story). It is estimated that Yahoo! Personals could sell for around $500 million. This happens to be the same price that the Friendfinder Network sold in 2007 (see Story).

Interesting enough Match.com and Yahoo already have some dating partnerships. Yahoo has a number of dating sites for different parts of the world but, they really only actually run the one for US and Canada (as far as I can tell). The rest are partner dating sites. Match.com runs the Yahoo dating sites for the UK & Ireland, Germany and Taiwan. Find out more about Yahoo Personals partners by reading [story: Yahoo-Personals-Dating-Partners].

For more on this story read The Deal and for the full IAC/InterActive Q1 2009 Earnings Call Transcript visit Seeking Alpha.

Read our Yahoo Personals review and our Match.com review for information on these popular dating sites.

In a really surprising move (at least IMO), Match.com has sold 100 percent of their European operations to Meetic for approximately a 27 percent share in the company. Match.com will also get a 5 million euro note plus some additional terms which has not been released. Over the last several years it has been a battle between these two companies for the European online dating market. It looks like instead of trying to beat their competition, Meetic decided to buy them out and give Match an offer that was too good to refuse. Of course, with a 27 percent share in Meetic, Match.com will still have influence in online dating in Europe.

While Match.com tends to make more partnerships with companies to increase their market share internationally, Meetic tends to buy out their competition. Currently Meetic manages ten services, including Meetic, Meetic Mobile, Meetic Affinity, Lexa, ParPerfeito, DatingDirect, Neu.de, Cleargay, Partner.de and Lexamore. According to TechCrunch:

... Meetic had revenues of 153,7 million euros (close to $195 million) in 2008 and currently counts over 696,400 registered users. The company is public and listed on NYSE Euronext, currently valued at nearly 228 million euro ($289 million).

Meanwhile because of this deal, Match.com will go from having operations in 40 countries down to 24. The countries with operations now include Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, China, Colombia, India, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Pakistan, Peru, Philippines, Singapore, South Africa, Taiwan, Thailand, the United States, Venezuela and Vietnam. As a comparison to the Meetic numbers in the above paragraph, in 2008 Match.com had revenues of $368.8 million with 1,347,300 paid members in Q4, 2008. It will be interesting to see the number of paid members reported once the European operations have been removed. Currently 13 percent of revenues come from Europe.

The partnership between Meetic and Match.com will take several months to complete. At this moment it is unknown how this may affect members at Match.com European dating sites.

On a last note, I have to say that I am still surprised by this move from Match.com. We just did a story earlier this month which showed that Match.com UK memberships rose 26 percent in January.

TechCrunch is reporting that HotOrNot.com was sold to a Canadian company called Avid Life Media for an unconfirmed $20 million. Avid Life Media also owns Ashley Madison which is a hook-up site for married people.

It is estimated that Hot Or Not pulled in $2 million in profit last year. If this is the case, $20 million seems a little low, especially when compared to what other dating services have been sold for lately. I've got the sense recently though that Hot Or Not has been struggling with trying to increase revenue. They briefly went to a free model last summer (relying on people clicking on ads to bring in the income) but cited huge profile spam for switching to their paid revenue model again.

Related Story: Hot or Not is now Paid (again)

UPDATE - (Feb. 15, 2008) James, one of the original owners of HotOrNot.com, has confirmed the sale on his blog. He also mentioned that the $20 million price tag is incorrect. He didn't go into any details on what they did receive as payment.

This press release notes that the CEO and owner of The Penthouse Media Group Inc. (Marc Bell) will be giving a presentation regarding their acquisition of Various Inc. Various owns the FriendFinder Network. This presentation will take place at the Internet Dating Conference which in running from January 31 to February 1, 2008 and is located at the Miami Beach Convention Center.

For more information on the Conference visit the iDate2008 web site. This should be an interesting presentation for those of us in the dating industry. I hope they will post a video of it.

Last month we reported this story, Rumor - FriendFinder purchased for $1 Billion?. Well it turns out that most of the rumor is true according to the New York Times. The FriendFinder Network was sold but for $500 million. There are over 25 sites in the FriendFinder Network with about a total of 1.2 million paying subscribers out of 260 million members. The projected profits of the network is estimated to be $340 million this year.

Some more of the popular sites in the FriendFinder Network includes their first site created, FriendFinder.com and Passion.com geared towards adults.

TechCrunch have posted a rumor from what they call a reliable source that the FriendFinder Network of sites has been acquired for $1 Billion. In an update to this rumor the buyer is reported to be Penthouse Media Group. The FriendFinder Network of dating sites includes AdultFriendFInder, Passion, Senior FriendFinder and over 15 other different types of dating services. The article further reports that rumored revenues for the Network is over $300 million a year which makes this acquisition worth about 3 years of revenue.

Is this a good deal for Penthouse? Could be, the FriendFinder dating sites have always done well financially and they don't seem to be slowing down. At a cost of 3 years worth of revenue seems a little on the low end to me but most likely there is more too this deal than we know about (if it actually is true!).