Match Group

Edward Butler, a senior analyst at IBISWorld, used Australian Bureau of Statistics data and industry surveys to review and crunch data on the global sex services industry. He determined that the $1.2 billion industry has seen a 6 percent ($74 million) decline since the global financial crisis started. Brothels, tobacco and alcohol are usually recession proof but that doesn't appear to be the case this time.

Some analysis like Butler think that the popularity of adult dating sites have taken business from the sex industry. Adult dating sites make it easier for consenting adults to be frank about what they want and need in terms of sex. It has never been cheaper for like-minded individuals to organise casual liaisons with the rise of adult and casual dating services.

About 1.5 million men and women now have accounts in Australia with sites such popular dating sites as RSVP, Match.com and eHarmony. Most of these singles are not looking for casual sex and are intent on finding a partner for a long term relationship. Adult FriendFinder, one of the more popular casual sex dating sites reports on having just over 892 thousand profile listings from Australia.

For more on the story, read The Sydney Morning Herald.

Sam Yagan indicated that an iPhone application was in the works for OkCupid earlier this month (see Story), and now it is out (much sooner than I was expecting). This is a full featured dating application that offers:

• Sending and receiving of your OkCupid mail messages.
• Instant Messaging with members.
• Updating your profile and photos.
• Spend time answering those famous OkCupid match questions.
• Search for users.
• Search for matches based on your current location.
• Find out who has been checking you out.

Have you always wanted to be able to start conversations with other members easier on OKCupid? Now you can as their new Ice Breakers feature is now in beta. Ice Breakers are a little different on OkCupid than on other dating sites (also called Winks, Flirts, Express Interest). Ice Breakers have their own page which when you visit will show you other people with similar interests. From there you can then write a short message to one or more of these people about those interests, an instant conversation starter.

Thanks to Online Dating Insider for the heads up. To find out more about OkCupid's Ice Breakers read our reviews of OkCupid.

The Unofficial eHarmony Blog sure knows how to dig for eHarmony news. They found this banner on the eHarmony US website:

under the URL "http://www.eharmony.com/static/images/diamondgiver/banner/".

From this banner it looks like eHarmony is creating marketing material for a possible new personalized matchmaking service where eHarmony Matchmakers select matches for you and possibly setup the dates (my thinking on this). All this is speculation, but it does sound close to how the China dating site Zhenai.com operates (see Story). They have a 350 matchmaker call center which sets up dates for clients.

The service looks to be called eHarmony Personal Matchmaker Service but the above banner image was found in a directory called DiamondGiver. In the service industry Diamond usually means the highest quality (and most expensive) service. We didn't see the word Diamond in the image so once again we are just speculating.

Match.com has done this type of service before in which eHarmony may be getting into. They called it Match Platinum (the old Platinum service not the new one, see Story). This Match.com service was only available in Texas and was not tied directly to the Match.com dating site. Match Platinum offered customers a one on one matchmaking service but it has since been shutdown (RIP 2006-2008).

To find out what other think about this dating site, check out some eHarmony reviews.

On November 9th Meetic released the financial results for the first 9 months of 2009. Revenue earned during this period totalled 117.2 million Euros (over $174 million USD). This is a 20 percent increase over the same period last year. From this income, the purchase of Match.com's UK site this year added 19 million Euros in revenue. 96 percent of all revenue was from sources in Europe.

Meetic's dating sites subscriber base totalled 970,623 as of September 30th, 2009. This is an increase of about 25,000 subscribers from the same date in 2008. No mention of Match.com's UK site is here so it is unsure if their subscriber numbers have been included in the Meetic 2009 numbers. We estimated that Match.com UK had about 291,000 paying subscribers as of quarter 2, 2009, at the time of the sale (see Story).

Earnings Before Interest, Taxes and Amortization (EBITDA) came to 24.1 million Euros over the first 9 months. This is an EBITDA margin of 20.5 percent. As of September 30th, 2009 Meetic had a net cash surplus of 41 million Euros and the only debt on the books was from the Match acquisition which is estimated at €7.1 million.

Expect the quarter 4 2009 financials and annual revenue for Meetic to be published on the 11th of February 2010.

News first spotted on OPW. For more information, read the full Meetic Q3 2009 Financial report.

OKCupid has released some interesting detailed reports and stats about their members. It looks like a member of Plenty of Fish (see the blog) is following suit by using a built in tool on PlentyofFish to check out the different demographics based on an interest you can type in. This tool is intended to inform potential Advertisers of Plenty Of Fish on what type of people use the site, so they can better target their ads.

POF will return a percentage result for the following attributes for any interest. This information is compiled straight from the members dating profiles and the percentages are based on the answers members have chosen for each profile attribute.