Dating Services

Spark Networks released their 3rd quarter financial results this past week. It wasn't a very good quarter for the company when compared to 2007 Q3 and last quarter.

Revenue for the third quarter of 2008 was $14.0 million, an 11% decrease compared to $15.8 million in the third quarter of 2007, and a 6% decrease compared to $15.0 million in the prior quarter. Revenue for the nine months was $44.1 million, a 10% decrease compared to $49.2 million for the same period last year.

Subscribers are also down.

A while ago we asked the question Is PlentyOfFish.com going to offer Paid Memberships? Well, it looks like the owner, Markus, will be offering some products and additional features for sale on Plenty of Fish sometime soon. He didn't mention or hint at what the new products or features might be. The reason Marcus gave for his eventual switch from what POF's slogan, 100% Free. Put Away Your Credit Card is:

There is really no money in being free and we have to start experimenting with other models now or we won’t be able to compete in 3 or 4 years.

Now Markus does make a fair bit of money, especially for the low overhead he has but it is not even close to what other popular dating sites are reporting as income. Markus will have to be careful here and I am sure he will take a slow approach to what he plans to offer as not to scare off his members. Products for sale will be the easiest way to go at first. Having real flowers and candy on the site for sale (instead of the virtual kind) could be a big seller. Especially if it is implemented in a way that makes it quick and easy to choose the person and the flowers to send.

I really doubt Plenty of Fish will go completely paid. Instead I see them offering enhancements to existing free memberships. This could include things like improved customer service, profile listing highlighting, having your profile appear higher in search results and an improved matching system. Of course, this is all just speculation. We will have to just wait to see what POF has in store for it's members.

For more information on this service your can read our POF review.

Dating site PerfectMatch.com has seen a 47 percent increase in members over the same quarter last year. This is a huge jump especially in these economic times. Most other popular online dating services membership growth levels have either flat lined or increased marginally. Membership renewals are also up and when you combine these numbers with the new member numbers, matching on PerfectMatch.com has increased by 125 percent. Almost 92 percent of these matches are using the automated matching system called the Duet Compatibility System.

For more information on the dating service, read our PerfectMatch.com Review.

I was doing some research and I ran across this CNN Money article again. In it CNN mentions that eHarmony has annual revenues of almost $200 million. In 2007 this dating service spent upwards of $100 million in advertising (from our stats page you will see they spent $88 million for the first 3 quarters of the year). This means, about 50% of revenue (membership fees) goes towards advertising. I know eHarmony is not the only dating site spending this type of money on marketing. Other dating sites that have similar spending habits includes Match.com and Friend Finder. I wonder how this compares to other industries?

For more information on eHarmony, read our dating review.

I was doing some Yahoo! Personals research and came across some interesting information. Yahoo! Personals has 13 international sites and I had always thought they were all based on the U.S. and Canadian Yahoo dating websites. I was wrong. It looks like some of the international dating sites are actually partnered dating sites. Basically what this means in the dating world is the underlying dating site is actually run by another company. The dating service itself still retains the other partners logo and general theme of the website (in this case Yahoo). Partnering like this is not necessary a bad thing since the partner usually are experts and already successful in their field. Both partners benefit with the relationship, with each endorsing the other.

From what I can tell, Yahoo! Personals for the UK & Ireland is actually the Match.com UK dating site. Yahoo! Personals for Germany and Taiwan is Match.com as well. Yahoo! Personals France, Italy, Brazil and Spain is part of the Meetic Network of European dating sites. I would also question the Japan, China, Hong Kong and Taiwan Yahoo dating sites.

This leaves just the US, Canada and the Australian Yahoo dating sites being actually owned and run by Yahoo. The Yahoo dating site for Australia though, is partnered with eHarmony Australia. On Yahoo's main dating page you have the choice of going directly to Yahoo Dating to search for singles or visit eHarmony Australia to let them find your matches for you. This is a similar idea to AOL's partnership with eHarmony (See Story).

I guess I was more surprised than anything else. I had always figured Yahoo being so big that they would have created and run their own dating sites for these countries.

For more information on Yahoo! Personals, read our online dating review.

UPDATE: Wow, I must of been reading eHarmony's mind! They released a press release yesterday (which I just saw today, Nov 12) announcing eHarmony Australia and Yahoo's partnership.

Match.com and Chemistry's parent company IAC reported their Quarter 3 Financials last week. IAC revenue grew by 10% to $369.3 million when compared to the same quarter last year. It's not all good news as they reported a net loss of $14.8 million. In Q3 2007 they had a $70 million net income.

Q3 operating loss was driven by the spin-off expenses and a $16.2 million non-cash charge related to the modification of certain IAC equity awards in connection with the spin-offs.

Match.com revenue is reported to be $93.5 million, this is up $4 million over quarter 3 last year and up $200,000 from last quarter. This revenue gave Match an operating income (before amortization) of $30.3 million.

For more information, read IACs press release in their media room.