Finances

I've been meaning to post this information for a while.

Spark Networks released their First Quarter 2008 Financial Results on May 1, 2008. Spark Networks revenue for this period is $15 million. This is $1.8 million less from the first quarter 2007 and a decrease of 6% over quarter 4, 2007. It is not all bad news though as operating expenses where cut 27% over quarter 1, 2007 which resulted in a $1.6 million net income. Spark Networks reported a net loss of $1.4 million last year in the first quarter.

As far as subscribers are concerned, Spark Networks in the first quarter of 2008 had 195,325 subscribers. This is a decrease of 16% from 231,313 from the first quarter in 2007 and a decrease of 3% from the fourth quarter of 2007.

Well it looks like Match.com made $90.5 million in the first quarter this year. This is up from the same time last year by 10 percent according too Gigaom. The Online Dating Insider also mentions while commenting on the same story that international subscribers increased by 12 percent while North American subscribers declined slightly. Even so, Match.com was able to increase revenue by 6 percent per subscriber.

While internet dating does continue to grow in North America (but not at the same numbers as in previous years) even the large dating services like Match.com are feeling the pinch from the increasing number of dating services and social networking sites out there. I wouldn't be surprised if the next couple of financial quarters show similar results for Match.com.

Find more information about Match.com here.

Expect to see more television commercials for Chemistry.com mid April. There will be 4 different ads and the campaign will be mostly seen on cable stations like Bravo, TNT and the Food Network.

Last year Chemistry.com spent $21 million on television commercials which helped grow the sites traffic by over 70 percent in February (when compared to the last year). Chemistry had over 500,000 unique visitors last month. In total they have 4.2 million registered members.

See BrandWeek for further details or check out our Chemistry.com Review (Chemistry).

I usually don't post much about non-English dating sites (since I don't speak any other language, except a little French), but it looks like German online dating services are doing just as well as North American sites, according to Just 4 Business. German online dating sites generated 85 million Euros in 2007, a 27% increase from 2006. Jupiter Research has predicted 103 million Euros for 2008.

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!).