Finances

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!).

Spark Networks just released their third quarter financial results. Spark Networks owns AmericanSingles.com (there flagship dating service), Date.ca (for Canadians), JDate.com (Jewish Dating) and a fair number other specific niche oriented dating services. With most of their dating services membership numbers holding steady, JDate.com saw an increase in paid members by 3% for a total of 74,078. This shows well for the service in this increasingly more competitive niche market. Overall Spark Networks have a healthy bottom line and will continue to be one of the driving forces in internet dating.

For more information on the dating services which Spark Networks owns, see our reviews of AmericanSingles.com, JDate.com, and Date.ca.

Spark Networks, owners of AmericanSingles.com, Date.ca and JDate.com have released their 2006 4th quarter financials. There is some interesting numbers here for singles thinking about joining one of these dating sites. For the year end (Dec 31, 2006) American Singles had 80,519 paying subscribers and JDate had 74,775 paying subscribers. All of Sparks business ventures combined had a total of 217,276 paying subscribers, an increase of 10% when compared to last year. Of course none of these numbers include the members who use the site with a free membership.

I was surprised by JDate's numbers, they must be the largest Dating Site for Jewish singles out there.

Spark Networks also had another milestone on February 14th, 2007. It was their one year anniversary of its AMEX Listing. Look for them under the ticker "LOV". For more information on Spark Networks financial results check out this page.