Details are thin, but it sounds like someone is trying to sue online dating companies that ignore 3-day cancellation notices. Over the summer a handful of lawyers contacted me to snap up copies of the Online Dating Industry Report. All within a two week period. Interesting.
Markus was on the LavaLife investor call and says: Acording to the press release, membership revenue declined by $400,000 during the same period last year it rose 600k. $60M ad spend this year. They make a lot more money on phone dating than web dating, that’s for sure.
Spark’s impending IPO remains just that.
[tags: finance, lavalife, spark networks]
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What was the reason given for the 400k member decline? Or what does everyone think the reason is.
Through a Great Expectations owner, I was told that Jeffrey Ullman, the founder of Great Expectations, (though not associated with the company for 10years, thank God) stated he had been contacted as an expert witness for a case in California regarding online dating and the failure to offer a 3 day notice of cancellation. In roughly 40 states, offline dating services must give customers a 3 day “cooling off” period. Onlines have never offered this and some think that is a violation.
Ullman has always been a huge self promoter so whether or not he was actually contacted is anyone’s guess.
I have reached out to quite a few people in the dating world online and offline, but Dave’s post was the first I have seen from anyone in the industry. Does anyone have any first-hand info on it??
Dave misquoted it was 400k in revenue not members. If you listen to the conference call you’ll notice that someone asked if there were “strategic alternitives for lavalife”.
From the sounds of managements response and the fact they are really unhappy with lavalife it looks like they are looking to sell the company if they can’t grow it.
At this point only Yahoo and Match.com would have the resources to buy lavalife, and from what i’ve heard most of their revenues come from the phone side so it would be a good fit.
I would be surprised if lavalife was a vertrue company this time next year.
The 3 day cooling off period, i would assume was put into law because offline services use high pressure sales tatics to get clients to commit to spending 2-10k+, but i don’t think it would apply well to someone who is only spending $20.