How Many Paid Subscriptions?

by David Evans on November 2, 2006 in Research

Interesting tidbit: Match CEO Jim Safka says there are 90 million people over age 18 who are single in the United States and actively looking for a relationship, yet only 3 million people actively subscribe to any kind of Internet matchmaking service.

I’m curious where he got that number from. I’ve not heard him or anyone else use that number before. Usually it’s all about profiles, not subscribers. Plus or minus a few hundred thousand subscribers doesn’t mean anything, really. Do you agree or disagree with this number?

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1 Andrew Arnott November 2, 2006 at 5:39 pm: Dave,

This seems a little low, but if we are talking paid subscriptions then it may be accurate!?!? There are a lot of people who just set up the profile hoping a paid member will initiate the contact. Just a guess though…

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2 Michael November 2, 2006 at 5:56 pm: He got his numbers from craplexa.com. You just enter what you want and out spits a number and a sweet graph.

;-)

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3 Markus November 2, 2006 at 6:56 pm: I think he is talking about active members not paid subscribers.

Average dater visits 3 sites and pays for 1 site. Average conversion rate is around 15% so that means that 45% of daters convert to paid.

Match.com has 800k paid

yahoo 400k paid

eharmony 300k paid

spark 150k paid

So ball park of 1.6 million paid subscribers per month with over 3 million users looking via social networks, dating sites, free sites etc

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4 Fred November 2, 2006 at 10:06 pm: The number that would really mean something is the ratio of subscribers to profiles on a given site. No chance of that, though. Better to mislead with artificially inflated profile numbers than offer some real quality for a change.

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5 Julia Dorofeeva November 3, 2006 at 5:12 am: I assume that there are many singles in Us but I agree with Markus on the “average dater” habit.

Usually not all members at your site are active and only half of them are in a paid membership.

Thst’s why I personally think that it’s hard to make any real conclusions on the basis of such statistics. And to gather a common database of users is adifficult task as you’ll need to compare their registration and membership state at the Dating Sites.

Besides, it’s impossible due to security reasons of many Dating Sites.

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6 Dave Evans November 3, 2006 at 8:24 am: Markus, I think your numbers are quite low. A look at recent 10-k’s would make me believe that you’re low-balling, Match is over 1 million subs, are you saying thats not true? And Spark has 150k between jDate and American Singles, are you saying the other sites only account for 110k paid subs?

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