US and EU Dating Companies Differ

by David Evans on December 17, 2008 in International

LoÃ¯c Le Meur, Seesmic founder, talks about the lack of understanding and cultural differences between American and European entrepreneurs.

Meetic is the #1 dating site in Europe, created by Marc Simoncini (disclosure, I am a board member), it has more than 100 million euros in revenues, present in 20+ countries and Marc has not sold to an American Company and time will tell but I see it staying european and defeating US competitors rather than the opposite.

Meetic coverage on TechCrunch? A completely out of date profile on Crunchbase that talks about the 2005 revenues and measures its success with US audience tools Quantcast and Compete that are entirely irrelevant to european sites (what a joke in fact, compete has Meetic as 30k uniques a month, of course, on US routers…). Marc Simoncini, one of our best european entrepreneurs does not even have his profile on crunch base and there is not a single post about Meetic accross the TechCrunch network except in French.

After reading this I saw that Markus Frind, founder of Plentyoffish, linked to an hour-long interview with Marc Simoncini.

I pay pretty close attention to what is going on in the European dating market. I have had a few European clients and after doing some market research and talking to people like Marc years ago when he was starting Meetic, I came away impressed with the state of online dating across the pond. The US dating market can learn a lot from studying European counterparts. Are you paying attention?

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