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Over the holidays I spent some time talking with Mandy Ginsberg, Match.com GM for North America. You might want to read Match.com Gets an Update along with this post.
Daily 5
Daily 5 helps members find interesting and relevant people who wouldn’t normally communicate with you. Putting new people in front of members has resulted in a significant increase in communication, 400,000 additional winks and emails and counting.
Daily 5 breaks up typical communications patterns, distributing communications between a greater cross-section of users. Usually a small group of alpha-males is responsible for more than 80% of the communication on most dating sites. Daily 5 loosens some of your stored search parameters.
As I said in my last post, your mileage may vary at this point, Match is constantly tweaking the algorithm responsible for sending out your Daily 5. You must have a complete profile to receive Daily5.
7 out of 10 people say dating isn’t fun. This statement alone warrants a a serious look at where online dating fails to live up to expectations and keep me busy as a consultant for a long time to come.
Match Getting Social
Match is getting more social. First it was their partnership (status unclear) with Are You Interested. Now it’s the new Facebook-inspired wall, although the Wall is more about transparency than social behavior.
Platinum package coming soon. Nonpaying members will be able to communicate with Platinum members.
Marketing
There has been some back and forth on this blog about the actual number of daily signups on Match. See Ripped From The Comments: Match.com’s Invisible Millions to set the stage. Mandy thinks Match North America has approximately 25,000 registrations a day. Some days the number dips below, which is why they promote 20,000 registrations a day. She thinks overall global number of daily registrations is 60,000. No, we don’t know how many of those daily registrations turns into a paying customer. Do the math, you can probably figure it out yourself.
Just shot new TV campaign. Will post ads here.
We briefly talked about community policing policy and procedures. You can post of photo of yourself with a dead fish, but not a lion or a moose. Community standards are different between different sites, difficult to please everyone.
Revenue
Match had their best November in 7 years, 15% traffic over October/November last year.
Q3 revenue from IAC’s Match unit, which includes dating sites Match.com and Chemistry.com, climbed 5 percent to $93.5 million.
Q4 is traditionally slow for them, picks up January 1.
Match.com worldwide subscribers and revenue per subscriber both grew 3% in Q3, driven by Chemistry.com domestically and in Latin America, the UK, Scandinavia and Australia internationally. Distribution deals signed with Australia’s NineMSN and Latin America’s Terra. Match mobile, launched late in 2007, continues to grow subscriptions strongly.
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So US has 20k dailly signups bringing in 70% of their reveues and the other 40k signups a day bring in 30% of revenues…
Platinum package is cloning singlesnet….
hmmm, not sure how exactly this will work. i highly doubt that they are going to clone singlesnet’s messaging (sending a pre written one liner and telling the recipient that they have new mail). maybe it will be more like friendfinder where they have a package that “Allow Standard Members to send you email at no cost to them”.
Besides SinglesNet and FriendFinder, Lavalife does this as well.