Match.com Getting Social, Searching Smarter, Continuing Growth

by David Evans on January 13, 2009   in Finance, Research

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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{ 1 trackback }

Match.com Launching Communication for Non-Paying Members…what?
January 13, 2009 at 10:12 pm

{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }

1 Markus January 13, 2009 at 1:12 pm

In the third quarter conference call they said the Subscription business IE match.com was now 30% international revenues.

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….

Reply

2 Saïd Amin January 13, 2009 at 6:38 pm

“Platinum package coming soon. Nonpaying members will be able to communicate with Platinum members.”

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”.

Reply

3 Tom January 13, 2009 at 8:25 pm

I’m glad to see Match will allow Platinum members to communicate with all members. This is something they have needed to add for a long while. Now members will be able to communicate with 100 percent of the site instead of only the 5 to 10 percent who pay for a membership.

Besides SinglesNet and FriendFinder, Lavalife does this as well.

Reply

4 Saïd Amin January 13, 2009 at 8:42 pm

will free members receiving carte blanche to email (or spam) platinum members at will affect the quality of outgoing emails? regardless, this certainly creates more activity on the site and allows match to offer a higher priced subscription package a la their previous dr. phil membership package.

Reply

5 Tom January 13, 2009 at 9:11 pm

Usually how it works is free members can only reply to emails. The platinum member would have to initiate the communication.

Reply

6 Dating January 14, 2009 at 1:23 am

Interesting topic and it is a good news for online dating. Thank you for the information. Cheers.

Reply

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