Talked with Zoosk about their $6 million fundraising announcement. Conversation started off discussing the announcement by Hitwise that they have begun tracking Zoosk across social networks, not just Zoosk.com, which is only roughly 5% of their aggregate traffic.
Why did it take until now for Hitwise to track Zoosk? The ability to track web traffic in iFrames, which is how Facebook and other social networks embed applications from third-party developers. Hopefully Compete and Quantcast will follow suit. They all want to have even numbers and the discrepancies have driven analysts site owners (and the media) crazy for years.
Zoosk has passed DatingDirect in terms of traffic and is catching up to Match UK. That’s a big deal.
Zoosk has previously made a number of acquisitions. Acquired large portfolio of apps. dating applications (MakeNewFriends, few others). Stopped due to complexity of transactions. Portfolio of sports applications as well. “What does your birthday mean” app. Did cross-marketing. Not bait and switch like SpeedDate. “Which sex in the city application are you?” is another popular app they own. Zoosk has about as many installs on primary Zoosk apps as all other apps combined. That is very smart, distribute risk across not only different dating applications but different sports and pop culture apps as well.
They won’t discuss valuation. Raised money based on a single presentation, weren’t going to shop for money until Jan 2010. The money is growth capital to make the engine go faster – expanding their US footprint, marketing and infrastructure scalability.
Vitals: 33 million accounts created over time. 12 million monthly active across all social networks. 7.5 million users on Facebook in the last month. Approximately 1.2 million users on Bebo. One third of all users have logged in in the past month.
Zoosk’s Alex Mehr is going to present at iDate next week. On Friday his topic will be Online Dating & Social Networking: A Marriage Made in Heaven?
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Zoosk states that there ‘awesomeness is undeniable.’ They certainly know how to party… http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=118476502393&ref=mf
I interviewed Shayan and Alex and the interview will be on OnlinePersonalsWatch.com by Friday, btw.
Two key reasons Zoosk is doing well are…
1. They autofill profile info from the Facebook/SNS profile so this speeds up and improves the registrant conversion.
2. One of the key metrics they monitor and focus on improving, is the time the users get to their first conversation online. They also allow non-paying members to respond to emails.
Autofilling violates facebook terms.
http://forum.developers.facebook.com/viewtopic.php?id=36000