Zoosk is the only dating site which has sent out any PR in regards to National Unmarried and Single Americans Week, which is September 20 – 26, 2009.
Zoosk claims it’s the world’s largest social dating community with more than 40 million users. Maybe 40 million people have tried Zoosk but as for current active members? Zoosk.com has 2 million monthly US users according to Compete. Maybe Alex at Zoosk can chime in and qualify/discuss the numbers.
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{ 15 comments… read them below or add one }
David,
Zoosk is by design built like a network of properties that are distributed through social networks such as Facebook as well as our destination site Zoosk.com. Many of the web analytics solutions haven’t caught up with the social applications yet but they are starting to get better at it.
Zoosk’s application on Facebook alone has more than 8 million monthly active members and if you look across our network we are currently serving over 12 million singles worldwide every month just on the web. If you add Zoosk Mobile and Zoosk Desktop the number is even higher.
What this means is that out of the 40 million singles who have joined Zoosk over the last two years, more than 12 million visit the site every month. Talk about stickiness :-)
Currently, Quantcast (which by far is doing the best job measure social destinations) is ranking Zoosk as a top 300 website worldwide (see http://www.quantcast.com/p-5eAtW1U79cmZM). We have an internal bet on the day that we will crack top 100. Do you want to join with your guess? :-)
Does the quantcast traffic measurement include your facebook application or just the website? It would seem it includes the application too.
I understand about measurement catching up to social platforms. You guys have a good product and its sticky, but I wonder about effectiveness. My bias learns towards serious more than casual dating, and I openly question the argument that traffic king. Are people getting anything out of it or is it just eazy-breezy check out a few profiles and then bail?
I 100% agree with you that traffic is not the only metric to look at. I would argue that when looking at an offering’s value you need to look at their traffic in conjunction with their stickiness and how much consumers value their engagement with the product.
Measuring value (and by definition effectiveness) directly is close to impossible. But in most situations if/how-much consumers are willing to pay for a service is a good proxy for the offering’s value proposition.
Considering the fact that Zoosk is thriving in an environment like social networks with plenty of cheap or free competition, the fact that we are delivering revenue numbers higher than publicly traded dating companies in US is a testament that consumers think the service is valuable and worth their hard earned money.
Besides these metrics, I think qualitatively you can look at the heart warming success stories of Zoosk couples on our blog, on our dating community as well as Zoosk Fan Page.
There are a whole host of publically traded dating sites that make less than 100k a year… Thats not a good measure. Also if zoosk is so profitable and so big why does it keep raising money http://sev.prnewswire.com/computer-electronics/20090616/LA3314916062009-1.html ? 6 Million is nothing to dating sites with that many supposid users…
What about profitability? Does Zoosk make money? Why are you comparing only your revenues to public companies that report profits as well. How about comparing your earnings???
Markus, we are working on building the largest quality dating service on the planet :-) we don’t raise money to survive, we do it to shrink time so we can dominate faster and provide an even better service.
As for publicly traded companies comment, I am talking about companies listed on major exchanges, not penny stocks :)
Which companies are you talking about? How about profitability? Any comment?
I think the real story is comparing Are You Interested with Zoosk. AYI claims not to have spent a dime on acquiring users, whereas this is not the case with Zoosk, AFAIK. AYI is on track to make about $4 million a year, and it’s a tiny company.
See http://statistics.allfacebook.com/applications/leaderboard/1000000::10000000/-/m/desc/Dating
$4m is certainlly big. and AYI is very monetized…
Penny stock or not, AYI is your direct competitor and should be addressed as such. You took the VC route and big burn rates and they did not. I find these issues as interesting, if not more so than overall user numbers.
I would be interested in your definition of “better service”. I stopped using both apps a while ago because I lost interest after a while.
I just installed the Zoosk AIR app, but it looks like a simple activity feed for the service and it opens up web pages when you click on profiles?
Interesting how Zoosk asks for an additional level of access (to post to activity stream) while AYI does not.
How do you differentiate between Zoosk and AYI at this time? My quick take:
AYI has tons more functionality, stuff to do and revenue opportunities. Zoosk still has a really clunky photo viewer, hope that gets replaced, its no good for quick browsing.
AYI never took down my profile when I uninstalled the app, so people are still sending me winks and gifts, which is wrong IMHO. Bad mojo.
This conversation is definitely nowhere close to being over, especially with Thread coming on the scene.
I find it a bit odd to brag about the fact that such a large number of the same members are on a dating site. Wouldn’t that mean that it might be effective as a business model, but ineffective in terms of actually getting people to meet.
The purpose of a dating site is twofold – and those goals are at odds with each other in most cases. 1) Keep your members on the site to make the most money out of them and 2) Doing a great job of getting your members matched off and off of your site. Unfortunately, many companies do a great job of #1 and do a poor job of #2.
In my opinion — doing a great job of #2 (getting members matched up etc) loses you two members, but probably gets you 5-10 more. Doing a poor job of matching people up, you lose the member anyway, and that pissed off member tells other people not to use the site.
Finally, you mention at least 3 separate platforms – are those unique members or could the same member be counted 3 times by using all platforms. i.e. I use both Twitter and TwitterDeck — am I using Twitter one time or twice?
Tough crowd Shayan! 40 million is huge and using VC funds to grow your business quickly is very much inline with a lot of plays from the Bay area.
There continues to be a big question ? surrounding Facebook and whether or not dating is going to mix well IMO.
As for Thread not sure it’s going to succeed, they have VC capital which mirrors that of the original money put together for engage.com. I still think most users don’t want to mix dating and friends. I know I always hated being setup by friends.
There are logical reasons why traditional dating sites keep growing and showing signs of success….they work.
Dan, leveraging VC funding to grow is like saying Bay area contains oxygen. Same thing goes here in Boston.
Agree FB is a big question mark, but the signs look promising. Let’s not lose sight that FB is a platform providing unique marketing, revenue and customer acquisition oppotunities.
There are some dating companies based on Facebook launching at DEMO next week.
Thread is off to a nice start, hopefully they learn from the mistakes and mis-steps taken by Engage, a company I helped launch and am all to familiar with the pitfalls Thread faces.
Online dating is one of those online industries where you can make money and still be a failure in the eyes of the consumer. Depends what you categorize as a win.
Dave:
Good point “Online dating is one of those online industries where you can make money and still be a failure in the eyes of the consumer.”
As I understand it, customers define a successful dating site by the amount of effort it takes (or whether they’re able to at all) to find what they’re looking for (whether it’s a marriage, a hookup or anything in between).
Considering the paid to unpaid member rate (and the limitations on free accounts) I’d say many of the companies that are making money are generally monumental failures in the eyes of the consumers. If 90% or more of your members are unpaid, and paid members try repeatedly to contact users that cannot respond to them, I’d say that would be a highly unsatisfying experience.
But then again, that’s why there are still huge opportunities in this space.