Markus at Plenty Of Fish asks the question Does Eharmony outsource matchmaking? and points us to Ian Clarke’s blog. Ian, for those of you who don’t know, is the founder of The Freenet Project, the first anonymous P2P network.
Ian’s current focus is the development of SenseArray (through his company Uprizer Labs). SenseArray is a powerful new type of collaborative filter which can make use of arbitrary metadata in making recommendations. SenseArray is already being used in a wide variety of industries, ranging from online dating (we can’t name the company but you’ve heard of it), to targeted advertising companies with revenues totaling in the hundreds of millions.
Markus wonders if Ian is powering one of eHarmony’s 29 dimensions.
Greg Waldorf, CEO of the online matchmaking service eHarmony.com, describes the essential components of a successful entrepreneurial career. He believes that working with great people, taking risks, adaptability, passion and timely execution of plans can lead to success for entrepreneurs. He draws parallels between the satisfaction found through finding the right career path and a fulfilling relationship.
Points of interest:
- 30 million people visit a dating sites homepage per year
- 3 million subscribe to any dating site per year
- 10% of people rejected
- Only half actually finish the test
- Parenting service coming
- 55% brand awareness
- 100M in lost revenue from turning people away.
- IPO soon
Who wants to be the Director of Business Operations at OkCupid.com?
Several people wrote in to tell me that the numbers I quoted for Zoosk and Are You Interested (AYI) were way off. Of course AYI has way more than 100k visitors a month. All sites are notoriously underreported, why won’t companies demand better representation? One reason Zoosk shows so many users is that the Zoosk facebook app is an i-frame. It appears that measurement companies track data pulled into Facebook in the overall traffic numbers, hence the overinflated stats.
AYI put out a press release yesterday.
Operational highlights (unaudited):
- Q1 2010 gross receipts of more than $1,300,000, an increase of more than 69% compared to Q1 2009 gross receipts of $768,972.
- March 2010 gross receipts of more than $440,000, an increase of more than 23% over February 2010 gross receipts.
- Gross receipts from subscriptions and premium sales increased to approximately $1,154,000 in Q1 2010 from approximately $449,700 in Q4 2009.
- Average daily gross receipts from subscription and premium sales have increased each month since launch of our subscription model on AreYouInterested.
- Recurring revenue beginning to ramp up — should produce further revenue growth as year progresses.
Always-on iPhone apps Great For Dating. Always-on iPhone apps raise new promises, perils for location privacy
Sites like ladiesofchatroulette.com are using webcam girls on video to drive site usage. Instead of seeing some guy in a gorilla mask you see a sexpot who undoubtedly want you to upgrade to a paid subscription services or shell out $25 for a show.
Other dating sites are using Chatroulette to drive traffic by putting up screenshots of their url on Chatroulette. This is pretty smart and at the same time is going is going to hurt Chatroulette. Pretty soon it will be all marketers spamming the service. This is what happened to Twitter once it became popular.
Online virtual world Utherverse is the first social networking world to offer its users interest on bank account balances. The virtual currency, which can be transferred into real world money, will earn daily interest at 6% – 8% that is tax free. Virtual currency is earned simply by participating within the virtual world. Many users are now viewing virtual currency as a real investment.
Easydate launches four new dating sits with Orion media. EasyDate certainly is on a role lately.
IAB Internet Advertising Revenue Report conducted by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC). A good read if you have anything to do with online advertising or performance-based marketing.
The Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) is in beta. This could make it easier for dating sites to provide site->member and member->member messaging of all kinds. Reliable and cheap, what’s not to like?
Algebraix: “Too Good To Be True” – Creating An Algebra For Data: I wonder if this could have implications for the online dating industry in terms of matching capabilities.
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{ 7 comments… read them below or add one }
eHarmony has 2 main revenue lines:
By subscriptions.
By ads.
The Worldwide 2009 annual revenue for eHarmony was estimated in USD 250 millions.
My personal estimation is: 90% by subscriptions and 10% by ads.
eHarmony is intended for serious dates, so if any registered member does not pay, he/she cannot communicate with others, unless he/she uses the (low performance) Free Communication Weekends.
I do not think eHarmony could *easily* incresase its convertion rate to increase its revenue by subscriptions, it will be easier to improve its revenue by ads. eHarmony could be testing its own ads platform and contrasting that platform with other proposals, like the one offered by VisualDNA or the one offered by SenseArray.
eHarmony needs to deliver the correct ads to its members to achieve a high CTR.
If you are an eHarmony user right now, you will see the “New Profile Questions” globe when you log in. It clearly says “Tell us more about your interests. Find out what interests you share with your matches. Note: This information is not used for matching”
The 2010 annual revenue for PlentyOfFish is expected to be USD30 millions, more or less the same amount eHarmony could earn by ……… ads.
Does Math Lead to Love? I wrote a post a few weeks back after I read about Peter Backus who wrote a paper ‘Why I Don’t Have a Girlfriend’ where a guy attempted to prove the probability of finding a girlfriend in London http://www.astramatch.com/blog/relationships/does-math-lead-to-love/2010/02/ He did eventually find a girlfriend & its an interesting paper! I’m still not convinced – not sure whether data & maths can predict relationships?
Plentyoffish has 2.5 billion monthly pageviews eharmony has 400M monthly pageviews. Eharmony couldn’t sell ads at 5 times the cost of a POF ad. Data and math are highly predictive, if you ask the right questions and have enough data etc etc etc. But the question becomes if you cull 30 prospects to 10 are you really helping anyone? What value is in that?
Most people seem to be ok with browsing up to 50 or so profiles. Thinking that any system is going to narrow that down the three people, as is sometimes said here in the comments, makes little sense. People don’t want to be artificially constrained, they want great choices.
Markus, I think Fernando’s point here is the disparity between what POF makes vs eHarmony.
They make, what, $100M in EBTIDA every year? You make, what, $10M?
So, 10x the earnings from 1/6th the page views? That translates to 60x the earnings per page view as you!
You’ve got the wrong model. “Free” performs dreadfully.
$10M is great for you personally, granted. But, as a business model it is terribly inefficient.
oops, typo, should be EBITDA.
Great dating websites with great traffic! Thanks for sharing and possibility to comment! Below are great places to look for pretty Russian brides:
E – Russian Brides
http://www.e-russianbrides.com/
or Aurora Dating Service
http://www.auroradating.com/