Newsflash: Match.com, an operating business of IAC, today announced an agreement by which Match will become the exclusive online dating site on Yahoo!. Yahoo! Personals users will have the opportunity to move to a new co-branded Match.com experience, “Match.com on Yahoo!” where they will combine with the greater Match.com community. The Match.com on Yahoo! service is available starting today.
Sure enough, the Yahoo! Personals home page is branded as “match.com on Yahoo!” Yahoo.match.com, who would have thunk it?
Several months ago I spent time with someone who put together a deal to acquire Yahoo Personals which fell through. Interesting back-story to say the least. Yahoo owned a (once upon a time) top-10 dating site where they got most of their business from marketing to their own 500 million members and to have to sell it to a competitor. Awkward, oh how the mighty have fallen.
Match, which just got a *lot* bigger, has done deals like this in the past. In November of 2008, eHarmony and Yahoo Announce partnership in Australia. I wonder how Match is going to deal with this?
Yahoo! Personals users will receive special offers designed to help them enjoy all that Match.com has to offer. The two companies are working together to help users easily migrate to Match.com on Yahoo!. Over the next two months, existing Yahoo! Personals members will be given the opportunity to seamlessly migrate their Yahoo! Personals accounts over to the new experience. Match.com on Yahoo! offers compelling features including mobile access, daily personalized matches and robust search tools and will fully replace the existing Yahoo! Personals experience at the end of the transition period.
If you migrate over from Yahoo to Match, let us know how it goes.
Yahoo tried to roll out social services like 360, new profiles and scores of other social services, the majority which have been shut down or buried. It sounds like someone at Yahoo finally decided enough is enough. Fish or cut bait, as they say.
Back in 2008 I said:
Yahoo spent an enormous amount of time and energy upgrading their dating site platform. I spoke with Yahoo a year ago, about the upgrade, back when Susan Mernit was still around. Doesn’t seem like anything has changed in ages. Why go through the process of a massive infrastructure upgrade and do so little with it? At least they can start to achieve feature parity with the competition.
At this point it’s safe to say that Match is the Honda Accord of dating. Nobody else come close in terms of worldwide brand recognition, marketing spend and mainstream advertising (the new commercials are very good.) I’ve known in my gut that Match was going to take the brass ring, just like I knew that YouTube was going to be the big winner in the online video business. Both exhibited traits of winning companies and continued to build upon a strong foundation and make solid strategic deals for the most part (Singlesnet, cough, cough.)
Who the heck is Match going to acquire next? Place your bets in the comments.
Congrats to Match, and if you worked at Yahoo! Personals, contact me for help getting another job in the industry. Better yet, come freelance with me while you figure out your next move.
I hope that someone at Yahoo will comment on this. In the meantime, what do you think the sale price was?
