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?
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{ 21 comments… read them below or add one }
Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz at TC Disrupt this morning: It wasn’t in the sweet spot of what we do. It was the same with HotJobs. It’s just not about in line with we do anymore.
I especially like the Only Match.com is allowed to advertise on yahoo personals part…
http://paidcontent.org/article/419-yahoo-outsources-personals-to-iacs-match.com/
They are going to run into anti trust issues soon at this rate.
It’s good news for the industry – consumers demand choice and they’ve just lost yet another one which will need to be filled.
Whilst this isn’t technically an acquisition, it’s as good as – Match has carried out a lot of acquisitions recently – you’d think their CEO was a lawyer or something!?!? :)
What will be more interesting is whether they make a success of their acquisitions or not – PeopleMedia, Singlesnet – has anyone noticed much from them post-acquisition?
Ross
My question is: Are Yahoo Personal members going to be Match.com members now, or just using their platform. In other words, can a PAYING Yahoo member email a PAYING Match.com member?
Because here’s what I see:
- Yahoo’s monthly fees are currently lower than Match’s (to the best of my knowledge)
- Match’s platform while far from ideal in my mind, is better than Yahoo’s platform based on people I’ve spoken with.
So, if Yahoo has almost as many monthly visitors as Match, Yahoo costs less, but uses Match’s technology … why would you join the more expensive Match instead of the cheaper Yahoo?
Anyone else agree?
Ross, good question, looking into it. What’s wrong with Match’s platform? People will join because they just do the upgrade and don’t worry too much about it, or this pushes them to WLDPOFOKCupidnichesetc.
Interesting that Yahoo will offer prorated refunds to current paid members.
The website also doesn’t explain whether “Yahoo on Match” has a separate pool of members from “Match” or not.
Cause if I was considering Match.com, I might buy a long term (cheaper) membership on Yahoo – if it would enable me to use Match’s full site.
My other question would be — what percentage of Yahoo’s members pay in comparison to how many of Match’s pay.
Spark.com has graciously offered Yahoo members one month free membership to their site. My favorite comment though is: “The value that Spark.com can provide is far superior to what Match.com hopes to offer Yahoo personals members,” says Adam Berger, Chief Executive Officer of Spark Networks, the owner and operator of Spark.com. “Our free communication features and photo requirements make Spark.com the highest quality online dating destination out there.”
Highest value, from a site that only has 7900 people who can send emails? Forgetting about the quality of the technology platforms for a moment. That means that Match.com has apparently 202 people who can send you an email for every ONE that Spark.com has.
Ouch.
Yahoo Personals is to be no more, as the service will be outsourced to IAC’s Match.com. Existing users will be able to switch over to the new service dubbed “Match.com on Yahoo.”
This sounds to me like a difficult merge, as someone who’s in IT i can’t imagine the millions this must be costing just to work on the technical part of this. I hope this will improve things and give yahoo the edge in the online dating scene. It’s amazing how search giants don’t capitalize on the fact that online dating is such a huge industry online.
I was shocked when I logged into Yahoo Personals last week and was told that they will be partnering with Match. There are some things I like more about YP than Match and will be sad to see it go.
I guess it’s time to migrate to Match once again.
It seems to me that revenue for some dating sites is stagnating. Yahoo was not able to generate enough revenue to justify keeping YPersonals. Perhaps it was a marketing problem or branding problem. Its always annoyed me when Portals acquire and then re-name sites to their corporate branding. It hurts branding and product uniqueness. In the Online personals space, there are too many options with social networks taking over online interaction time amongst the under-25 crowd. I think there is still room for smaller niche sites to be profitable with lower over-head, but Match and big sites may have too many costs. There might also be a change to more premium offerings.
I don’t think that it’s revenue stagnating as much as it is costs escalating and therefore margins decreasing.
Fundamentally it’s becoming more expensive to acquire customers, more expensive to support those customers and therefore there’s less profit.
We’re seeing more and more sites recognise what their core strength is – either brand/marketing, customer acquisition or technology and focussing on that – then outsourcing the elements that are not core.
So for example they cut the cost of their technology and customer support by outsourcing that to a platform, then just focuss on acquiring customers – it’s far more profitable for them and is the only way they can get the kind of margins back in their business that they used to enjoy a couple of years ago.
Ross
“The value that Spark.com can provide is far superior to what Match.com hopes to offer Yahoo personals members,” says adam berger, and this site serves the people a lot by providing services like to match up the IT professionals.
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Finance Capitalism
I like what you say about core strengths. I tell most people that want to start a dating site that they should strongly consider if they want to become expert Internet marketers, because thats the primary role of a small site owner.
Customer acquisition is happening more in-house, because the lead generators are charging too much and their landing page and SEO voodoo is becoming easier to replicate. Some dating sites spend hundreds of thousands a month and they could be spending 1/2 that if they did lead-gen in house.
A Dating site host/ASP like WLD, Datingfactory and Dating Lab makes more and more sense, not even counting their shared database, but a lot of people are waiting for things like better customization (this is so overdue it’s not even funny), better marketing support, VIP/verified profiles and a few other issues that are consistently mentioned.
For now I’ll settle on knowing who WLD acquired to get a jump start in the US and see how they do here. White label dating sites are much more suited to the EU market than the us, we’ll see how the expansion goes. Something tells me a number of sites are going to have to be acquired or profiles shared before people will take it seriously.
Ronald:
Interesting that you quote the CEO of Spark. Here’s something you might not have known. Spark.com was made up primarily of two sites: American Singles and Date.CA. Spark’s management has been announcing on conference calls for over 2 years that they’re managing the decline of the American Singles brand. Membership has gone from over 100k in 2005 to under 8k as of this year. Management has also indicated that they are NOT going to do any innovation in 2010, but rather spend the time merging their two separate technology platforms.
Now, Match has its own problems, with less than 1.7 million contactable members out of 15 million or so members that they advertise. But still, that’s approximately 200 members for every one member on Spark.com.
In my opinion, other companies are doing far more to service than members than Yahoo, Match or Spark combined.
A Dating site host/ASP like WLD, Datingfactory and Dating Lab makes more and more sense, not even counting their shared database, but a lot of people are waiting for things like better customization (this is so overdue it’s not even funny), better marketing support, VIP/verified profiles and a few other issues that are consistently mentioned.
tom,
Hi,
We are putting together a report with regards to M&A’s within the Dating industry – this one has off course been added to the list.
Can someone come up with other M&A’s recently – either between the big players, or even between the smaller/medium sized players please?
I have all of that, why do you ask?
Hi, we are putting together this report in order to estimate the M&A market in general – how many deals are being closed – how active is the market etc. etc.
What we are most interested in is getting to know is if any big players have it as a general strategy buying up local players on emergent markets. More specifically South America.
PM me on me email for more detail please.
Everyone I know who has tried internet dating, is either directly or indirectly part of the Match brand whether they know it or not. Another smart move by Match I think. I just hope for the subscribers sake that they get more value for money from such a partnership.
I have used Match with a lot of success, and I think they and eHarmony are the best out there. POF is alright too…but as with anything free you have to weed through a lot more junk than on the pay sites.
JT
http://www.online-dating-mastery.com