Today’s OMG! story is brought to you by Zoosk. In the past year or so Zoosk has raised $30 million, grown leaps and bounds, suffered some backlash, turned on subscriptions, hired and fired talent, run television commercials and in general ran roughshod over the entire online dating industry.
Zoosk.com, the world’s largest social dating community, today announced it has grown its annual sales run rate approximately 250% in one year to more than $90 million. Zoosk’s sales growth was driven primarily by sales of its premium subscriptions, which account for the majority of its revenue. The company continues to expand its offerings globally and now monetizes in more than 60 countries.
Are You Interested is making $4+ million a year and Zoosk makes that every 30 days. Spark Networks makes around $40 million, Zoosk makes that every six months. Spark has been around forever, Zoosk is only a few years old.
While everyone (myself included) is bloviating about free vs. paid, matching algorithms, lead-gen and customer service, Zoosk is out there redefining what a dating startup is capable of. From a business perspective, Zoosk is an enormous hit.
I’d like to hear more singles talking about Zoosk in general. The contact form here gets more Zoosk complaints than any other site, 10-1 easy, but that could be some google link somewhere.
No idea what consumer sentiment about Zoosk is like in EU. Can anyone shed light on this? What exactly do singles think about Zoosk? Are they screwing around at work on it checking each other out and not communicating? Are they there for a week then gone, or a month, or five months? How many people are actually communicating and responding to emails?
Without knowing this information, Zoosk remains a very successful company that nobody really knows anything about. I never, ever meet anyone who uses Zoosk and my personal opinion is that while they can be huge moneymakers, they are not exactly raising the bar in terms of online dating. But that doesn’t really matter because they are making a lot of money and thats all that most dating industry people care about, at least publicly.
I can only imagine what Plentyoffish thinks about Zoosk. $25 million-ish in revenue vs. $90 million. Free is great but there’s not a lot of money in it compared to subscription-based dating (unless you are OKCupid ;-).
And to think a main theme at iDate last month was free vs. paid dating. As if thats even a discussion worth having anymore. Sites are free until they reach a threshold and then they turn on subscriptions or Freemium offers. Having the inertia and resources and luck to get to that point where you can start making millions on subscriptions every month is a rare feet and Zoosk is to be commended on their efforts.
Word on the street is that Zoosk is looking to raise even more money. If they do, it will be interesting to see where and how they spend it.
