The earnings call transcript for IAC/Match is extremely interesting, lots of datapoints of interest to dating industry insiders. Key takeaways below and full transcript at Seeking Alpha.
Developing, which is everything but Core and Meetic, bottomed out in Q4, but we’re expecting growth in PMC and revenue throughout 2013, starting low but coming in for the full year at double-digit levels.
Now to Match, which we’re also feeling pretty good about. Q4 came in with 35% OIBA growth and 16% revenue growth.
Match Events didn’t pack the immediate customer acquisition punch we were hoping for. 4,000 to 5,000 in 2013.
67% of singles say that these events make them more likely to do online dating. A particular note, 15% of people who previously said they were not open to online dating say they are open to it as a result of events.
Strong gains at OkCupid, which by year’s end will have more paying subscribers than all but 3 of our 29 brands included in Core, and by Canada.
Meetic: It’s really a tremendous turnaround from what was, at the time of purchase, a suffering asset.
Currently in the U.S., there are about 100 million single people, and about 50% of them say they are open to online dating. By 2017, the single population is expected to be 112 million people, and we conservatively expect somewhere between 55% and 60% of them to be open to online dating.
This means an expansion of our addressable market from around 51 million to between 62 million to 67 million, or an increase of 21% to 31% over the next five years. Today, we’re still reaching a relatively small percentage of the addressable market and we expect that market to expand over the coming years.
Now, we’re able to move above the set price with a variety of add-ons and packages, and move below the fixed price by moving non-converting registrations into lower priced brands. Simultaneously, people coming in through the lower priced brands are increasingly being offered, and taking, additional paid features and services.
As a result, we’re starting to look at every registration, no matter which entry point it comes in through, as a potential registration for all our other services. Because our lower priced products acquire a large number of users at little or no marketing expense, this lowers the cost of customer acquisition for the higher priced brands as we more effectively figure out ways to increase the optimal matching of user to specific service.
OkCupid alone, with zero cost of acquisition, provides us with free access to millions of online daters, and we’re just starting to offer those daters the OkCupid subscription product, access to events through Match subscriptions, and paid add-ons like OkCupid’s new Crazy Blind Date offering, all without negatively impacting the traditional OkCupid experience.
Tinder, that’s getting a lot of traction, as well as Kiss.com, our re-launch of Singlesnet, Tallygram, a Facebook exploration engine recently launched, Combosaurus, an interest search/matching engine released to the public last week and Ravel, the photo based dating application that is getting ready to launch.
From 2010 through 2012, despite the fact that this was a period of proliferation of low and no priced dating alternatives, like OkCupid, we added 590,000 Core subscribers. During the preceding three years, we only added 66,000.
Twoo is doing 60,000 registrations every day, up about 30% from just December, with zero cost of acquisition.
Signing up approximately 1 million new users every week. Only about 7% of them are paying us.
Many services being developed through our Chinese partnership.
