I for one am not buying the hype surrounding Badoo. I hear too many people talking about systems in place for creating fake profiles, the rampant address book mining, the hundreds of women I see in Boston with Spanish-language profiles, and the scores of messages I’ve sent, only to receive a handful of replies (asking me to contact them at their Yahoo or Hotmail addresses, which means they are camgirls most of the time.)
And 50% of online contact leading to offline meetups? I’m not buying it. While the company is clearly earning considerable revenue, this is a hype-driven company which is going to struggle to survive for much longer once people get clued into the scammy/fake nature of the site.
Few people knew about the company until they got to this 130-million member number. Why is that? They want funding, high valuation and are probably praying for a big sale while the valuation is up in the clouds.
At this point, Badoo could clean up its image and do a mea culpa like Mark “I did every horrible thing in the book to, just to get revenues right away” Pincus at Zynga. If they don’t do that, Badoo is going to be the second coming of Myspace, meaning it’s nice to be able to mine the Internet for a few hundred million before people move on to something else (#envy).
While everyone was busy focusing on niche sites or trying to compete with Match on features (you really can’t), Badoo went out and crushed it, quietly and outside of the US. Now this 130-million-member scam-tastic juggernaut is coming to the US.
Are You Interested, POF and Zoosk are #facepalming over Badoo, which has run right past these more established players. At this point it doesn’t matter how many times POF shows up in Lady Gaga videos, they missed out on monetizing social dating big time. Zoosk and AYI did slightly better but the revenue just isn’t there. Supposedly Zoosk was on track to make $100 million this year, but these “run rate” shenanigans don’t impress, especially when one take into consideration that many successful dating companies are in the red at the end of the year.
I’d love to see the Comscore numbers for Badoo, send a screenshot if you have one.
Does anyone stop and think about what 130 million members mean? Is that like Match’s 20 million profiles where you have a few million active profiles and the rest are aged/stale/inactive? $1 revenue per member, but how much are acquisition costs? For perspective, a Facebook user is generally valued at around $125 per user these days.
I have one question for casual dating site owners, how come you didn’t copy Badoo? Why didn’t you all jump into the “pay for exposure” game a few years ago?
