Marketing a dating site is incredibly expensive. Just look at these numbers, from an article in Barron’s about Spark Networks trying to find a buyer.
eHarmony may spend $125 million on marketing and advertising, or more than 40% of its estimated $280 million in 2010 revenue, according to a report on the company by NeXt Up! Research. JDate spends as little as 5% to 10% of sales on marketing and advertising.
In 2009, JDate generated a modest $29 million in revenue. While that was 63% of Spark’s sales, it’s a small fraction of the $1 billion in annual revenue generated by the online dating industry, which is dominated by privately held eHarmony and Match.
Lots of resistance from all sides when it comes to acquiring Spark Networks. I have calls with no less than three investors this week to talk about South American dating sites as well as other North American acquisition opportunities. Everyone wants to talk about Zoosk and FriendFinder, Spark doesn’t even come up in conversation because most investors have been scared away by the relentless trend-down of the Spark brand. This could have been easily fixed years ago but someone got complacent, greedy, tied-hands or most likely all three.
Social gaming may be a fad, but there are many useful lessons to be learned from marketing on social networks. via TechCrunch. Overpaying for users with investor money is something that Zoosk probably knows a lot about.
Now this is interesting, EasyDate is now offering Events Bookings, which means that their white label partners running sites on the platform will also be able to offer their members tickets to singles events in their nearest town or city. Someone should do a shootout between White Label Dating, Dating Factory, EasyDate and all of the other companies competing for dating site business.
Dating sites, we’re still waiting for you to embed Twitter updates in dating profiles.
I received three press releases as MS Word documents today. Pr people, try Pitch Engine.
