This time vertrue isn’t trying to sell just lavalife, its put the entire company for sale. Looks like private equity and companies are bidding over Vertrue. Lots of speculation in the press and on todays conference call. News Article here.
Lavalife has been dieing, the majority of the revenues are generated from its late night phone based “dating” service. With declining web revenues, price hikes and other money grabbing ideas it only managed 4% year over year growth. Management is now referring to lavalife as a “Social Network” I wonder what that means…
January 25, 2007 at 2:11 am |
As for lavalife website: it’s crappy. It seems they haven’t got any leadership for where they want to go with their audience..
Markus, you will always have good stuff around because you have the idea of what users want by direct manner. Lavalife has layers on layers of managers with strategy sheets on tables without knowing what they want to do next.
Also Markus i have seen that on compete you are starting to stagnate instead of rise, IMHO i think you should take it to another level.
January 25, 2007 at 1:24 pm |
I’m not sure I would agree that lavalife’s website is “crappy”… It’s actually quite slick from a design point of view. In my opinion, their major downfall was the failure to innovate. I have been a member for 2 years and although I’m not a regular user, I do check in from time to time. In the 2 years I’ve spent with the site, I’ve yet to see any new features, tools, or functionality.
On the other hand, I would argue that the “quality” of users on lavalife are superior to those on POF, at least in my experience. I suppose this is a result of the paid model (i.e. users willing to pay to make connections are likely to be more engaged).
Markus – although your site may not look as “nice” as lavalife and some of the other paid sites, you have continued to innovate and improve on user experience while remaining a free service for your users. It’s the features like send a rose, favourites, and see who’s looked at your profile that set you apart from the “other guys”. Keep up the good work my friend.
January 25, 2007 at 4:00 pm |
@Jason “I’ve yet to see any new features, tools, or functionality.”
That’s why it’s crappy.
January 25, 2007 at 4:19 pm |
Dating via the telephone seems VERY dated, and to have to pay for it….
January 25, 2007 at 5:47 pm |
Jason how are lavalifes “users” better? From the polls I took 60% of people actually came from using lavalife. I tend to find people form their opinion of “”quality” based on the first 3 contacts and if they were rejected or not. Dating is one of those perception is reality problems, quality is the same everywhere as its a mass market.
January 25, 2007 at 8:40 pm |
I could be completely wrong Markus. It just seemed in my personal experience, the people I met on lava were more professional and sofisticated on average. Plus, the fact that you have to pay to send a message seems to act as a bit of a filter. Therefore, only qualified prospects will message you.
January 25, 2007 at 8:59 pm |
Are users site monogamists? I think if you polled the audience you would see that there are users that have a POF and a LavaLife and a MySpace account – they use them for different reasons. I agree with Markus on this one – you cannot say that because a user does not pay they are not as serious. I think the biggest telltale sign is the frequency of use – those that create a profile and then never log in are just “looky-loos” and those that are engaged with other users are there for serious reasons. By design POF weeds out the “looky-loos” because they have a pagerank of 10 or higher.
That’s my two cents.
Eric
P.S. I would love to be a fly on the wall when all the pay-for-play sites talk about POF – it is probably not that different than the commercial guys who talk about Open Source stuff and as they say POF they spit on the ground and then wonder how the hell they are going to stay alive!
January 27, 2007 at 9:26 am |
^ yah, and open source sure killed microsoft…
January 27, 2007 at 5:11 pm |
Eric, what does a page rank have to do with “looky loos” or not? I’ve been a member of POF for years now and the site is FULL of “looky loos”. I would guess AT LEAST 25% of the female profiles go like this:
“Just looking, to see whats out there”
POF doesn’t insist that a new user actually DO anything to get an account. If someone is bored and searches for “online dating”, they see POF at the top, click on it, add a new profile, type: “fdsjafljasdflas” for the description and they are in! A paid site at least forces them to put effort into their profile, thus higher quality prospects right off the bat. Do you think someone with: “Just looking…” as the profile description is serious? They are essentially just wasting space and time of other members looking for something real.
Don’t get me started on the guys that email these women either though.
In my opinion the problem with most dating sites is that the vast majority of the people who call shots aren’t single, or don’t even use their own site for DATING. If they were, they would be implementing ALOT more USEFUL features. Not stupid things like “you have 2 roses to give someone a month”. That doesn’t improve the site at all, its just a GIMMICK.
Markus, I’d like to see some REAL improvements. Features that improve quality for DATING. Not silly little gimmicks, or stupid tests that waste everyones time.
January 28, 2007 at 1:28 pm |
Hey Mike….
What do you want for FREE?
Markus doesnt need to change a thing…His site is very successful as is.
If you think you can do a better job…then start your own dating site and lets see how long you last.
January 29, 2007 at 8:41 am |
“Markus doesnt need to change a thing”
January 29, 2007 at 6:26 pm |
[...] says that Lavalife is for sale. Actually, the whole company, Vertrue, is on the block. Vertrue could fetch around $640 million [...]
January 29, 2007 at 10:20 pm |
I wrote a big response to Mike’s comments and it vanished
January 29, 2007 at 11:08 pm |
[...] says that Lavalife is for sale. Actually, the whole company, Vertrue, is on the block. Vertrue could fetch around $640 million [...]
January 30, 2007 at 1:02 am |
Patsy, I didn’t delete anything. Its the spam filter if anything, even my comments are getting sent to the trash.
February 1, 2007 at 4:55 pm |
Yeah, WordPress is awful, half my posts are deleted or cut off in the middle. Its almost useless to attempt a post anymore.
February 5, 2007 at 3:08 pm |
I use akismet spam filter for a soccer site that I look after and it bans members from the site which is very frustrating.
As for Lavalife, it was just a matter of time. Free dating services have hurt many of the paid models.
February 10, 2007 at 4:20 am |
“how are lavalifes ‘users’ better?”….well, since you asked, I’d say that 80% of women in my filter are smokers on POF, and the reverse ratio (20%) on Lavalife. I log onto and snoop around POF pretty much every day (and ya, I “click” too). I’d snoop more selectively if I could filter out smokers. Probably 80% of my bandwidth usage for profiles on POF is for people I wouldn’t ever care to meet because they smoke (that’s not a moral judgment, I’m highly allergic). Just thought you might appreciate the feedback….apart from that your site impresses the heck out of me.
August 14, 2007 at 11:52 pm |
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