Digg and Twitter.

Kevin Rose gave a interview today…

Are you concerned that if economic conditions get tougher and the ad market tightens up, that you’ll feel forced to sell?

Rose: Digg has 25 million people a month coming to the Web site. We’re not going anywhere. We have very strong financials, we have a very clear path to profitability, we have a small team. We’re 50 employees.

What about hardware and R&D costs?
Rose: Digg’s very lightweight. We don’t serve, you know, YouTube videos. So for us it’s not like we have some crazy bandwidth bill at the end of the month. I mean, it’s crazy, but it’s not YouTube crazy.

*************
Ok so digg has 300-500M pageviews a month, probably 20k/month in hardware/bandwidth servers etc, no real work for their 50 employees to do, “25 million” users coming to the site a month they can’t make any money yet somehow. 50 employees * $7000 salary/month = $350,000/month + 70k random expenses gets you at 420k/month in expenses. That means diggs revenue is far below that… How on earth do they expect to sell themselves for $300 Million ? The site is nothing more then a collection of links to news stories that are indexed by google and thereby get a massive amount of referrals from google.

Twitter.

Yahoo Finance Google finance etc all their postings in the forums are nothing more than short twitter messages. I don’t see why twitter doesn’t enter this space and own it. The CPM’s are among the highest paying on the internet and users would use the system religiously because it would provide utility. I think this is where the real money is and if twitter doesn’t own this space someone else will, and earn 10’s of millions a year because of it.

Pocado.com to kick the bucket.

“For organisational reasons Allegran Ltd who own both Loopy Love and Pocado will be shortly ending Pocado’s existence as a site in it’s own right and blending the two sites’ membership databases together whilst keeping the Loopy Love interface and brand.”

Looks like the closure date is April 1st  2008.    A year or 2 ago  Allegran  used to have 3 or 4 sites in the top 10 dating sites in the UK…

Patent Infringement Lawsuit.

Filed papers yesterday and we are out of the case.   Apparently someone didn’t realize Canada isn’t part of the US.

Back In November Eharmony & Match  asked the patent office to re-examine this bogus patent.   Spark Network Services was arguing they invented the concept of matching people based on preferences.    The exam was granted last week and the case stayed pending the results of the re-exam.     So basically for the remaining defendents the case will be on hold for 2 years until the patent office rules.

Wired Cover Story, Online Markets will all go to free.

http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/16-03/ff_free

Wired says that all markets will go to free as marginal costs of creating the service fall to 0. Its happening to pretty much every industry online.

Another Free Dating Site Packs up Shop.

Eromance.com got sold at the internet dating conference for $100,000. No other free sites have really gained any traction, as can be seen by this google trends graph. All of the remaining “free sites” are now getting their traffic from giving away free quizes and blog widgets or myspace widgets.

http://www.datehookup.com/CustomFriends.aspx
http://www.justsayhi.com/bb
okcupid distributes their tests all over social networks.

Facebook to lose $150M next year.

Decieving headline,   facebook is going to invest 150M in servers next year  creating huge fixed costs and a headache in 2 or 3 years time.

Revenue:  
2007:    $150 million (Same number that was given in August–i.e., no upside)
2008:    $300-$350 million, up 100%+

Revenue for Facebook for 2007 will be $150 million, as has been widely reported. But for 2008, Zuckerberg projected revenue to be increased to $300 million to $350 million.

More interesting was the news that Facebook would spend $200 million next year on capital expenditures, which is a whole lot of servers.

By the way, more expenses, noted chatty Mark, those employee levels would rise to more than 1,000 in 2008 from 450 now.

And Zuckerberg also said the company’s EBITDA–earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization and a number widely used by Wall Street as an indication of operating performance–would be $50 million in 2008.

That means the company would have a negative cash flow of about $150 million (EBITDA minus CapEx), rather than break even, as it does now.

hitwise on dating site traffic this year.

NEW YORK, NY – February 13, 2008 - The market share of U.S. visits to the Dating category increased 26 percent for the week ending Feb. 9, 2008, compared to the same week in 2007, Hitwise reported today. The most-visited website within the Dating category for last week was Singlesnet.com which received 14 percent of all the U.S. visits to the category.

Top 5 Dating Websites ranked by Market Share of U.S. Visits for the week ending Feb. 9, 2008
Rank	Name	Domain	U.S. Visits w/e  Feb. 9, 2008
1	Singlesnet	www.singlesnet.com	14.45%
2	Plentyoffish.com	www.plentyoffish.com	10.64%
3	eHarmony	www.eharmony.com	6.07%
4	TRUE	www.true.com	6.02%
5	Yahoo! Personals	personals.yahoo.com	5.70%
Note - the Hitwise data featured is based on U.S. market share of visits, which is the percentage of online traffic to the domain or category, from the Hitwise sample of 10 million U.S. Internet users. Hitwise measures more than 1 million unique websites on a daily basis, including sub-domains of larger websites. Hitwise categorizes websites into industries on the basis of subject matter and content, as well as market orientation and competitive context. The market share of visits percentage does not include traffic for all sub-domains of certain websites which are reported on separately.
Source: Hitwise

Other top Dating websites for last week included Plentyoffish.com which received 11 percent of the U.S. visits followed by eHarmony.com who received six percent of visits as did TRUE.com. Plentyoffish.com posted the largest year-over-year traffic growth among the top five websites within the Dating category with an 87 percent increase in U.S. visits.

“Each year we see people trying to find love online after the holidays and meet someone new in time for Valentine’s Day,” said Heather Dougherty, research director, Hitwise. “This January brought a higher influx of traffic than past years and the users are spending more time interacting on the dating websites looking for potential mates.”

Average Session Time

The average visit time for the Dating category during the week ending Feb. 9, 2008, was 17 minutes and 7 seconds, up from 14 minutes and 5 seconds, for the same week during the previous year. For the week ending Feb. 9, 2008, the average time spent on Plentyoffish.com led among the top five dating websites with users spending an average of 21 minutes and 31 seconds on the website. The average visit time on the free dating site increased 31% from the week ending Feb. 10, 2007.

Average U.S. Time Spent for the week ending Feb. 9, 2008 (in minutes & seconds) among the top % visited Dating websites
Rank	Name	Domain	Avg. Visit Time	Y-on-Y Change
1	Plentyoffish.com	www.plentyoffish.com	0:21:31	31%
2	eHarmony	www.eharmony.com	0:18:10	4%
3	Singlesnet	www.singlesnet.com	0:14:12	16%
4	Yahoo! Personals	personals.yahoo.com	0:13:04	76%
5	TRUE	www.true.com	0:12:49	4%
Note - data is based on the average U.S. time spent from the Hitwise sample of 10 million U.S. Internet users. Hitwise measures more than 1 million unique websites on a daily basis, including sub-domains of larger websites. Hitwise categorizes websites into industries on the basis of subject matter and content, as well as market orientation and competitive context.
Source: Hitwise

New and Returning Visitors

For the week ending Feb. 9, 2008, True.com received 26 percent of its share of traffic from new visitors. Among the top five dating websites by market share, Yahoo! Personals and Singlesnet followed with 15 and 13 percent, respectively, of new traffic that has not visited during the previous month.

Market Share of U.S. Traffic from New and Returning Visitors for the week ending Feb. 9, 2008 (in minutes & seconds) among top 5 Dating Websites
Rank	Name	Domain	New	Returning
1	Plentyoffish.com	www.plentyoffish.com	6%	64%
2	eHarmony	www.eharmony.com	12%	88%
3	Singlesnet	www.singlesnet.com	13%	87%
4	Yahoo! Personals	personals.yahoo.com	15%	85%
5	TRUE	www.true.com	26%	74%
Note - a returning visitor is defined as a user that has visited the site in the past 30 days from the Hitwise sample of 10 million U.S. Internet users. Hitwise measures more than 1 million unique websites on a daily basis, including sub-domains of larger websites. Hitwise categorizes websites into industries on the basis of subject matter and content, as well as market orientation and competitive context.
Source: Hitwise

About Hitwise

Love 3.0

The Globe and Mail declares  Love  3.0.      I made the front page of the business section!.     Good to see other sites following my lead and declaring active daily users.

HotOrNot Sold for a reported $20 Million?

Sale details

Hotornot sold for 20M to ashleymadison.com ie A dating site for married people that want to cheat.

Given the size of the site the brand and what not i’m amazed it sold for so little.

Cupid.com Earns $100M from sale.

Cupid.com sold regionalhelpwanted  for $100M

RegionalHelpWanted.com, a network of about 350 geographically focused online job boards, has been bought out by OnTargetJobs.com, a Texas-based recruitment-site aggregator. RHW, launched in 1999 and based in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., operates its sites under the “…HelpWanted.com” brand in U.S. and the “…JobShop.com” brand in Canada, and also owns dating site Cupid.com.  Its revenue was estimated at $35 million annually, according to a Classified Intelligence e-mail alerts (not available online), who also reported the $100 million figure (not disclosed by the companies themselves).

OnTargetJobs.com is part owned by PE firm Warburg Pincus, operates sites such as HealthECareers Network and BioSpace.com, a news and recruitment site for the pharma industries. It also operates local recruitment sites for the American City Business Journals.

This was the second recent major acquisition of a group of niche sites the last month or so. In January, Monster paid $61 million for AffinityLabs, a much smaller company that operated seven niche recruitment sites and industry portals.

http://www.paidcontent.org/entry/419-regionalhelpwanted-sold-to-warburg-pincus-bascked-firm-for-100-million/