Facebook revenues are expected to come in around 200M for 2008 and facebook app revenues are well over 100M. There are several facebook apps earning millions a year and some over 10M a year. I’ve been pitched by some of the companies monetizing some of these things and the money is insane.
So what is facebook going to do when the apps revenue surprasses their own revenue? At that point will facebook become a Application Service Provider and will get the valuation of one?
Much of the gains in marketshare i’ve made over the past 2 years have come because the dating industry has shrank 40% over the last 2 years.
http://www.google.com/insights/search/#cat=102&geo=US&date=1%2F2007%2024m&cmpt=q
At the same time the social networking industry has grown 450%
http://www.google.com/insights/search/#cat=529&geo=US&date=1%2F2007%2024m&cmpt=q
Check out the unbelievable spike in traffic that social networks have been seeing the last 3 days. That huge spike normally goes to dating sites… The recession has been really bad for most of the paid sites, and they have lost a lot of traffic in the last 3 months. 2009 will be a blood bath!
hitwise top sites by pageviews
I had a good year this year, taking over the top spots for dating in both the US and the UK. In the US I managed to break into the top 10 sites in terms of pageviews if you combine Yahoo and googles properties otherwise I’m between 12 and 13 on any given day according to hitwise. Its cool to be the only company in this list that isn’t actually based in the US.
In just the dating category we’ve blown past Match.com and Eharmony which sit between 3 – 5% marketshare in the US. Since the recession began in the US in Sept i’ve seen the signup to relationship ratio of the site increase by 10%, i’ve also seen the attrition rate go down significantly. There has also been huge volatility around signups since sept so its been hard to draw conclusions. Most importantly unlike other years where signups tend to plunge 30% in December every year i’m seeing no decline in signups in the US this year. This decline is normally followed by a 30% increase in signups (above the november average) starting Dec 26th…. This all points to Plentyoffish finally going mainstream in a huge way in 2009 in the US.
I still haven’t hired a tech guy to watch over the servers, that will be the first thing i’ll do in 2009, getting tired of running every aspect of the site except customer service myself!
http://www.loiclemeur.com/english/2008/12/should-michael.html
Helen Fisher also presented, anyone have a link to her talk?
Found it.
http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/930411
So why can’t we get these kind of speakers at the dating conference?
