Meetic and Match.

I found a strange press release from a billing company talking about meetic.   It seems that meetic has out sourced all billing to a third party ?   Can anyone shed any light on what exactly this is?

As for the match meetic deal,  details of the transaction are here. 

“Meetic SA to buy Match.com International Ltd. from IAC/InterActiveCorp. for $110 million
Boulogne-Billancourt, France-based online dating service provider Meetic agreed to acquire Match.com International, known as (Match Europe, the UK-based European operations of Dallas-based online dating service provider Match.com. The seller is IAC/InterActiveCorp., the New York City-based E-commerce group, which is paying $16.9 per share for 6,094,334 new shares, along with promissory notes of $6.64 million, in a transaction that will give IAC a 26.8-percent stake in Meetic and 21.1 percent of its voting rights. The transaction is expected to close no later than June 30.”

I wonder what  be2,  parship  and eharmony will do this year…

Recession hits paid sites hard….

Rubicon ad network is reporting a 40%  drop in  Dating CPM’s.   

Now that valentines day is over  I’ve seen massive swings in signups and  i’ve been talking to a few adnetworks and they all say paid sites are cutting back even more dramatically and payouts are going way down as people are no longer willing to pay for memberships.

Last quarter every publicly traded paid dating site reported revenue declines.    Because dating sites didn’t spend as much money on marketing last quarter  they have lost a lot of market share.     At the end of last month  Plentyoffish was #2 on hitwise,  in this last week Plentyoffish has been less than 1% way from having more market share than the #2 and #3 players combined in the US.    Plentyoffish hasn’t really grown much this month,  we just haven’t lost traffic like many others.

With so many dating sites for sale either in whole or in part,   one has to wonder what this industry will look like in 6 months.

Average Paid Dating Site subscriptions per user fall 25% in 6 months.

In the summer I ran a massive survey in the US asking users what dating sites they were paying for and how many dating sites they were paying for over 300,000 users responded.

1.  In the summer  15.04% of my users were active paying members elsewhere.    In a poll that ran on the weekend  16% of my users are now paying elsewhere. (might be the huge valentines/new years bump)

2.  In the summer paying  users said they had 1.306 active paid dating subscriptions that number has now fallen to 1.245 a fall of 25%

So what does it mean?    The top 5 paid dating sites are getting bigger and all the other paid sites are getting smaller,  which is pretty much what hitwise is showing these days….

Why Don’t free Sites appeal to younger or lower income users the way paid sites do?

One of the hardest parts about growing plentyoffish  is that it doesn’t really appeal that much to lower income users  or younger users.

Hitwise demographic stats for 4 weeks ending  2/7/2009
12.36% of singlesnet users are under 25
10.15%  of match.com users are under 25
9.65% of  Plentyoffish users are under 25
7.28% of downtoearth  users are under 25.

Hitwise income statistics for 4 weeks ending  2/7/2009.
4.11% of singlesnet  users make over $150,000 a year.
5.05% of match.com users make over $150,000 a year.
6.23% of eharmony users make over $150,000 a year
12.37% of Plentyoffish users make over $150,000 a year.

The recession in the US seems to be growing Paid dating sites in the US fairly quickly  but isn’t really having a major of an impact on my sites growth.   We will still grow at least 80% organically this year  but I don’t think all that much is because of the recession.   The problem being is that most of my users are higher income and aren’t really effected by the current economic problems.     If you were me how would you market plentyoffish to take advantage of the current economic times ?