Archive for June, 2011

Vancouver riots.

June 16, 2011

Its crazy outside all you can hear is the constant buzz of police helicopters, even more bizzare seeing the riots unfold on TV now considering its only a few blocks away. Police are firing tear gas, cars are on fire and fires in the streets and looting of the stores.

Wow its just going nuts now its only 9:40… Heavy black smoke over the city and everyones afraid to go outside. Liquer stores got looted and cop cars are getting set on fire. Its going to be a long night. Grandville is just a wall of tear gas. If plentyoffish goes down tonight you’ll know why!

Government Of Alberta spend millions of dollars creating a parody of Plentyoffish.com

June 16, 2011

You’d think the government of Alberta would have better things to do than spend millions of dollars creating a parody of Plentyoffish.com  and than flood the Print/ TV/Radio with it.

View News Story

Yes syphilis is a serious issue, effecting ~200 people a year in Alberta.   What I don’t get is why parody a mainstream dating site?   Its completely the wrong demographic in many many ways.   The average age of Plentyoffish  is 39 years old not 19.

Okcupid Acquisition was 50 Million + 40 Million earn out.

June 5, 2011

On January 20, 2011, Match acquired OkCupid for $50.0 million in cash, plus potential additional consideration that is contingent upon OkCupid’s 2011 earnings performance. The amount of the additional contingent consideration ranges from $0 to $40.0 million.

http://ir.iac.com/secfiling.cfm?filingID=1047469-11-4675

So that works out to 100 times+  ebitda if the max earn out is earned?

Match.com also announced the acquistion of meetic  for around $500M.    Meetic’s ebitda  is around $60M a year so that is a dramatically different.

The real reason  Match bought okcupid is  a couple minutes into this talk by the CEO.

http://ir.iac.com/eventDetail.cfm?EventID=97073

1.  Badoo a free dating site supposidly is earning north of 140M now.   They have no advertising costs so I assume their ebidta is higher than all of Match.com current properties combined.    They currently plan to IPO for  2 Billion. 

2.  In the talk  the Okcupid team signed a deal to stay on for a year  and is focused building a badoo clone that will get profiles via facebook to compete in the space.

From the sounds of it  Okcupid is going to have no more investment in it and left to die off like singlesnet.com,   the focus seems to be to focus on dominating all these new forms of “online dating” such as mobile.

Badoo has grown 40% in the US dating market in the last 2 weeks,    Match.com’s traffic has declined 30% in the last 30 days according to hitwise.


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