Nielsen has come up with incredible stats on the advertising spend of the dating industry. This is why cheap hosted sites with little marketing budget will never make it past the mom-n-pop stage. It’s amazing how much more the top sites need to spend to stay there. Eharmony and Match both grew their ad spend by 39%, what are the odds of that happening? Match makes more than Eharmony yet it’s ad spend is half of Eharmony’s $110 million. Teligence spent $42 million, mostly on chat lines. There are a lot of very interesting things to learn from this information, go check it out.
In 2004 (January-November) total U.S. media spending was $149 million; 2005 (January-November) total spending was $310 million; for January - November 2006 total spending was $430 million. In 2006, most dating services companies spent their advertising dollars on Cable TV with $130.6 million in reported ad spending, the Internet ranks second at $127.3 million and Spot TV
follows with $75.1 million.
Online ad spending:
Total estimated spending on image-based online advertising for dating services was $127.3 million for Jan-November 2006. True ($52.2 million), Mate1.com ($20.4 million) and InterActiveCorp (match.com) ($16.1 million) led the top online personals advertisers in 2006.
It will be interesting to lay revenue on top of these numbers and see who is the most effective with their advertising dollars.
Who the heck is Flingweb and how did Chemistry.com spend $2 million when they supposedly haven’t even started advertising yet?
ad spend, advertising, nielsen, Research Online dating site Match.com has decided that marketing dollars spent in the US on it’s home turf can only take the company so far, announcing it has acquired two international dating and social networking sites.
From PaidContent:
Online dating site Match.com has changed its strategy of organic growth by acquiring two international dating sites reports AP. Match.com has added more than 4 million subscribers by buying Netclub in France and the eDodo social networking site in China.
Most of the new subs come from NetClub: EDodo only has about 180,000 subs, but is seen as important because it gives Match.com a foothold into the burgeoning Chinese market.
Match had a social networking component several years ago and was not able to make a go of it. Acquiring a company with experience in the space that’s (way) outside the Dallas orbit might be exactly what it needs to get a foothold into the social networking space. Although 180k subs is a small site, it’s a start, and we all know the China market is taking off.
Match.com ranks second in the French market; now Netclub gives Match.com the third-largest online dating service. Netclub has been around for nine years.
Recent Match.com acquisition history:
Valentine’s Day 2001: Udate acquires Kiss.com for $17.7 million. Kiss CEO is Duane Dahl, founder of Perfectmatch.
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Match acquires Kiss.com and Udate in 2002 for $150 million.
Duane Dahl leaves Kiss.com for Marketrange parent company of Perfectmatch.
Dating Sites, edodo, Finance, kiss.com, marketrange, match.com, netclub, Research, udateAccording to Alex Mindlin at the New York Times (reg req’d), men and women are about evenly balanced at major dating sites, it’s the niche sites where women often outnumber the men.
I would like to know how Hitwise knows if visitors are men or women. Too bad they didn’t list the breakout of the sexes for True.com, Mate1 and some of the other dating sites which rely on scantily-clad women in their advertising.
Here are the top 10 Dating Industry search terms for January 2007.
