Facebook friends in search of romance drive growth of dating application
With the rise of the Internet, people began looking for love on websites such as Match.com and EHarmony.com. With the growing popularity of social networks, they’re turning to services like AreYouInterested.com.
The dating application, available on Facebook and Apple Inc.’s iPhone, lets users see beyond the personal details of potential mates to their social circles, including friends and family. AreYouInterested.com is adding more than 50,000 users a day, according to parent company Snap Interactive Inc. Match.com adds 20,000 new users daily.
AreYouInterested.com is now the largest Facebook dating application, with more than 13 million average monthly users, according to research firm AppData.com. Its popularity may cut into the growth of Match.com, part of IAC/InterActiveCorp, and EHarmony.com Inc., whose Facebook programs have 72,712 and 8,607 average monthly users respectively.
“Those traditional online dating companies don’t have a large app presence like us,” Snap Interactive Chief Executive Cliff Lerner said. “Our growth, as well as the growth of a couple competitors, has come out of nowhere.”
But although Match.com may not be signing up as many new users, the site has greater appeal for serious daters and a stronger long-term business, said Gregory R. Blatt, chief executive of IAC. Founded in 1995, the site collects pages of data from users to help them find appropriate mates, with a large engineering team to refine its site and algorithms.
The company is also working on introducing new Facebook apps that will compete with AreYouInterested.com, Blatt said.
“AreYouInterested is a flirty, fun little app,” Blatt said. “They have a few people working in a garage. We’ve got hundreds of engineers maximizing our business. You need huge degrees of sophistication, huge amounts of data behind it, and a huge community.”
IAC’s Match business, which includes other dating websites such as Chemistry.com and SeniorPeopleMeet.com, had revenue of $292.4 million in the first nine months of the year, up 13% from a year earlier. Operating profit for the group rose 25% over the first nine months to $77.3 million. The company’s dating sites have 1.8 million subscribers, who pay $24.95 a month or $99 for a year. The websites had 6.5 million unique visitors in November, up from 60% from a year earlier, according to market-research firm ComScore Inc.
“Never has Match experienced the kind of growth it’s experienced in 2010,” Blatt said.
Meanwhile, Snap, with 17 employees operating out of a midtown Manhattan office building, had $3.9 million in revenue in the first nine months, up 65%. Its shares are traded over the counter.
Lerner and his brother founded the company with $750,000 from friends and family. Cliff Lerner, 32, had worked as an equities analyst at Lehman Bros. Inc; Darrell Lerner, 36, ran a fantasy-sports company. The brothers first started a dating website called IamFreeTonight.com in 2006, and shifted their focus after the initial success of their social-networking products.
AreYouInterested.com is a software application, or app, that users can load onto their Facebook page or iPhone and then use to click through photos of potential matches and exchange messages or virtual gifts of digital roses or teddy bears.
Dating apps on Facebook are popular because they give romance seekers insight into potential partners through the social networking site’s existing information, Darrell Lerner said. People who meet on AreYouInterested.com can become Facebook friends and see each other’s posts, photos and videos before ever agreeing to an actual date, he said.
“A lot of people on dating websites don’t put up legitimate information,” he said. “Because we’re an app on Facebook, every user is legitimate. Before people go out with someone, they look them up on Facebook, they add them as a friend, and they see who their friends are. They get a better representation of the person, and it makes them more comfortable.”
Snap plans to expand beyond Facebook, particularly in the mobile devices market, Cliff Lerner said.
“We believe there are big growth opportunities around mobile as Web usage continues to increase rapidly and there are exciting opportunities around location-based features for dating apps,” he said.
One online dater, a 26-year-old event planner in Manhattan, said she had joined a couple of dating websites before she recently registered for AreYouInterested.com through the Facebook application.
“For people in their 20s and 30s on Facebook, dating is a big aspect of our lives, and a lot of people use Facebook as a dating thing anyway,” said Adi, who declined to give her last name for privacy reasons. “There’s something to be said for a dating website that’s linked in with the most popular social network. It makes it feel more real.”
