I finally took the time to watch Marc Simoncini’s interview at LeWeb3.0 (last December in Paris). Marc is the founder of Meetic, the leading European dating site that no one has heard of here in the states.
Indeed, when you look at Compete’s stats, the site comes at 20K uniques in March 09 in the US. Meetic doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page in English. When you google “Marc Simoncini”, you’ll find almost no bio in English. Talk about low profile!
However, Meetic is healthy dating site that counts more than 42M profiles in Europe, have had a steady and dynamic growth of revenues since its launch (133M€ in 2008), is present in 15 European countries and a leader in many (all?) of them.
As a comparison, Match.com has 15M members worldwide (one third of Meetic…), and eHarmony claims 20M members… If you remember well, Meetic even bought out Match.com European operations.
A longer intro than expected, as I just wanted to quote Marc. When asked by Loic Le Meur about Meetic’s subscription business model vs free dating sites (i.e. PlentyOfFish), he simply answered:
If you want to dance and can choose between the most expensive night club in New York or a free one, which one will you choose?
Makes sense. You can play the devil’s advocate as much as you want, expensive clubs are always packed.
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