Loïc Le Meur blog

An advertising campaign for ublog in French

It is in French but quite easy to understand ;=)



More info in French here















on-line:


Fast-food ou Bimbos

Proche Orient ou Queen

Elegance masculine ou Stress du travail

Mode ou Ecosse

Kartoo, a search engine that shows you results on a map

We had an interesting isight talk yesterday with Britt about Xpertweb, I will post more about it when I can.

Britt also showed me the search engine Kartoo. A very nice tool and toy to play with as it shows the results and lets you visualize the links on a map of links. Pretty cool.

Vive Technorati !

Thank you Dave, for making available to the French speaking bloggers your tool and the top 100 French sites !

Ublog.com is still small with 3300 weblogs but we grow at 40% a month and prepare european roll-out so hopefully we will fix that soon ;=)

The top 100 of French speaking blogs

The top 100 of Ublog weblogs

Here is what Daves says:

I got a ping last night from some folks at U-blog, one of the leading French weblog companies, asking for a friendlier interface for all the blogging frogs out there. Best of all, they sent over all the internationalized HTML I needed to convert the pages for them. So, now you can see the French homepage with top 100 french language weblogs (seems like the French aren't using the high-priority indexing pinger much, so only a few major weblog services are currently represented. I'm sure that that will change over time. Note to weblog developers: There's an XML-RPC interface and instructions on how to use it available as well. To say thanks to the u-blog folks, I put up a special u-blog top 100 just for them. Kudos guys - working code is always the easiest way to my heart. Thanks Loic, for pulling it all together.... [Sifry's Alerts]

Vive Technorati !

Power of blogs to get one's voice heard: #1 on 8 million pages

I know I am an egocentric but I was very surprised to discover that my pages were #1 on 8 million pages if you google for "Create a company".


These pages have been on-line for about two months and have a good page rank now. Let's see if Google continues to rank pages this way (if they stop they would become Altavista ;=)



It is going to be harder and harder to get this type of result as the number of bloggers gets higher, but right now it is quite easy to have a high ranking on one subject.


Now I feel some pressure to continue publishing in my "Create a Company category !

Isight works great, thank you Apple for the phone savings

I just had an hour conversation with Joi, it worked just perfect. I also tried between Europe and the USA. Looks like I am going to save a lot on phone, thank you Apple. Probably just this is a good reason to switch as I do not know any PC equivalent with that quality

Identity and social software

Marc seems to have put his network on the below new tool, while other friends suggest that I connect to them through Linkedin like TJ

I myself sent a spam plaxo to my network to update my address book (that was before I had my new Mac, no Plaxo anymore). Actually 30% of my network started to use Plaxo too, thanks to my email.

They call that viral marketing and I am starting to hate it. Why would I share with ten tools my address book and my friends so that they make money out of it, start getting the network of my friends and of my friends of a friend. And keep sending tens of my emails to my friends to invite them to join, in turn they send my other invitations from other networks and so on.

I had very long and interesting discussions with Doc, Eric, Dave, Joi and Marc about FOAF and they all convinced that companies trying to make business on sharing your idea are quite wrong, for many reasons:

1. you OWN your identity

American Express, Avis, Air France and the like think one of their great value is their customer databases and what they know about you. OK it has some value but it is never up-to-date. For example I started flying on United Airlines and Air France or American Express do not know why. I know why and I could easily update a centralised software of file like FOAFif I want to share it. .

2. There are too many places to put your identity

It is a nightmare having to fill-in all these questionnaires, dozens of loyalty programs. Now the new buzz about social-networking want us to subscribe to all of them and give away on a golden plate our address book. No way.

3. The place where I would put my identity should belong to me

The right solution is clearly open source I think. I do not want to share my identity with all these tools. But I would agree to put it in a public place for the public information that I want to share with everybody (including the type of car I like to rent for example so that I do not have to say that each time to rental companies), and in a private place what I want to share say with my friends only. FOAF seems to willing to do that, I have not checked it enough to say what I think of it.

4. I decide from this place with whom I want to share that identity. They can then use it.

Friends, unknown people and marketing companies will come and check that file. This way a travel site can come sync with my identity and discover that I want to travel to Asia next week, and that I am ready to listen to offers from any company (or from my preferred list of companies) during a limited period of time, the time of my choice.

Wouldn't that be really cool ? You go to YOUR identity file (easily, on your blog), update it, say what you want to give to your friends or to travel companies etc.

We will soon add FOAF to Ublog. I like it.

I will still give a try to the social networking sites, to understand them better.

Here's Jason Calacanis' report on Huminity getting funding....

Another social software site raises money: Huminity raises $2-4m. Anyone know these folks? Huminity's product combines instant messaging and chat technologies enabling users to share their personal contact systems.

Sources inform "Globes" that Israeli start-up Huminity has raised $2-4 million, at a company value of $10 million, after money, in its first financing round. Sources close to the company said a leading Israeli venture capital fund, a US fund, and the CEO of one of the world's largest Internet companies participated in the round, which is close to completion. Huminity cofounders Oren Rossen and Nir Ben-Halevy declined to disclose details about the round. [The Social Software Weblog]

Hey Jason,

Huminity is actually pretty cool. They have this visualization of the social network feature - which is fluid and seems to work. But that's because it's a desktop app - not to say that lessens the feature any, but it does lessen the scope and distance you can travel with your social net.

I guess that brings up the issue - do these social networks change - if they're not browser based? I've heard of people having 'Friendster' or 'Tribe' parties - where everyone clusters in the kitchen or living room, playing with each others settings, friends lists and postings. But you can't do that, if your social net is tied to a desktop - on your machine at home.

[Marc's Voice]

The Ublog team

The Ublog team: Victor, Jean-Yves, me, Pantxika, Olivier and Stéphane in Paris today.

Wearable computer glasses that allow you to Google and Blog in real time without keyboard

In his book smartmobs, Howard Rheingold describes works around wearable computers and people living like cyborgs. They wear helmets with computers inside and see the reality with virtual information live in their screen. This screen is permanently in front of us.



Not quite ready to be released yet but reading Howard's book has made me dream about it tonight.



Imagine you have glasses, light enough to be unnoticed, with computer information sent on them (like in the planes, head mount displays). You meet somebody and during the conversation the glasses automatically google that person, show his blog. You have all the information and can talk immediately about it to the person.



Imagine you see a painting in a museum and immediately all the information appears on that painting. Thanks to Technorati enabled glasses, you can see what the world has to say about the painting, you can directly access the links on the blogs and sites that talk about it. With all the history of the painting.



Think about going to another country. Put your glasses and you will get directions, information on the place you are as the glasses also carry a small gps receiver.



That was my all dream. Is it a dream really ? Maybe a nightmare. I have talked about it to my wife at breakfast and Geraldine said it would clearly be a nightmare as our brains will get used not to think anymore but just gather and read information.



I do not agree. Since I started blogging I have never "processed" that quantity of information in my life, reading about 100 RSS feeds of blogs everyday, talking to people in ichat and irc, answering emails (which I dislike more and more since I started blogging). I actually think blogging makes your brain more active, not more passive.



The computer glasses is for me an extraordinary future product, and also very frightening as it will add live transparence to anything you say and do. Think about exaggerating a bit when you talk to someone (which we all never do, right ?). His glasses will google on what you said with voice recognition and show the most appropriate information about it, so he will know as well if you are likely to tell the truth or not.



I should say my dream actually finished in a bad way. Let's share that too even if it was quite hard for me. I lost my father 3 years ago from a cancer. And the computer was so advanced that it had a virtual copy, a bot, of my father that I could talk to. This bot had learnt during his life how my father usually reacted and thought through his blogging (in my dream blogging has existed forever and everybody blogs). I could talk to my virtual father when I wanted, he would reply and that was great. I could see him when I wanted.



The nightmare started only when I woke up and I understood I could not talk to him anymore.



Am I sick or getting crazy ?

Now journalists copy paste text from bloggers !

Via Matt Welch and Via JLR

A Plagiarizing Story That Will Make You Dizzy: Jack Shafer tells the tale, which involves Hollywood mob goon Anthony Pellicano, Schwarzengroper scoopmeister John Connolly, Luke Ford, New York Times L.A. correspondent Bernard Weinraub, Cathy Seipp, and even, if tangentially (or hyperlinkerly), my darling wife.

I blame Mickey Kaus. Who, by the way, has a must-read extended riff on the 2004 election metaphor of Pedro Martinez (I kid you not), and another on … Bernard Weinraub.

 | 

Good stats on the weblogs growth by Dave

8000 to 9000 new weblogs a day ! keep up the pressure, Dave good luck !

These past weeks have been a pretty busy one for me and the growing Technorati team. Before I get too far in this post, I've got a mea culpa - Technorati hasn't been very responsive lately. Fact is, we've been getting a lot of attention and new searches, and the blogosphere seems to be growing at a pretty steep rate as well. This double whammy has caused our current infrastructure to buckle, and has caused some service outages. I'm sorry. Here's what we're doing to fix it: I've got a new, much more scalable infrastructure designed and currently being built. I'm committed to having it up and running by the end of the month, just in time for Technorati's first anniversary. This will be the third generation of our infrastructure, each designed to be more scalable and flexible than the last. After stability, the next priority is response time - we're gunning for a response time of under 1 second. Allow me to give you some growth statistics: One year ago, when I started Technorati on a single server in my basement, we were adding between 2,000-3,000 new weblogs each day, not counting the people who were updating sites we were already tracking. In March of this year, when we switched over to a 5 server cluster, we were keeping up with about 4,000-5,000 new weblogs each day. Right now, we're adding 8,000-9,000 new weblogs every day, not counting the 1.2 Million weblogs we already are tracking. That means that... [Technorati: Sifry's Alerts]

Good stats on the weblogs growth by Dave

Meeting of the Minds

Thanks for the picture, Marc ! Funnily enough there is a "Belgium" writting on the umbrella did you modify the picture ;=) ?

Left to Right:

Me, DaveSifry, Loïc Le Meur, KevinMarks, EricSigler.

A good time was had by all.

[Marc's Voice]

Meeting of the Minds

Blogging: static or moving forward

Good conference it seems, we should organize one in France too.

BlogTalk 2.0 taking off. I have just received the annoucement that BlogTalk 2.0 is taking off. Vienna... here we come! [Paolo Valdemarin: Paolo's Weblog]

I know that Paolo and Matt had a great time at last years BlogTalk and I know that I had a great time in Vienna in Sept. I wonder if the BlogTalk folks want to hear about personal publishing that goes BEYOND just blogging (or shall I say amatuer journalism.)

There are so many wonderful, exciting things going on in the world of identity, calendar events, recipes and reviews - I hope that these "futuristic" topics make it onto the 'agenda'.

I guess the only question is - is the term blogging going to remain static or move forward?

[Marc's Voice]

Blogging: static or moving forward

Back in Europe

Totally jetlagged, blogging in GPRS from the airport in Paris, chatting already with some friends I have met in SF. Looks like my online life is really addictive, I should look further into the wearable computers Howard is talking about in his book, I may try becoming a cyborg during a week (in his book Howard talks about experiments of people living with a wearable PC all the time and seeing reality through a PC helmet that adds on information to everything real). I loved the idea but not the helmet. Hope the Tom Cruise like sunglasses with a GPRS PC inside (euh I meant a GPRS mac inside) will arrive soon. Or maybe I need an isight integrated into my body as a third eye ;=)

By the way I have done daily isight sessions with my wife from SF to Brussels and it worked incredible, I had this booklet in the hotel talking about the phone surcharges while I was talking and seeing my wife for free, that is cool.

IBM has announced it will have 80% of its team using voip soon, that is going to cut down a lot of traffic and cash from Telcos.

Hopefully wifi will be everywhere soon so that I do not get these 500 euros GPRS monthly bills anymore.

Howard Rheingold considers the weblogs revolution as important as the print revolution

Thank you, Howard, for having received me yesterday in your inspiring office close to Sausalito.

Usually when I find a book great I try to meet the author, this time I met you before I read your book and with such an inspiring discussion I cannot wait to read it.

Here are some of the topics we discussed, poorly writen as I was more focused on what we were talking than taking notes.

The blogging revolution is as important as the print revolution. Suddenly everybody has a voice and blogging enables litterate people to express themselves in written language, publish their thoughts. Even the simplest ones are important, Howard insisted on the 15 years old yound people, as for them blogging is already very natural. Blogging turns them away from TV and from being passive in front of the media, passive listeners, viewers or readers.

They become the medium themselves.

"it is what happens with my book, Smart Mobs, it is very addictive. I do not write for unkown readers anymore, they are here, they interact with me and even more important, they continue writing about Smart Mobs in a a totally new way, on our blog Smart Mobs. We write it together."

"they are right there with me. It is so addictive."

Their written thoughts stay, are accessible and indexed by search engines, enables them to build virtual communities.

"the users create the medium. Innovation becomes orders of magnitude greater".

More important it enables collective actions to happen in a way they could not happen before.

We talked briefly about Howard Dean's campaign, continuing a discussion I had with Doc Searls in the morning (I will blog it soon too).

Here is my understanding of the story, please forgive me for not understanding very well recent US politics, I will work on it. Please correct me if anything is wrong.

Howard Dean heads a very small State in the United States and got enormous popularity from his blog. He has been the very first in the US politics history to become a candidate in a totally new way. The blogging way. Thanks to his blog, he raised today $35 million from hundreds of thousands of people with an average donation of $80. This has never been seen before. Thanks to Meet Up, more than 140 000 meetings to support his campaign have been organized. Again totally unseen before, nothing to do with the vip dinners at x1000$ a seat usually organized to support campaigns. Thousands of people help him and daily comment his campaign on his blog.

Howard says "TV became the #1 politics medium in the 60s with Kennedy. If Howard Dean wins this election, the web will become the #1 medium for politics"

Howard is making great efforts to understand the future and explain it. "I want to see the user revolution not die" and continue their "next social revolution".

I feel I really should introduce blogging to some european politic leaders as an emergency. I will work on it as soon as I return.

Howard, thank you so much for helping us understand our future. Thank you for your time and I will help you as much as I can to get your thoughts understood in Europe and people joining the "next social revolution".

NB. Some people in Europe already asked me if it was true Howard had great painted shoes. I guarantee they are incredible and will probably start painting mine soon too ;=)

NB2. About phones that have digital cameras. Howard says "how come phone builders released these phones without a button that blogs the pictures immediately ? It is like building a standard camera without films ! So f...g simple !" I am sure they will listen to you, Howard.

Howard Rheingold considers the weblogs revolution as important as the print revolution

Great bloggers dinner in San Francisco and Joi is upside down

Thanks wiki, Joi and Jacob for letting us get together to this great bloggers' dinner. Blog the next one and I will catch again the first plane from Europe just to see Joi upside down again on Jay pictures.

Had a fun dinner and drinks list night. Thanks for organizing everything Jacob. Jay has some pictures posted.

[Joi Ito's Web]

Macintosh shortcuts (just for me to remember where it is)

Still learning my Mac...

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=75459

Macintosh shortcuts (just for me to remember where it is)

Dealing with thousands of pictures in iphoto

My "switching" has been very well, now my 8 years son and my wife also have macs and they love them.

The only issue we have is with our 6000 digital pictures. The mac gets really slow when iphoto loads them (even the 1.8GHZ G5 I just got woah). So the solution is probably to create different photo galleries (I do not know the iphoto word in english, the French is "phototheque") and save them on cds or dvds but it is not convenient as you do not have all your photos nearby.

Apple will probably improve that soon. Any thoughts of you having the same problems with large photo galleries ? Thanks

Off to San Francisco Nov 11-14

I will be in San Francisco Nov 11-14, if you are interested in getting together please let me know. I will join Joi's dinner below (with jetlag too...).

I'm in San Francisco from November 11 for 48 hours. I'm free for dinner on the 11th. Sign up on the wiki page if you're interested in getting together. I'm arriving on that day so I may be a bit tired, but I'd be happy to meet up with everyone.

Jacob Levy has agreed to help organize it. Thanks Jacob.

[Joi Ito's Web]

Off to San Francisco Nov 11-14

Now my notes go on-line even before I see them !

Heiko Hebig has been faster than me to find my notes on Liza's notebook that I borrowed when we saw Joi Ito in Japan. Now do I really need to post this interview ? Just check my handwriting...

Loic Le Meur did an interview with Joi Ito. The notes taken during the interview contain some key facts (joi.ito.com: 25,000 page views, 10,000 sessions, etc.) and some nice quotes. My favorite:

My blog is my intelligent conversation 24 h a day.

[Heiko Hebig]

your billion dollar idea

That is actually excellent, thanks for pointing me to that, TJ. You see, the idea has such low value that now everybody post their billion $ ideas on blogs...

Tim Draper has requested pitches for his next investments at Always On Network. Dozens of entrepreneurs have commented on and presented their ideas. This is the best collection of new ideas I have seen for a while. Don’t miss!

My thanks for the link goes to Patrick, who hopefully starts blogging soon. :-)

Posted by TJ at 09:18 AM

---

Comments: (post your comment)

[TJ's Weblog "Technology, Venture Capital and Entrepreneurship"]

My last Jet Ski ride of the season

Last week-end I had in Spain my last Jet Ski ride. I'd rather have kite-surfed but there was no wind. This sea-doo is incredible and not called "supercharged" for nothing, it has close to 200 HP and takes you at 55 knots or 100 km/h !

It can also take you out of the water in monoski in less time than required to say it. Good stuff and the kids love it of course (picture from last summer as you can imagine...)

Too bad it is getting cold, see you next year !

Started a weblog in French as well...

I have received some requests for a weblog in French, so I launched one. I guess this english one will be much more updated, though.

French journalists detained

There are many things I really like about the US, and I would actually like to live there for some time, but I really do not understand this anti-French feeling being still alive in the US.

I was recently taking to Jack Hidary, a GLT friend of mine, who told me that he ordered mineral water in a restaurant in the US. They brang Evian water and Jack does not like it for its taste, not because it is French. Jack said "can I please have another brand". The waiter answered "of course sorry, we will take all the French products out of our menu, we have just not had the time to do it" ! Just do not trash everything French because our President was against the war in Irak...

via BoingBoing: Six French reporters heading to LA for E3 were detained, arrested, strip-searched and deported, for no apparent reason at all, according to Reporters Without Borders.

Why? Because they were French, presumably, and every good Ame... [Zenarchery.com]

French journalists detained

Microsoft Blogger Fired

I know this is already an old news (3 days old is forever in blogging times) but this is really going to grow. It is so easy to publish content and ideas through blogs that I see more and more of those happening.

Hard times for Bloggers Like Us: MicrosoftWatch reports that a temp worker, Michael Hanscom, has become the first Microsoft employee to lose his job over his blog. But, as with all these cases, it gets murkier the more you look at it. Hanscom doesn't believe it was the act of blogging, per se, that led to his firing but for taking a photo inside the company, and possibly revealing information in his blog about his work. The irony: Microsoft is busy encouraging its own employees, as well as others working with its products to blog. Here's a list of them.

[loose wire]

What do you think ?

Microsoft Blogger Fired

News: You've Been Bluejacked

If you start receiving weird messages on your Bluetooth-enabled phone (or, I guess, a PDA) from strangers, you've probably been Bluejacked. For more, read here. Nice. Although of course it's open to abuse so expect the vulnerability to be exploited by spammers, hackers and the marketing fraternity.

[loose wire]

Who is going to write your phone's firewall ?

News: You've Been Bluejacked

Budget Rent-a-car nightmare

I love these comments appearing about brands on weblogs. There should be a web service devoted to products and rate them, delivering RSS feeds, so that I can subscribe to what people think about a brand.

For example, I bought the latest C3 Pluriel from Citroën (not for Brussels, for Spain !) that looked as a great innovative idea. Unfortunately it has been the third time I take it back to Citroen for various problems and I am already considering selling it.

Flemming had a nightmare experience with Budget Rent-a-car. I'm doing my part to help spread the word, so that prospective car renters may benefit from what he learned.

Budget gets an average of 3 stars on Epinions - but mostly from the American side, I reckon; Avis ranks first.
[Seb's Open Research]

We should be able to easily find product information given from bloggers.

Budget Rent-a-car nightmare

Photoblog Aggregator

Photoblog Aggregator.

Anyone interested in photoblogs and their social impact should check out BlueHereNow daily. They report on picturephoning news and are agreggating images from photoblogs across the world. It's where you’ll see political news, celebrities, international news, sports and other major events wirelessly reported for the first time.

As more people are able to capture photos and send text, images and sounds through the air it is inevitable that all major cultural events will be captured by hundreds if not thousands of accidental bystanders, citizen reporters.

[Smart Mobs] [Via Marc's Voice]

Victor and me in Barcelona

Victor and I were in Barcelona last Saturday to bridge the European Blogosphere. Virctor and Fernando have launched Blogalia, designed for their friends only, about to launch Bloxus, for everybody, and the Spanish equivalent to Blogdex and Technorati, Blogometro.

Print publishers squack as online metrics infect their ad sales

via [Blogads -- the ad engine for opinion makers.]

Ad Age reports on the higher standards being set by advertisers and the indignant response of publishers. "We are in business, in part, to serve the media buyers," said Thomas O. Ryder, chairman-CEO of Reader's Digest Association and newly elected chairman of Magazine Publishers of America. "But there is a point at which this becomes silly and counterproductive, and we are rapidly approaching...

Print publishers squack as online metrics infect their ad sales

Visualize blogspace.

DiceLaRed ("The Network Says") helps its customers see and understand.

For example, here is a picture of a real time graph, shown in the browser, that shows Spain's political parties by share of the current news cycle. In real time. Clicking on a wedge lets you dive into the news stream.

The flow of news and blogs is beyond understanding. The headlines alone are overwhelming.

So we need machines to helps us make sense of the flow.

DiceLaRed creatively blends news crawling + lexical analysis + data mining + data visualization + customization + alerting.

Apply this to your customers' weblogs, your industry magazines, and local newspapers for an environmental scan.

Apply this to job board postings. Understand labor market demand across the usual dimensions. Then stretch to discover new buzzwords and "terms of art". Can you say competitive analysis? How about strategic recruiting?

Apply this to medical discussion boards. Look for spikes in conversation about symptoms to detect outbreaks and public health problems. Look for swings in interest to retarget investment in health education and social programs.

Apply this to your citizenry, to understand what political issues are emerging in importance, and with whom, in real time.

We are much closer to a dashboard that helps us understand and respond, sooner and with more precision. Thank goodness. "akasig"

[a klog apart]

Excellent post. I agree, this is going to help us understand in real time the trends the world is going in all aspects. This is good because we can also react to it in real time.

Visualize blogspace.

Using the metaweblog API on ublog

Still has some bugs but JY has worked hard to allow us post on ublog with tools such as Kung-log and Net News Wire. Still has some bugs, but it is so cool.

What is the use of Kung-Log and NetNewsWire ? Kung-log allows you to post entries much faster, even off-line, and with a much better page layout, as well as picture and file upload (mp3 for example).

Net Newswire is an RSS News reader, the great thing with posting directly from there is that it automatically quotes the person and what he says in paragraph and in no time. Saves a lot of efforts.

I really advise those of you not using them yet to give them a try. We will give ublog users the parameters soon, when I have finished the beta testing ;=)

the dating industry - a closer look

TJ has a very good entry about the online dating industry.

Considering the enormous valuation for Friendster, I decided to take a closer look on the online dating industry. It grew to a rather long entry, but you will like it. And here we go.

The market

Let’s start with some projections how this market should develop.

According to comScore Media Metrix, more than 45 million Americans visited online dating sites in May 2003, up from about 35 million in December 2002. The Online Publishers Association projected that spending on Internet dating sites this year would be $100 million or more per quarter, compared to less than $10 million a quarter at the beginning of 2001. The New York Times is forecasting a $400 million market for online personals in 2004.

Online dating has become the major driver in content business. Users could be convinced that services are worth paying for. Even this older but quite interesting study from 2001 concludes that paid subscriptions will become more and more popular.

Although an estimated 40 million people in the US access online personals sites each month, only a fraction of those pay for personals content. Most dating sites offer both free and paid services.
The OPA/comScore Networks report claims that individuals who pay for personals content are likely to spend both more time and more money online. Whereas the average Internet user spent 6,143 minutes online and $83 in e-commerce purchases during the first quarter of 2003, the average personals content purchaser racked up 13,895 minutes and $238.72 online.

In Europe, Jupiter reckons revenues will double this year to €40m and will reach €117m by 2007. "It's the biggest category of paid content online and will be for the foreseeable future," says Jupiter associate analyst Nate Elliott. "Word of mouth has a lot to do with it. People are talking to friends who have had success using online dating - they see it mentioned on TV. It is entering the mainstream."

The players

Dating has become such a good story in any VC chat that an extraordinary amount of sites have sprung up. A simple Google search delivers dozens of good and not so good sites.

The biggest and the most known in US is Match.com. Match.com, owned by Barry Diller's InterActiveCorp, claims to have 9m advertisements posted on its site and currently 857,000 people or 4.76% of its 18 million members paying monthly fees. Users regularly pay $24.95 a month. Match.com had 2002 revenues at $125.2 million, a 154 percent hike over the previous year. Profits in 2002 reached $36.1 million, up from $2.7 million the previous year. Second quarter 2003 revenues have been $48 million.

Yahoo doesn't give membership or revenue figures, but personals are a key component of the company's drive to shift its revenue stream away from advertising and toward fee-based services.

Matchnet a dating conglomerate with sites all over the world had 14,788,008 users in June 2003, up from 7,849,710 a year earlier. Revenue for Q2/ 2003 was $8,7 million. My forecast for the year 2003 is at $40 mio. As this company is the only publicly listed, it has an "official" market cap of 42.45 Mio. EUR as of today.

PlanetOut another provider has figures about advertisements: "We're generating about 4 million page views a month. And, on those pages, we're serving targeted ads. We have advertising geared to the online dating demographic."

Meetic a French company is active in France, Italy, Spain, Germany, Great-Britain and Belgium and has already "seduced" 1.5 million web users. This let’s the dating site occupy the first place on the European market. What is most surprising is the fact that Meetic started very late in Q1/2002 after the boom times, but has been exactly in the right time for growth in memberships in Europe. Marc Simoncini, the former founder of i(france), which was later sold to Vivendi Universal for 192 million Euros, launched the concept, which scores well in usability and conversion of contact media.

Valuations

Revenues for all these companies usually derive from advertising in the first stage and membership fees in a later stage. Costs are mainly marketing (up to 50%) - in order to grab the market share - as well as HR & IT.

In order to get some data for the math, I tried to make some rough calculations. InterActiveCorp aquired udate.com in 2002. Udate had revenues for the nine months ending on 30 September of 2002 of $29.2 million. Assuming full revenues in 2002 of $45 mio. and a approximate payment of roughly $100 user/year, Udate had around 500.000 paying subscribers at this time (leaving out any advertisement revenue). InterActiveCorp paid around $150 mio. in stock. If you do the math it divides to $300 per paying user. Taking other revenue channels into account, $225 per paying subscriber are a value we can work with.

Applying this to Matchnet, which conversion and amount of paying customers is not published, they should have around 400.000 paying subscribers or 2.7% of all users. This should value them at 90 mio. So they might be a very cheap buy, considering their roughly $52 mio market cap actually (see above).

This calculation of the $225 per user holds more or less true with Match.com, having 857.000 paying subscribers and $125.2 mio in revenues (which include all revenue channels incl. ads.)

Having done this research we can think about Friendster's monstrous $54 mio. market cap. Friendster actually boasts around 1.8 million users, all free as far as I know. But it had achieved this through viral marketing in less than 6 months, nearly without a budget. Considering the 100% growth in members per year of classic dating sites, Friendster might be able to reach 200% or more on a yearly basis. All this with little expense in marketing, as any value added using Friendster only arrives with invited connections of each user. This is a major competitive advantage to all the classic sites, which invest more than 50% of their revenue into marketing. Assuming Friendster will reach 5 million members next year and 15 million by the end of 2005 while having a conversion of 4% of paying customers, it will have yearly revenue out of subscriptions of $60 mio. (with 600.000 paying users). Considering the valuation figure used above ($225,- per paying customer), Friendster might be worth $135 million. But consider as well, Friendster might reach this with a much better margin. If the Friendster model works, which nobody really knows, it has also has the potential to grow much faster and produce much better conversions as the classical dating communities.

After all and considering a minimum of 3 years timeframe the very high valuation, which all of us surprised might be worth it. But as it is with all the hockey stick business plans, they are damn risky.

Outlook

Another fact which is interesting: A rule of thumb says 17.4% of all trial customers for most ecommerce sites convert into paying subscribers. Even without growth in memberships Matchnet might soon have the joy to multiply revenue by 9, match.com by 3.5 times, which makes a nice fortune for them and their shareholders. Friendster might have it even easier to reach such a conversion.

Posted by TJ at 10:34 PM

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Comments: (post your comment)

Mario @ November 2, 2003 08:58 AM:

facts plus quality equals your research. Very well done!

Heiko Hebig @ November 2, 2003 08:13 PM:

Some German players listed here:

http://www.hebig.com/archives/001202.shtml

[outrageous self-link, but it adds some local flavor]

[TJ's Weblog "Technology, Venture Capital and Entrepreneurship"]

the dating industry - a closer look