SMB: Zoosk online dating with difference

Deborah L. Cohen

Zoosk, online dating with difference

With a growing base of 40 million, this site offers services for the dominating young population on social media

Online dating

Thursday, December 24, 2009

CHICAGO, US: The online dating scene has become pretty crowded in recent years, with sites like eHarmony, Match, Jdate, Gaydate, Maturesinglesonly and countless others catering to everything from users' religious preferences and sexual orientation to their specific hobbies and activities.

That didn't deter entrepreneur Shayan Zadeh, who sought to combine the forces of online dating and social media platforms like Facebook, when he launched Zoosk two years ago.

"We're able to reach out to an audience that would never sign up for an online dating site like Match.com," said Zadeh, Zoosk's 30-year-old co-founder and CEO. "We try to take out a lot of the hassle, a lot of the work that you'd have to put into the process."

Zoosk charges no fee for basic membership and requires a simple profile and email verification process to get started; soon after it begins sorting out eligible singles based on preliminary details a new user has provided such as age, educational background and geography.

Users join by adding the Zoosk application on Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Hi5, and Friendster, or by signing up on the company's mobile application or at Zoosk.com. Of Zoosk's growing user base of 40 million, most - about 65 per cent - are under 30. Only 11 per cent are over the age of 40.

Traditional online dating sites, by contrast, tend to skew more toward older, seasoned singles with a no-nonsense approach. These folks are typically on a mission: they want to get married, and they often don't want to waste any time. The end game is readily apparent on the Jewish singles site Jdate; its home page is laden with testimonial pictures of happy couples and the dates of their weddings.

Zoosk's younger users aren't quite ready for that kind of self-inflicted pressure. Often they want nothing more than to widen their opportunities for casual dating, said the Iranian-born Zadeh.

"We try to make it a delightful experience. We try to get your friends involved," he said. "If it turns into marriage, great, but if it doesn't, it's not a failure."

Zadeh and his business partner, Alex Mehr, had originally planned on building a market research company that would glean data from social networking sites. Before long, they had identified the need for a dating service that would resonate with the hordes of twenty- and thirty-something's who dominate these virtual communities.

"We found that consumers got bored very quickly answering business questions," he said. To spice things up, they started asking users to vote anonymously for friends they thought ranked as top eligible singles. Soon they had created city-specific lists and were on the path to creating a new model for online dating.

Dating Rivals

Zoosk is attempting to crack a crowded and mature industry that has been developing since the 1990s and includes several entrenched rivals. According to a July report from the investment firm Piper Jaffray, U.S. spending on online dating had reached $1.2 billion in 2008 and is on track to hit $1.7 billion by 2013.

The major difference between Zoosk and its competitors is its ability to reach broader audiences, including non-members, over a variety of social-media platforms, Zadeh explained. "If one of your friends is using Zoosk, and they do something on the site that they want to tell their friends about, it shows up on your (Facebook) news feed."

Venture capitalists such as Deepak Kamra, a general partner with Canaan Partners, are betting that younger singles will continue to use viral methods such as these to build scale and awareness for Zoosk's network.

"It has turned out to be a much more economical and very fast-growing form of customer acquisition," said Kamra, whose firm was one of several that recently boosted Zoosk's financing by $30 million to a total of $40.5 million.

To make money, Zoosk sells users premium memberships that offer additional services such as unlimited messaging and the ability to see who has viewed their profile. Those upgrades begin at $24.95 a month and go down incrementally when users purchase multi-month subscriptions. In addition, the website recently began selling users virtual currency known as Zoosk coins (they start at 95 for $10), which can be used to purchase virtual gifts.

All of this may seem otherworldly to those of us who found our mates in the brick-and-mortar dating world, but Zoosk is already tracking revenues at an annual run rate of about $30 million, according to Kamra, who sits on Zoosk's board and has made a business of backing online dating sites. He was one of the early investors in Match.com and has also bought into an Indian matrimonial service.

"This is a company that has come out of nowhere," he said. "We feel it is really changing the space."

©Reuters

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ferfiferg said on 7/22/2010 8:32:12 AM:
zoosk sucks! they want you to pay $ to do basic things as simple as sending an e mail! they wont even let me view the people who are trying to contact me! so unless you willing to pay out of the ass to do simple things i suggest you take your e mail addrss and screen name and go somewhere else

to ferfiferg

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