BLOOMBERG -- July 25 -- Meetic, Europe's biggest publicly traded Internet dating service, fell to a record in Paris trading after first-half sales missed analysts' estimates. Meetic lost as much as 1.73 euros, or 11%, to 14.01 euros and traded at 14.55 euros as of 9:22 a.m., the lowest since the shares began trading in October 2005. Revenue rose 18% to 63m euros ($99m), missing the 67.1 million-euro average estimate of two analysts compiled by Bloomberg.

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Mark Brooks
Editor, Online Personals Watch
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USA: 212-444-1636, UK: 020 8133 1835

I found something interesting..... look at this:

Here is Meetic on Google Trends. Google Trends shows how many searches are made for a particular word. Google will not reveal the actual numbers of searches, but the results are relative to a particular point in time. I also suspect the graphs are logarithmic, so a popular time period may actually have had far more searches than it appears.

Nevertheless....Google says searches for 'Meetic' were down the 1st half of 2008. This correlates with the fiscal losses for the same time period. However, the company appears to be doing something in July to turn that around, as the graph shows a clear increase in searches.

Look at eHarmony's results. Notice that their recent searches are much higher than normal. I imagine business must be booming for them. Still, a concern for them should be Plenty of Fish...Here is a comparison.

Here are Match and Match.com's results. While July 2008 may look terrible, that is for a generic search term (Match). Match.com shows a slight uptick in the last month or 2. Here is IAC on Google Trends. The uptick doesn't look as strong as eHarmony (see this Comparison. I would be concerned about revenues for Q3 if I were an exec at Match right now. Particularly with THIS GRAPH, showing Plenty of Fish getting more searches now than Match.com (but not the word Match).

As an aside, I also see Match and eHarmony duking it out with television ads here in the USA (cable TV). Q3 of an election year is the worst time to place television ads. Politicians run up airtime costs, and dominate the commercial slots. Nevertheless, both companies do have nice looking ads.

Now look at the results for Online Dating (Internet Dating is identical). Online Dating as a search term had a boom in 2006, a falling down period in 2007, and a bottoming out period in 2008. Which is exactly what everyone said at the 2008 Miami Internet Dating Conference. That dating is 'bottoming out' and will only go up from here.

Another item....online dating as a search term is far more popular than social networking, as can be seen here.

Marc Lesnick
Conference Organizer
Internet Dating Conference