Zoosk is the new hip online global dating web site. With about 50 milion subscribers and sites in 12 languages worldwide, they are a proud competitor of match.com.
They didn’t do much really besides starting as a facebook app and capitalizing on that to generate 200,000 subscribers very early on in their history. It’s been growing since, again, thanks to a tight integration with Facebook. They also got lucky with hip hop artists T-Pain and Flo-rida deciding to write a song called Zoosk girl. The video went pretty viral even though it’s a terrible song that sounds more like Gwen Stefani than hip hop. It truly lacks attitude but it generated buzz and traffic. Zoosk is a little bit like the parasite that eat other people’s food.
The buzz around this start up is completely out of proportion, and so is its level of funding (it has raised another 30 million in VC capital recently). It was also selected by the Wall Street Journal as one of the “next big things”. What does that really mean anymore though? not so sure.
The start up did have a smart strategy to monetize early on as part of their business plan. It includes virtual coins that users can buy in addition to subscription costs. But see this is the ultimate problem; the word in the industry is that the only thing that they are truly investing in is Marketing. Are they investing in their matching algorithm to be more relevant for people or anything like this? No. Shayan Zadeh the founder was asked in an interview what the history of the company was, and his story was “originally, we wanted to create a marketing company”! This is a pretty unbelievably unethical company.
They are investing in offline ads pretty agressively with the millions that they raised, but when the trend for online dating space is to have more specific sites, smaller dating communities and more relevant and complex matching algorithms, Zoosk is simplyforgetting to pay any attention to that and to be relevant. They are more like a gimmick.
They take their marketing seriously and their monetization seriously, but when you operate in a space as personal as dating, neglecting to take that side serisously is a huge mistake. They just want to get as many subscribers and make as much money as possible. I don’t see them continuing to grow. They’re bound for a rude awakening and I anticipate this to happen soon.
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