The Irish online dating site Maybefriends.com, which calls itself 'Ireland's No.1 Social Dating Site'
Webdev, the company behind Ireland’s largest online dating site Anotherfriend.com, has acquired another Irish dating site Maybefriends.com from Saongroup. The deals of the financial transaction have not been disclosed.
Gráinne Barry, managing director of Anotherfriend.com, said that the site currently has a 60pc market share of the Irish online dating market. She said that the acquisition of Maybefriends.com will enable Anotherfriend to provide a separate service offering to the Irish market.
Anotherfriend.com gets over 12.8 million page impressions and 290,000 unique visitors each month.
“We have known the team at MaybeFriends for many years and feel we share a like-minded approach in providing a quality customer experience with a broad community reach for consumers looking for a premium site experience,” said Barry.
Maybefriends.com came on to the online business dating scene in 2004. Saongroup purchased the site back in 2008.
Cashing in on online dating
With more and more people flocking to online dating sites these days, online dating would appear to be big business. The Consumers’ Association of Ireland (CAI) recently published a survey in its Consumer Choice magazine about internet dating and what people can expect to pay when joining such sites. While there is scope on some of these sites to scan for love interests for free, using more limited search mechanisms, the CAI found that dating websites in Ireland charge subscribers between €12 and €49.50 a month.
There are other sites such as Plentyoffish.com that offer a free service, instead using advertising to fund themselves.
Globally, in the migration to the mobile app space for online dating, Plentyoffish.com is emerging as a fast-moving player. Just today, Markus Frind, founder and CEO of the site, said that Plentyoffish.com surpassed 300m monthly visits to its free iPhone and Android apps in January 2012.
“With an increasingly tech-savvy public, the online dating world needs to step up to accommodate the advancement of the industry,” said Frind. The site receives over 7bn page views per month. Plentyoffish.com is available in seven language and apparently has over 39.5m registered users around the world.
