Problems For American Singles And JDate

Spark Networks owns the American Singles dating website (www.americansingles.com) and a host of others, including many religious and ethnic dating sites. Among the religious groups the company caters to are the Latter Day Saints, the Seventh Day Adventists and Catholics, and it also provides the well-known Jewish dating sites, such as www.jdate.com and www.jewishmingle.com. But that’s the tip of the iceberg. Spark owns sites with an ethnic emphasis too, like www.italiansinglesconnection.com and www.blacksingles.com, as well as other social sites for deaf singles, larger women, military singles, and so on.

Spark Networks clearly wants to play a large role in helping people make romantic connections, but at the moment things have gotten just a bit rough. The Jewish dating services appear to have been hit the hardest, with an almost 25% drop in profits by the end of the second quarter of 2009. It makes sense that with the economy having slowed way down, people might cut back on memberships to websites that help them find dates. But the reduction in subscribers doesn’t just come from American singles, despite how hard the United States has been hit by the downturn. With these sites also running in the UK, France and Israel, it seems that the income drop has come from several places.

It’s possible that the large influence of a downturn in revenue from the Jewish dating sites comes from too much dependence on them by the company. In fact, one of the responses of Spark Networks to the loss of profits in the last couple of quarters was the announcement that they were going to try to reduce their dependence on just one brand. Yet their CEO Adam Berger admits that while all the other networks showed profits, the “lion’s share” of the revenues still come from the Jewish sites. So the emphasis is still on revamping and “revitalizing” those, rather than pushing the other websites more than before.

Given that the Jewish singles dating sites and services play such a large role in the profitability of Spark Networks, it’s not surprising why so much attention is being paid to them. For example, for the summer of 2009, the rather clunky www.jdate.com got a redesign and face lift, providing many more features. If the Jewish sites can be brought back to profitability, this would bode well for other dating sites, like American Singles (www.americansingles.com), Christian Mingle (www.christianmingle.com) and so on, since they don’t appear able to shoulder the same financial load that the Jewish websites have carried for almost a decade.

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