Spark Network Continues Dip, But Commits To User Growth By Q4

Spark Networks has continued its downward spiral in 2015, despite assuring that its “walk, crawl and run” strategy is still on course.

The company recently released its financial report for the second quarter of 2015.

Revenue in Q2 2015 was $12.3m, a 22% decrease compared to the year before and a 9% decrease from Q1 – where Spark made $13.5m.

The public company, which owns brands like JDate and Christian Mingle, has tried to lower marketing expenses to help, with direct marketing in Q2 down 33% from last year to $5.3m.

However despite this, adjusted EBITDA in the second quarter was $621,000 compared to $1.1m last year, and $1.8m in the previous quarter.

Net loss in Q2 was $95,000 compared to $1.1m a the year ago, and $723,000 in the previous quarter.

In addition these financial problems, the company’s total subscriber rates are falling.

The Jewish Network now has 65,087 subscribers, a 17.5% decrease from the year before, where they had 78,856, and a 6.5% decrease from the previous quarter.

The Christian segment fell even further compared to last year, falling a huge 30.3% to 126,214, but a slightly smaller 3.6% decrease from the previous quarter.

In total, Spark Network’s average total paying subscribers fell 25.9% from 2014, and 4.5% from the previous quarter, to 203,895.

However despite this, Spark Networks says the “company turnaround remains on track”, and has reiterated its commitment to subscriber growth in Q4.

CEO Michael Egan said: “We are pleased to have made considerable progress toward transforming our business during the second quarter, and remain on track to return to sequential subscriber growth across both JDate and ChristianMingle by Q4.

“As a result of the hard work of our teams, by the end of the quarter we began to see real improvements in a number of our underlying subscriber acquisition and retention metrics.

“These improvements have continued into early Q3 with July being a very solid month for us. In July, our Jewish Network subscriber numbers were up for the first time in a year and our Christian Network subscriber numbers were flat against the end of Q2.”

The CEO, who replaced Greg Liberman last year, also said its team was performing a redesign of JDate and ChristianMingle, which would go live later this year.

He also said the marketing team had seen 10% efficiency gains with its ChristianMingle television marketing spend.

In addition to this, he said in July, JDate saw more initial registrations than any month since the first quarter of 2014.

Egan said: ”It is important to note that this is just the start. As we roll out new and refreshed products, and continue to enhance our operational capabilities, we expect to drive continued improvements in customer growth and retention.

“While we still have work in front of us, we are encouraged that our efforts are beginning to bear fruit and result in real improvements in the business. Our crawl, walk, run strategy remains squarely on track and we look forward to running in Q4.”

Read the full results here.