Vivendi chairman turns matchmaker
By Frank Ahrens
Washington Post
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Would he use his clout as head of Vivendi Universal Entertainment to pry Universal's film and music assets from the troubled French media giant and run them himself?
"That's just dumb," he said in a recent interview.
How about a rumored marriage of Universal studios and DreamWorks SKG, Steven Spielberg's studio? That earned nothing more than a simple "no."
While the industry press has treated Diller the way Us Weekly treats Justin Timberlake, the real news has gone largely unnoticed: Diller himself is becoming America's leading matchmaker, thanks to his growing Match.com online dating service.
"If not us, then I'd like to know who is," he said.
Though Diller's most-talked-about position is as chairman of Vivendi Universal Entertainment, which oversees the company's film and music properties, his day job is chief executive of a separate company called USA Interactive. The two companies own minority stakes in each other.
Match.com, one of the top online dating services, is among the many subsidiaries of USA Interactive, or USAi, which also includes the Home Shopping Network, Ticketmaster and the Expedia online travel service. For $24.95 per month, hopeful romantics can post their photographs, vital statistics and desires on Match.com's Web site, then exchange e-mails with potential paramours. (The costs drop if users sign up for more than one month.)
Sites such as Match.com are divided into subscribers (who pay the fee to post their data and have e-mail conversations with potential dates) and members (who register and cruise the offerings free of charge. Members must become paying subscribers to respond to e-mails. Match.com says it has more than 700,000 subscribers and 11 million members.
In addition to operating its own site, Match.com provides the paid dating services used by Microsoft's MSN Internet service; BET Interactive, the online unit of Viacom's BET Inc. television subsidiary; and the relationship channels on Excite Network's Web portal. In addition, Match.com does personals for Love AOL.
Over the first nine months of 2002, Match.com was USAi's fastest-growing segment, taking in $33.4 million in revenue, compared with $12.5 million over the same period the previous year.
In December, Diller expanded his online empire of love by buying uDate.com for $150 million in USAi stock. UDate.com is an online personals service based in England with members in more than 100 countries. It is growing rapidly. Revenue for the first nine months of 2002 was up 156 percent over the same period of 2001, USAi reported. In 2001, uDate.com bought another online personals service, Kiss.com, and the two now combine for more than 237,000 subscribers and 10 million members.
For Diller, the move to online dating dominance is an outgrowth of his early days in interactive television — the QVC and Home Shopping Network cable channels, which, for a time, made the former Hollywood mogul a butt of industry jokes. No one's laughing now: HSN, USAi's leading revenue generator, booked $371 million for the first nine months of 2002, or 31 percent of USAi's total take.
Match.com is part of Diller's interactive Internet strategy.
As with Diller's shopping channels, which struggled with a lowbrow image, online dating services have worked hard to overcome their inherent creepiness factor. There is always the possibility that an online date could end up being a) a real geek or b) a real criminal.
"It started out in a fringe area and it had a kind of stigma of people thinking it was really not a great way to meet people," said Diller, a member of the Washington Post Co.'s board of directors. "It had a sleaze factor to it."
But it caught on for a key reason, Diller said: It attracted busy, single people who wanted to be married, and it put them together in a visually stimulating but safely arm's-length environment.
Now it is Diller's mission to expand online dating beyond marriage-making.
"We think there are all forms of relationships and flirting that are less serious than being married," he said. "At the same time, we didn't want to cheapen it in any way."
To that end, there are rules on Match.com, such as: You can't be married and go trawling for dates. "Of course, you can lie and make up" a persona, Diller concedes, acknowledging what is still the Internet's biggest drawback — or appeal.
In the coming year, Diller says, the site will continue to hold face-to-face events in various cities, which are booked through his Ticketmaster company. And Match.com will improve its search algorithms this year, he said, "to weed out the people you do want from the people you don't want."
