Overview

Venntro Media Group represent an “exemplar” product business model, which provides individuals and companies the technology and web hosting capabilities to set up their own online dating websites. Venntro Media Group are one of the world’s largest providers of technology for online dating and social discovery businesses. In addition to providing the technology, Venntro Media Group operates a complementary work-for-hire business model in which it offers customer care and after sales service to companies that use its technology. Venntro Media Group help service the dating sites created by their partners in order to boost revenues and increase the number of users on the platform. Venntro Media Group hold on to all of the dating service user information on their databases.

History

Ross Williams and his partner Steve Pammenter set up a web-based dating service in 2003. It all started as the two partners identified a gap in the market while using existing online dating sites. They decided to develop a technology that could improve the existing offering with the acknowledgement that most dating sites where based on the same type of technology. The company was founded without any outside investments, and four years later Venntro Media Group had an annual £3m turnover. By 2011 the annual revenues had grown to £30m a year.

The company reported annualized revenues in excess of £74 million last year (2014) with a staff of nearly 200 people, with offices in Winchester, London, Melbourne and San Francisco, with another opening in Boston. Venntro Media Group now hosts a portfolio of over 25,000 sites and work with over 1,700 partners around the world. The company has over 40 million people worldwide on their database.

Customers

The business model represented by Venntro Media Group serves developers of dating / matching websites. These tend to be existing companies that have a portfolio of websites – dating or not – that either want to build or improve an existing dating website.

The websites created by Venntro Media Group partners are categorised into three groups: traditional, niche and casual. Traditional include the mainstream sites tailored to those who are looking for dating, long term and traditional relationships. Niche sites cater for people who wish to meet someone little more specific to their interest whether it is age range, hair colour, ethnic background, divorced etc. Casual sites are tailored to individuals looking for more flirty fun.

Learn more about the Product Business Model

A dyadic transactional relationship where your good or service can be designed and delivered without prior interactions with the customer.

Engagement  — Value Creation Proposition

Venntro Media Group delivers value to developers by providing the software to build a dating web site, a pre-populated member database, payment processing, a dedicated customer support center and a bespoke CRM program. The Venntro Media Group product includes a simple site creator tool, which allows partners/developers to create and launch their very own site with little effort and at no cost. The challenge for partners/developers are to drive the traffic onto their own websites.

Delivery — Value Chain

Venntro Media Group develops its software in-house and delivers the technology suite to customers through it website. Website user data is stored in the cloud, for which Venntro Media Group pays a third party provider. Effectively, Venntro Media Group develops technology that provides the backbone behind dating sites – including matching algorithms, ways to screen and search for individuals, tools to build user profiles, and messaging technology that allows users to contact each other, among other systems and infrastructure that are needed to run a dating website.

Monetisation — Value Capture

When a customer’s site is up and running, Venntro Media Group will take a small percentage of each user’s subscription fee. Venntro Media Group charges no start-up costs for web-site developers and they do not charge any ongoing maintenance costs.

 

 

Disclaimer — Written by Mats Kallum and edited by James Knuckles under the direction of Prof Charles Baden-Fuller, Cass Business School. This case is designed to illustrate a business model category. It leverages public sources and is written to further management understanding, and it is not meant to suggest individuals made either correct or incorrect decisions. © 2016 Published 20 April 2016