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On Badoo, the Social Network for Sex, Users Pay To Get Noticed (And To Get Other Things Too)

Combine the brazenness of Cragislist claissifieds with the power of a web app - and the libidos fo eager twentysomethings across Europe - and you've got Badoo, the millions-strong social network dedicated to hooking up. Thanks almost solely to word of...

Combine the brazenness of Cragislist claissifieds with the power of a web app – and the libidos of eager twentysomethings across Europe – and you’ve got Badoo, the millions-strong social network dedicated to hooking up. Thanks almost solely to word of mouth, it’s huge in places like Spain, France, Turkey and Greece (Athens is its ‘hook-up capital’), but it’s virtually unknown in the US and Europe.

That could change soon however: the company is said to be valued at around $2 billion, and its founder, a reclusive 37-year-old London-based Russian named Andrey Andreev, says revenues and profit are growing by “double-digit percentages” every month. He’s got the weekend Aston Martin and Masarati rentals to prove it.

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Though Andreev plays down the controversies (he says the service is about “adventure,” not sex), Badoo is seen by some as a magnet for sex offenses, has been accused of collecting profiles without permission, and, in a survey of 45 social-networking sites by researchers at Cambridge University, recieved the lowest score for privacy. Many say it’s popular for those looking for prostitution.

The UK edition of Wired goes in depth, explaining the centerpiece of the service’s logic and its revenue model: paying to get noticed across the site, much as advertisers do on Google searches.

“No one’s pushing you to spend money, but if you want to attract more users, you have to pay,” he explains. “You pay to advertise yourself. If you want something to go faster, you pay. And some people pay tens of times every day to rise up.” By the end of 2009, the site had 48 million registered users — a fifth of whom, then CEO Neil Bryant said at the time, were paying to boost their profile… Before Badoo there was Mamba, a Russian online-dating business that Andreev launched in 2004 as “an interface for offline relationships, for all type of adventures”… “You register, upload a profile picture, and we put you at the top of the search list,” Andreev explains. "Then you slowly move down the hill — if we have 50,000 new customers a day, you can quickly understand how many minutes of attention you have. When you lose attention, like a Google search result, no one finds you. “The first day [of this paid service] we made $5,000, the second $6,000, the third more — I wasn’t expecting this. But people love advertising themselves. Lots of people use this function several times a day. They become addicted.” A few weeks later, the site added the opportunity to be briefly visible on every page, for a fee. “This was even more successful. Some people spent hundred of dollars every day. People complained they couldn’t write SMS messages fast enough, and a lot on pay-as-you-go had to keep going to kiosks to buy new scratchcards to charge another $50.” So Mamba began taking credit cards, online currencies, Yandex money. Revenues climbed ever more steeply. “We just sat back, relaxed, and added more services every day,” Andreev says. “There were virtual gifts — before Zynga. You could send a gift, make a virtual phone call at 50 cents per minute. It was Mamba time. You can’t imagine how cool it is to run things that are growing fast, getting revenue, watching the charts as the money grows — it’s a sport.” He grins.

Read more at

Wired UK