Thoughts on America
The progress on California has been quite good, we’re now up to 442 members and what’s also nice is that virtually everybody has come back more than once after joining. It’s still nowhere near having a viable chatroom or even taking off through personal recommendations but it’s been a slightly faster start than we managed in the UK.
I’ve been wondering how big the Californian market is compared to the UK and other states. The top 5 states on AdultFriendFinder by number of members are:
- California: 1,136,000
- Texas: 772,000
- Florida: 715,000
- New York: 646,000
- Illinois: 413,000
- USA Total: 10,495,000
For comparison, they have 1,811,000 members in the UK so it would seem that California would be roughly the same size of market for Fab Swingers as the UK has been.
It’s interesting to think about what percentage of these members are active. According to the New York Times various has 1.2 million subscribers out of 260 million registrations. However this isn’t broken down between their different web properties so I’m reluctant to apply the ratio to AFF.
Over at Compete.com, AFF had 20 million unique US visitors in November 2007. Now, California probably accounted for 10% of these visitors, giving 2 million Californian visitors to the site.
AFF is not directly a swingers site, as AFF is a bit bigger on adult dating for singles but even still it is pretty clear that there is a good 1 million people in California who should become Fab Swingers users!
The only negative is that the competition is better. When we launched in the UK we were lucky that the largest swingers had gone subscription only and in a really crass way, this resulted in a lot of unhappy users who were looking for an alternative. The top sites in the USA, which seem to be AFF, SwingLifestyle, LifestyleLounge and BayCouples (big in California) are better than the UK competition so although it’s a much bigger market we will have a bit more of a fight. But at least we don’t have a free competitor so the USP is still in place.