Growth at Ticketmaster comes from personals as ticket sales flatten. (Media & Technology).If Ticketmaster has a date with success, it may not be in its core business. Struggling to reach profitability, the L.A.-based event-ticketing company recently closed on the purchase of its second online dating business, gaining a foothold in a market that has shown growing promise. Majority-owned by Barry Diller's USA Networks Inc., Ticketmaster reported a net loss of $119.7 million (84 cents per diluted di·lute tr.v. di·lut·ed, di·lut·ing, di·lutes 1. To make thinner or less concentrated by adding a liquid such as water. 2. To lessen the force, strength, purity, or brilliance of, especially by admixture. share) during the first quarter ended March 31, compared with a loss of $39.6 million (28 cents) for the like period a year ago. Revenues were $185.9 million, vs. $171.2 million. But promising news came from the company's Match.com personals business. In its most recent filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Ticketmaster reported that Match.com had first quarter Ebitda (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization Earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA) is a non-GAAP metric that can be used to evaluate a company's profitability.
To complement that success, Ticketmaster last month closed on its acquisition of Australian online personals group Soulmates Technology in a mostly stock deal worth $23 million. Based in Sydney, Soulmates claims more than 2 million registered users in 25 countries with multilingual mul·ti·lin·gual adj. 1. Of, including, or expressed in several languages: a multilingual dictionary. 2. capability in 18 languages. Soulmates provides the personals service for Microsoft Corp.'s MSN (1) (MicroSoft Network) A family of Internet-based services from Microsoft, which includes a search engine, e-mail (Hotmail), instant messaging (Windows Live Messaging) and a general-purpose portal with news, information and shopping (MSN Directory). . Soulmates reported an Ebitda loss of $80,000 on revenues of $1.5 million for the year ended Dec. 31, 2001, according to according to prep. 1. As stated or indicated by; on the authority of: according to historians. 2. In keeping with: according to instructions. 3. the company's statement upon the acquisition announcement. Ticketmaster officials said in the announcements they expect the deal to add $5 million in revenues and $2 million Ebitda on an annualized annualized Of or relating to a variable that has been mathematically converted to a yearly rate. Inflation and interest rates are generally annualized since it is on this basis that these two variables are ordinarily stated and compared. basis. Between Match.com's growth and the addition of Soulmates, Ticketmaster projects that revenues and adjusted Ebitda at its online personals business will beat earlier projections by 40 percent and 20 percent, respectively, at year end. The growth in online dating comes as its core ticketing business has flattened flat·ten v. flat·tened, flat·ten·ing, flat·tens v.tr. 1. To make flat or flatter. 2. To knock down; lay low: The boxer was flattened with one punch. . Tickets sold in the first quarter increased by 1.5 percent of the year-earlier quarter, while revenue per ticket increased by only 2 percent in the same period. At the same time, the share of tickets sold online climbed to 37.8 percent, an increase over the 29.5 percent recorded the year-earlier. |
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