The "Social Dating" Revolution has Arrived: Badoo.com Surpasses 100m Users, by Mixing Social Networking and Online Dating

LONDON, January 31, 2011 /PRNewswire/ --

- Badoo is Creating a new Online Category of "Social Dating": a Hybrid of Social Networking and "Traditional" Online Dating.

- What Facebook is for Managing Existing Relationships, Badoo is for Making new Ones.

Badoo.com (http://www.badoo.com), the world's largest and fastest-growing "social dating" site, today announces that it has passed the milestone of 100 million users.

It has done so by reinventing both social networking and online dating, helping to create the new online category of "social dating" - a hybrid of social networking (like Facebook) and "traditional" online dating.

The four-year-old start-up is registering nearly 10m new users a month, making Badoo the planet's largest social network for meeting new people locally. It expects to reach 200m users next year. The "social dating" revolution has arrived!

Badoo is a global, multi-lingual, location-based, "social dating" network, focused on chatting, flirting and meeting new people. It has also now launched a Facebook app with huge success - already used by 25m people.

Badoo is rewriting the rules of online dating and meeting.

"The biggest shift is from "marital dating" to "social dating" or "casual dating," says Bart Swanson, Badoo COO.

Second, the rise of geo-location apps, able to pinpoint a mobile user's location, and the spread of smart-phones means that there is also a shift from dating based on shared interests to dating based on location ("dating by satnav").

Third, this is prompting a shift in time horizons - from planning a date in a week's time to one in an hour's time, or right here and now.

"Online dating is no longer all about meeting a future spouse," says Swanson. "It's about meeting lots of people in a short time, at short notice, in an easy, fun, relaxed manner."

All these changes are combining to remove the lingering stigma associated with online dating. Online dating, reborn as "social dating," is becoming something that everyone does. Badoo is making online dating cool.

FACTS

    
    - Over 100m users, in 180+ countries, 22 languages
    - Over 300,000 new users daily.
    - Among the world's top 135 sites (Alexa.com)
    - Seven billion page-views monthly.
    - World's largest, fastest-growing Facebook dating app: used by 25m
      people monthly; sixth in top 10 of all Facebook apps

Contact: info@thorburnmedia.co.uk