Flirtomatic

» see flirtomatic.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Flirtomatic was British at the layer that actually decided who could use it, which was the phone bill. Premium SMS and carrier billing are not global infrastructure. They are a stack of separate commercial agreements, one per operator per country, and Flirtomatic had them with AT&T on one side of the Atlantic and Vodafone on the other, in the markets it had bothered to enter. Turkey was not one of them, and the Turkish operators had their own premium-SMS economy running in parallel with nothing in common but the mechanism.

The origin is better than the product deserved. The design agency Fjord had been hired by Nokia to propose five ideas for mobile. While the team was describing what they wanted mobile dating to feel like, light and low-stakes, somebody said out loud that they were describing flirting. Mark Curtis, who tells the story, co-founded the company around that sentence in 2005 with Avi Azulai, who had just sold the mobile entertainment business iTouch for 180 million pounds.

It went live and grew fast for a service that was, structurally, a chat room with a paywall on the fun parts. A hundred thousand users by July 2006, a hundred and eighty-five thousand by that November. A million by 2008.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the money ~

The original model was subscriptions, which is what everyone did, and in 2007 they dropped it. What replaced it was advertising plus small purchases paid through the handset: a currency called FlirtPoints that bought virtual gifts and pushed your profile in front of more people. In the four weeks before Christmas 2009 they sold a hundred thousand virtual gifts, including 19,455 Christmas stockings.

That is a real business and it was ahead of its time. It was also not enough. Eighteen million dollars went in across the life of the company, ten of it in 2010 alone, from Nauta Capital and Doughty Hanson Technology Ventures among others. Roughly eighty percent of users were on a phone at a point when most of the industry still thought of mobile as a companion screen, and the advertising rates on a phone in 2010 did not reflect that.

~ peak flirtomatic ~

December 2010 is the top. Three and a half million registered users, a million and a half of them American, and a study that August naming it the number one mobile dating site in the US with sixty-five percent of the summer audience. In December 2009 it was the ninth largest mobile internet property in Britain by minutes. It had been the fifteenth most searched term on the UK mobile web that year.

During the 2010 general election they posted mock profiles of the three party leaders and let members vote by kissing them. Ten thousand people did, and Nick Clegg won with 34.4 percent, which is roughly what the polls were saying at the time and is a genuinely funny thing for a flirting app to have accidentally gotten right.

~ switched off ~

In 2011 Mark Curtis left and the site was redesigned, openly, to appeal to older users, because the young ones did not spend. That is the standard admission that a consumer product has stopped being what it was for. Then Facebook and the first wave of location-based dating apps took the entire category and rebuilt it around a map, and a service whose competitive advantage was knowing how to bill a Vodafone customer suddenly had no advantage at all.

There was no closing post. In March 2014 the company stopped operating and the site went off. Handmade Mobile Entertainment kept filing accounts until 2018 and was finally dissolved on 16 April 2023, which means the legal shell outlived the product by nine years. flirtomatic.com resolves today and serves a GoDaddy builder page with the company name on it and nothing behind it.

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