Zoosk, The Dating Site That's About To Go Public, Relies Heavily On Spam

Dating startup Zoosk recently filed to go public on the NYSE.

Last year, Zoosk experienced impressive growth. It grew 44% from 18 million registered users to 26 million. Zoosk's monetization strategy is based on paying users. The number of paid users last year grew from 483,000 to 650,000.

But the problem with Zoosk is that it sends its users an insane number of messages.

At one point I was receiving an "Activity alert" email every five days (proof on right). That's when I decided to cut my losses and cancel my Zoosk account.

Zoosk acknowledges this in its filing. Here's a key nugget (emphasis ours):

Our email and text message campaigns are an important means to drive member and subscriber engagement. We send a large volume of emails and text messages to members and subscribers notifying them of a variety of activities on our platform, such as new connections. We also rely on the use of email and text messages as a part of our registration and validation processes. Because of the importance of email and text messages to our business, if we are unable to successfully deliver emails or text messages to our members and subscribers or if members and subscribers consistently decline to open our emails or text messages, our business could be adversely affected.

Since its founding in 2007, Zoosk has raised $61.6 million in total venture funding. Zoosk is looking to raise $100 million, according to the filing.