(Liebepur 2007-06-05) When I have been in the IT Department of a Swiss-German company and I had to handle statistics, my first question was always: “what do you mean by “turnover”? In fact, all the companies have their own rules, and the thinking in a financial department can be far different from the opinion of the sales department.

But what may be the reason, if a whole industry is not sure about the turnover? This happened to Germany’s high-valued dating industry yesterday. A new study for the Bitcom association showed a turnover of about 65 Million Euro last year, expecting about 85 Million this year.

This is quite a lot for a rather small country like Germany, compared to the USA. But a few weeks before, the experts of the “SBV”, which are famous for their skills in watching the market, said that the complete turnover was already higher than 110.000.000 Euro.

So there is quite a difference – and it seems, that the secrets behind the different figures can be described as an “insider look”, as far as the “SBV” is concerned, while the marketing agency looked from a "bird's-eye view". Experts in Germany say that they missed a lot of “Sparrows” with turnovers around one million Euros, giving a total amount of about 30 Million to be added to the marketing researchers Figures. Most probably the “adult” side of the business has not been taken into account as well – so if you put this all together, even 110.000 Million seems to be a rather “conservative” figure as an expert told “liebepur” last night.