Jiayuan Stock Plummets After Missed Earnings, Reveals Active User Numbers

China’s leading website for helping people who are unlucky in love is itself proving to be unlucky in money. US markets have just closed on Tuesday after giving Jiayuan (NASDAQ:DATE) a solid kicking for badly missing analyst’s earnings estimates in its newly-released fourth quarter and full year 2011 financials.

According to StreetInsider, it was caused by “reported Q4 non-GAAP EPS of $0.01, $0.05 worse than the analyst estimate of $0.06. Revenue for the quarter came in at $14.1 million versus the consensus estimate of $14.39 million.” And that, despite rising net income, was enough to provoke the backlash. $DATE has just closed at $5.90 per share, its second-lowest level ever.

Looking at the official Jiayuan press release, net income for full year 2011 was RMB37.2 million (US$5.9 million), representing an increase of 122.8 percent over the previous year. CEO Rose Gong instead focused on new users, saying that in the “fourth quarter [2011] we saw a record-high number of newly registered user accounts on our website, and reported encouraging revenue growth of 53.6 percent year-on-year.”

But, the stats for monthly active users and paying premium members don’t look so hot, with the financial data pointing out that the Q4 2011 numbers were down from the third quarter ones. But still, there is year-on-year growth. Registered users are now at 55.9 million at the end of December. More importantly:

The number of average monthly active user accounts for the fourth quarter of 2011 was 5,179,713, compared to 4,403,262 for the corresponding period of 2010, and 5,560,387 for the previous quarter [Q3 2011].

The number of average monthly paying user accounts for the fourth quarter of 2011 was 1,172,159, compared to 761,271 for the corresponding period of 2010, and 1,250,439 for the previous quarter.

Those stats seem pretty static since we last looked at active and paying users on Jiayuan back in November last year.

When Jiayuan IPO’d last year it was thought to be China’s safest social media stock, and initially looked more steady that Renren (NYSE:RENN) or Tudou (NASDAQ:TUDO), which debuted in the US at around the same time.