Nothing compares to you... staff’s £6m bonus

The company, whose adverts featuring a warbling opera singer have been voted the most annoying for two years in a row, reported that pre-tax profits increased by 35 per cent to £29.9m in 2010.

Its turnover lifted 35 per cent to smash through the £100m barrier for the first time, increasing from £74.9m to £101.5m, while Go Compare insurance quote volumes rose to 28.5 million, compared to £19.4 million in 2009.

The bumper figures triggered an £11.8m dividend pay-out, of which 49 per cent went to insurance giant Esure, which backs the site, and the rest, £2.7m, went to chief executive Hayley Parsons and her staff and founding shareholders. Ms Parsons, who set the site up after working for rival insurer Admiral’s Confused.com, took out an initial £500,000 loan to build the service in 2006, but she said she realised she would need to take it further if she was to challenge the dominant players in the market.

The initial seed was planted when she and four other original Confused.com employees decided that between them they “could do a better job” than the poster-child for insurance comparison sites.

The aggregator, which employs 94 staff, said the latest figures reflected a surge in awareness during the early part of 2010 with the launch of the second stage of the Gio Compario advertising campaign.

Go Compare said it had strengthened its customer base by attracting a “substantial share of the new customers using price comparison services for the first time”. The company is believed to have spent 30 per cent more than rivals on TV advertising last year, which, at a cost of only £2 per visitor to its site, is an investment that appears to have paid off.

The adverts’ opera singer, Gio Compario, is played by Welsh artist Wynne Evans, who recently launched a debut album, which has gone to the top of the classical charts.