Feb 22 — First there was Friendster…Actually, first there was Sixdegrees, then Planetall, Eturn, Everyonesconnected, then Friendster, then Linkedin, Myspace, Facebook, Flickr, Hi5, Piczo, Fropper. We’ll see more and more utilitarian and demographically targeted social networks pop up this year. Check out Estonia’s answer to Myspace. www.rate.ee – Mark Brooks
Month: February 2006
You Can’t buy Friends Like These, Well, Actually, Now You Can
BOSTON GLOBE — Feb 21 — Catch27 was created last year by E. Jean Carroll, an Elle advice columnist and former 'Saturday Night Live' writer. Carroll specializes in riffing off established social norms. Her last site was GreatBoyfriends.com, where women can recommend ex-lovers. "I was watching all these kids on MySpace, spending all their time saying, 'Add me. Add me,' and I thought: Why not buy people? So you understand? The whole thing started as a joke." Members join, upload a profile, and site staff would assign the newbie a monetary quantity based on their overall attractiveness. Members who wanted to be friends with other members would either have to beg or trade their way to the top. FULL ARTICLE @ THE BOSTON GLOBE
Mark Brooks: The site peaked last year at around 40k Alexa rank. Alexa rank is 78k average now.
Yahoo! Launches Social Network Site for UK
JOURNALISM.CO.UK — Feb 21 — Yahoo! has launched a social network and community publishing platform for the UK. Yahoo! 360° invites users to build their own profile page incorporating their blog postings, Flickr photographs, reviews of local events and restaurants, links to friends’ blogs and discussion groups as well as lists of favourite TV, books and music releases. The UK version is being launched in beta and has been developed using research and feedback from the US version. Around one million of MySpace’s 50 million registered users are in the UK. MySpace UK will be promoted on other News Corporation platforms such as Sun Online and Times Online and will initially aim to build its audience through the UK music scene. FULL ARTICLE @ JOURNALISM.CO.UK
WebmasterRadio.FM Airs Exclusive iDate 2006 Radio Special
PR WEB — Feb 21 — WebmasterRadio.FM, a free, business, 24/7 internet radio network, announces the iDate 2006 radio special airing Thursday, Feb 23, 3pm EST. Hosted by FriendFinderInc.com, the iDate special will cover all aspects of the recent iDate conference. Held on February 2-3, 2006 at the Wyndham Miami Beach Resort in Miami, the iDate conference is the biggest dating industry event of its kind. The third annual Internet Dating Conference (iDate) Miami 2006 event focused entirely on the business management, marketing and technology of online dating and social networking Web sites. Programs are available immediately in podcast and archived format at http://www.WebmasterRadio.FM.  RELEASE @ PR WEB
Yahoo’s Challenge
INFORMATION WEEK — Feb — Yahoo's chief data officer Fayyad knows if you're about to buy a new car. "When you're on the Yahoo network you're telling a lot more about yourself and your intent…I can turn that into a very powerful ad-matching machine…in many cases, much more powerful than search." Yahoo; $5.26 billion in revenue last year, 47% more than 2004. Google; $6.1 billion in 2005, a 92% increase. Between November 2004 and November 2005, Yahoo went from handling 32% of Internet searches to 29.5%, according to comScore Media Metrix. Google's market capitalization stood at $106 billion earlier this month, more than double Yahoo's market cap of roughly $46 billion. Yahoo is more diversified than Google, with 12% of its revenue coming from user fees. Yahoo has more unique users and they spend 10 times as much time on Yahoo. "If I get 10% more usage from the average consumer, I have suddenly created 10% more inventory for my ads," Fayyad says. Yahoo accomplished something like that last year when it made an effort to improve user retention with Yahoo Mail.
Mark Brooks: Yahoo Personals, complete with premier profiling, is a goldmine for contextual advertising.
Online Personals Watch Interview-CEO of Plentyoffish.com, Markus Frind
OPW Interview — Feb 21, 2006 — I met Markus at iDate2005 and barely gave him the time of day; a hokey little site called Plentyoffish. I have a lot more respect for him these days. Plentyoffish is free and has snuck up on the Canadian market and now he is sneaking up on the American market.
What's your background Markus?
Computer programming. I went to a Technical Institute for a few years and then worked for a few dot com companies. Every one of them went under after 6 months. I was a developer of websites and databases; nothing glamorous. I was really good at making things efficient. They threw me from project to project making things super efficient.
Why did you decide to offer plentyoffish for free?
I originally created the site because I had to learn asp.net and I didn’t want to buy a book, so I created the site and I just kept adding things to it that I liked. I had to continue to learn new things and it just kind of became a dating center; it wasn’t meant to be an actual site. Then I wanted to learn SEO (Search Engine Optimization), so then I read up on SEO and I integrated that into the site and taught myself. Then it just kept growing and every time I wanted to learn something, I would add that to the site. Eventually it just became a huge thing.
How do you make money?
I make money off the ads upselling to other sites. It doesn’t need much money to run. The site does about 13 million pages views a day, making it one of the top 5 sites in Canada of any site and in the top 60 or so in the region according to Hitwise. I started this in March, 2003 and I haven’t kept track of the registrants, but my traffic has grown 12 fold in 12 months overall in both markets.
How can you afford to do radio and TV advertising?
My costs are next to nill Look at American Singles. According to their quarterly reports they spend a million dollars a month just handling servers. I spend about $15K a month tops. It is cheap to advertise on radio if you have none of those other costs.
Who do you regard as your top competitors?
I’m really competing with Match.com. In Canada, I started at 3% last year and I’m sitting at over 50% market share and in the next 6 months I will double the size of the dating industry in Canada.
Are you at all worried about other major players or new entrants starting up with free sites?
Not really. A lot of VC’s are throwing around a lot of money and probably have funded some of the other free sites, but I have so much of a head start that I don’t think there’s much they can do. Google and Yahoo would only affect me little if they went free, in fact I think they would help me rather than hurt me. If the average dater is using 3 dating sites, they are probably currently using Plentyoffish and Match and Yahoo. If Google comes in and offered a free site, most of the paid dating sites like Match and Yahoo would get pushed out of the market. I took a poll today that says that over 55% of my members are paying members on other sites or have been in the past.
What's next for plentyoffish in 2006?
Plentyoffish is already blazing the trail. All the other dating sites are attempting to go niche, whereas plentyoffish is the only site that segregates the database on the spot, so no individual user has access to whole database. When they login and create their profile, the database is refined and they only access to a limited subset. So basically, as soon as you sign up, a niche is created around you. You only have access to that specific niche. Currently, no other site is doing this. This is like creating a niche site on the fly. If you logon and you don’t want to see ‘smokers’; every person on there that is a smoker will get filtered out of the search results and no smoker will ever be able to message you. This is specifically the reason why people leave the big sites or the niche sites, because a lot of the people that they don’t want to message them are messaging them. If you filter them in real time, the brand power of a large site will blow away a billion niche sites. No one will remember a tiny niche site and they won’t have the brand to be able to compete. 2006 is setting the stage for a show down with Match.com.
Spark Networks Reports Q4 and 2005 Financials
SPARK NETWORKS NEWSROOM — Feb 16 — "2005 was a turnaround year in which we made significant strides towards right-sizing our cost structure and generating cash flow from operations," stated David Siminoff, Spark Networks CEO. "We begin 2006 newly listed on the American Stock Exchange. We are energized by recent technology improvements and are poised for balanced growth with significant operating leverage." "Our next level of growth will come from leveraging the communities we acquired in the MingleMatch acquisition in order to move quickly into new vertical markets…"
Record results for JDate. Revenue grew 9%, to $26 million. Other Businesses segment grew by 72%, partially driven by the purchase of MingleMatch in Q2. Q4 revenue was $16.6 million, down 3%. 2005 revenue was $65.5 million, up 1%. Q4 net loss was $403,000, compared to a net loss of $1.6 million. 2005 net loss was $1.4 million, compared to a net loss of $11.6 million for 2004. The net loss for 2005 includes compensation expense related to share options of $2.7 million. EBITDAS (EBITDA adjusted to remove share compensation expense) for Q4 was $2.0 million, compared to $7,000 for Q4 2004. EBITDAS for 2005 was $6.0 million, compared to an EBITDAS loss of $6.0 million in 2004.
Q4 2005 revenue for AmericanSingles was $6.7 million, down 22%. 2005 revenue was $29.2 million, down 17%. Jdate average paying subscribers was 73,700, during Q4, up 8%. AmericanSingles average paying subscribers in Q4 was 91,900, down 29%. Q4 average paying subscribers for Other Businesses
was 58,600, up 88%. Total Q4 average paying subscribers for Q4 was 224,200, down 2%.
Direct subscriber acquisition costs for JDate in Q4 was $12.25, up 15%. For 2005 it was $12.70, up 57%. "…the marketing mix has shifted from a primarily online, direct marketing effort to one that now includes a wide mix of offline initiatives…" stated Siminoff. Subscriber acquisitoin costs for AmericanSingles in Q4 was $36.66, compared to $36.52 for Q4 2004. For 2005 it was $35.16, down 19%, compared to $43.29, for 2004. And for Other Businesses in Q4 it was $29.73.
The full article was originally published at Spark Networks website, but is no longer available.
Mark Brooks: Spark is focusing more on it's niche businesses and Minglematch sites. They are admirers of Friendfinder's business model.
Pickiness Dominates Quest for Perfect Mate
WASHINGTON POST — Feb 20 — Falling in love has never had a reputation for making much sense. Dante glimpsed Beatrice a few times and wouldn't shut up about her for decades. Why should not falling in love be any more rational? There is something peculiarly modern about this phenomenon, something aligned with our dark privilege of too much, this consumeriffic culture in which jeans and houses and breasts and ring tones are customizable. Consider it all: geographical dislocation, cities filled with singles, extended childhoods and postponed childbearing, speed-dating, the growing sense that the dating pool is as vast as the 454 men-seeking-women between the ages of 29 and 31 within five miles of your ZIP code on Yahoo Personals.
The full article was originally published at Fort Wayne Journal Gazette, but is no longer available.
Mark Brooks: We are in a throw away culture…why commit? Seismic changes on our views on marriage and long term relationships (commitment) will continue. How will this affect online dating. More importantly, how will online dating influence these seismic changes? Your comments please.
The Growth of Gay Online Dating
THE INDEPENDENT ONLINE — Feb 19 — Gaydar has 3.5 million members globally. The UK is by far its biggest market, with a total of almost one million members. Most are in big towns and cities, especially London, Manchester and Brighton. Most members are between 25 and 34. There are leather queens in LA, sugar daddies in Shanghai, and, at every point of the compass, married men seeking "discreet meets". When Freud talked about "polymorphous perversity" he foresaw Gaydar. The site caters for any and every preference. Specialised chatrooms include chastity, chubbychasers, Eurovision, hypnosis, kilts and scallies. There is plenty to amuse and arouse, much to disgust, but absolutely nothing illegal. Gaydar membership is £60 a year. This year, Europeans will spend £157m on online dating. They will spend £291m on "adult content." Go figure. Sex is what's really getting us online in such record numbers. "Most of the big dating sites claim to be about actual dating aiming at actual relationships," says Nate Elliott of Jupiter Research. "Sites like Match.com and Datingdirect say they want people to meet and fall in love. Users say that friendship is their main goal, not physical intimacy." The current advertising campaign for Match.com is the UK's biggest online dating promotion. Slogan: "We guarantee you'll find someone special within six months." Gaydar's homepage features pictures of semi-naked men beckoning you to log on. Slogan: "What you want, when you want it." "People definitely lie about what they're looking for," says Dr Monica Whitty, social psychologist at Queen's University and co-author of Cyberspace Romance: the Psychology of Online Dating. "Often women will try to attract more men by claiming they're only after a casual relationship. Men will do the opposite. Both sexes are playing a game." Gaydar makes ~£1 million a year in the UK alone. Q Soft Consulting, currently employs a total of 40 people and owns, among other products, Gaydarradio and Gaydartravel. Today Gaydar has more than three million members, while Match.com has just 500,000 gay members. Gaydargirls.com launches next month. Already 140,000 gay women have signed up. In December 2005, Gaydar accounted for more than half of all gay website visits.
The full article was originally published at The Independent, but is no longer available.
Mark Brooks: Fascinating insight on the gay and casual dating market. Sexsearch and Adult Friend Finder are the leading adult dating sites in the USA. They fly under the wire because the personals rankings don't include them because of their adult content. I never see them mentioned in the press. The press don't want to talk about them, the analysts don't include them…but the people are voting for them in droves. We're in the business of love, which means we're also in the sex business. Better matches > more love > more sex, and the freedom to express one's sexual preferences are paramount for the success of prosperity of this industry.
Prisoner Personals
KOMO 1000 NEWS — Feb 19 — One ad on http://www.inmate-connections.com has a local woman outraged. The man who raped her is now advertising from prison looking for a female friend. "Hello to all of the honest women in the world. Here is an opportunity to meet that honest man you've been searching for!" He is locked behind prison walls, behind barbed wire and he's not supposed to have access to the Internet. It turns out he has the help of a special courier.
The full article was originally published at Komo 1000 News, but is no longer available.
Mark Brooks: While TRUE.com is promoting background checks and kicking felons off their site and the press are jumping on the safety bandwagon, women are vying for love on sites featuring men clad in prisoner uniforms. Strange world.