PR NEWSWIRE — Sep 12 — TripConnect, a social networking site for travel advice closed $1 million of first round funding led by Masthead Venture Partners and individual private investors. TripConnect helps people obtain travel advice from friends and family.
Mark Brooks: WAYN.com is their main competition, and has a more compelling service. WAYN is unusual because of it's travel focus, and it's paid membership model…which is actually working quite well for them.
PR NEWSWIRE — Sep 12 — Digication Spotlight targets the academic community, and presents an opportunity to showcase their work, expertise and personality to employers, colleges, grad schools, teachers and other students. e.g. Smithfield High School Art department. The Digication Suite opens the lines of communications by combining elements of social networking and learning management systems. Available for free to the first 1,000 users at any U.S. accredited institution. FULL ARTICLE @ SYS CON
Mark Brooks: Facebook has grown quickly. Academics want their own system for teaching and sharing information and making more serious connections online. I'll interview the CEO of Affinity Circles. They have been quietly working on in-house walled garden social networks for groups associated with universities. As Facebook's focus becomes diluted, the opportunity for new, high integrity, even more highly focused 'private' networks will open up.
PR WEB — Sep 13 — Elena's Models (77,000 users from 176 countries since 1999), serves western men seeking Russian and Eastern European women for marriage. Men of all ages and walks of life join Russian marriage agencies but the mature men pay. Younger men appear to be in a 'window shopping' mode. Most paying members are from the U.S., followed by the U.K. The average age of paying members is 43, vs 38 for non-paying members. Only 5% of paying members are under 30, compared to 21% for non-paying members. 91% of paying members are white. The majority are college educated white males 30-50 years old with previous marital experience.
BUSINESS WEEK — Sep 11 — Repeating MySpace's success in the big, fragmented European market won't be a cakewalk, analysts say. MySpace's competitors in Europe already have established themselves with local audiences, offering targeted content in native languages. MySpace is adapting, launching a British version in April and its first non-English-language site in France in August. On Sept. 11, it unveiled its latest country-specific site in Germany. MySpace aims eventually to roll out sites in other European countries, and later in China and India. It's signing up local bands, adding native language videos, and staging events such as the popular "secret shows," where Indie and mainstream musicians play exclusive concerts for lucky MySpace members. Bebo has more market share in Britain than MySpace, according to Hitwise. In August, reports emerged that Bebo might team up with Viacom (VIA ), whose deep pockets would allow a more serious challenge to Murdoch. Ringo.com, a photo-sharing site owned by Monster, tops the social-networking rankings in France and Spain. Other rivals are adopting niche strategies to survive MySpace's European push. Startup MyStrands, based in Barcelona, Spain and Corvallis, Ore., is a "music recommendation" site that blends social networking with music reviews to help its users find new tunes and share their preferences with others. In August, Viacom's MTV Networks launched its own social-network site in Europe (Italy and Britain), called MTVFlux, that combines the company's music know-how with the interactive elements of Web 2.0.
The full article was originally published at Business Week, but is no longer available.
Mark Brooks: Here are some more well established, international social networks…
Arto.dk (Denmark), ASmallWorld (Euro), Cyworld (South Korea), Epuls.pl (Poland), EveryonesConnected (UK), Faceparty (UK), Fropper (India), Grono (Poland), Hyves (Netherlands), IRC Galleria (Finland), Mixi (Japan), Nexopia (Canada), Passado (Euro), Playahead (Sweden), ProfileHeaven (UK), Rate.ee (Estonia), Yeeyoo (China), Yeskee (China), Yonja (Turkey)
New advice column gives singles everywhere the chance to ask respected dating expert, Eric Resnick, how to manage the ins-and-outs of online and offline love.
PR WEB — Sep 7 — The People2People Group (P2P) has teamed up with Eric Resnick, of online dating assistance site, ProfileHelper.com, to create the "Ask the Expert!" dating advice column to be featured weekly in over 250 newspapers around the country. Eric will answer questions on everything from how to write a great online dating ad, to how to look for signs that the person you are seeing really is who they say they are, and even how to tell when it’s the right time to move things to the next level or how to walk away. The People2People Group (P2P) provides personal ad services to nearly 80% of the daily and weekly newspapers across the U.S. Founded in 1998, P2P remains at the forefront of the newspaper voice personals industry. FULL ARTICLE @ PR WEB
Mark Brooks: Congrats Eric. LookBetterOnline.com (David and Merav) and e-cyrano.com (Evan Katz) are Eric’s main competitors. All of these sites/people are very keen to partner with online dating sites.
BBC NEWS — Sep 9 — First Great Western is starting what it believes is the first speed-dating service on a train. Passengers, who paid £45 for a ticket, travel first class from Paddington with a bell sounding every four minutes to signal time to swap partners. The dating service was set up following a survey carried out by First Great Western which found 13% of people have been chatted up or asked out on a date while travelling by train. FULL ARTICLE @ BBC NEWS
Mark Brooks: Trust the British to come up with something like that 🙂
TECHCRUNCH — Sep 11 — Sometime soon, Facebook will start allowing anyone to join directly into a geographic network, regardless of whether or not they are already a member. There are currently 530 geographic networks, including some non-U.S. areas such as Paris and London. FULL POST @ TECHCRUNCH
RATE OR DATE — Sep 6 — Take a look at this Alexa graph of two sites going in different directions, plentyoffish.com vs. americansingles.com.
Unlike many industries, where market share is a costly trophy for top executives, here, share and momentum are about survival. In a recent report by Kelsey (Newspapers Should Bolster Online Alliances) senior analyst Michael Boland says, "Partnering with online players to etch out a strategy is something that we've seen work, and we recommend that partnering with an online player is a good move." The report goes on to state that newspapers need to re-think their emphasis on offline conversions, when new technologies offer more potential for online conversions. Here's a list of U.S.newspapers.
| Dating Site/Network | Paper Partners, Weighted Total |
| eharmony.com | 18.33 |
| perfectmatch.com | 14 |
| people2people.com | 13.5 |
| fastcupid.com | 7 |
| match.com | 4 |
| americansingles.com | 3.33 |
| relationshipexchange.com | 2 |
| ahsventures.com | 2 |
| yahoopersonals.com | 1 |
| relationshipnetwork.com | 1 |
| heart2heartnetwork.com | 1 |
| 900 number | 1 |
| jdate.com | 0.33 |
| n/a | 31.5 |
| SUM | 100 |
| Dating Site/Network | Top 3 Partners, by circulation |
| eharmony.com | usatoday.com latimes.com chicgaotribune.com |
| people2people.com | washingtonpost.com stltoday.com tampabay.com |
| perfectmatch.com | philly.com miami.com kansascity.com |
| fastcupid.com | sfgate.com seattletimes.com signonsandiego.com |
| match.com | dallasnews.com pe.com fresnobee.com |
| americansingles.com | latimes.com chicgaotribune.com newsday.com |
| relationshipexchange.com | denverpost.com buffalonews.com |
| ahsventures.com | chron.com mysanantonio.com |
| 900 number | nytimes.com |
| yahoopersonals.com | boston.com |
| relationshipnetwork.com | mcall.com |
| heart2heartnetwork.com | jacksonville.com |
| jdate.com | sun-sentinal.com |
Almost 1/3 of newspapers have no online-personals partner. Partnerships at the parent-company-level were not as coherent as one might expect. Only Gannett stands out for their unwavering faithfulness to eHarmony, a partnership that spans over a dozen papers in the Top 100 list. Compare that to The McClatchy Company, who is primary linked with PerfectMatch, but whose portfolio companies also appear to include one-off deals with eharmony.com, match.com and americansingles.com. But at least those companies are in the game, which is more than one can say for Advance Publication. Despite having four papers in the U.S. Top 100 list (cleveland.com, nj.com, mlive.com, al.com), no online-dating partners could be found on any of their sites.
Best Integration – Boston.com / Yahoo! Personals – Yahoo provides several content sections, Boston.com has their own Personals forum, and Boston.com Personals has even held their own events and contests.
ALL HEADLINE NEWS — Sep 5 — Google agrees to turn over records of Orkut users in Brazil who are suspected of racism and distributing child pornography, among other crimes. Brazilian Judge Jose Lunardelli had ordered the search engine to disclose the data and IP addresses within 15 days or face fines of about $23,255 per day for each request it withholds. Orkut, a social networking site, has about 27 million users worldwide, and about 17.6 million subscribers in Brazil. Brazil authorities are investigating Orkut communities linked to racism, homophobia and pedophilia. FULL ARTICLE @ BIZREPORT
PC4MEDIA — Jun 20 — Whizspark is an event marketing and ticketing service which allows white labeling and offers the ability to track, enable and manage online, affiliate and word of mouth marketing. Our next step is to develop a network of online personals partners that drive attendance to events by marketing events to their members on a cost per action or cost per lead basis. Match and a few other dating sites tried to create their own branded events. Their goal was to drive subscriptions, while mostly breaking even at the events. Events were a bastard step child marketing tool for the subscription service. Dumb. People spend so much more money on events and offline entertainment than they do on dating subscriptions. The permission asset and traffic that these dating sites have could be leveraged for additional revenue streams: marketing ALL KINDS of events. FULL ARTICLE @ PC4MEDIA
Mark Brooks: I'd recommend online personals sites consider partnering with existing events vendors of high quality events and adding calendars to their schedules of events suitable for singles. It can give them ideas for dates, more interesting than the usual coffee date.
