MARKETING VOX — Oct 4 — After just 10 weeks, Wal-Mart has pulled the plug on "The Hub," a social-networking site for teens that the nation's largest retailer had hoped would become a competitor for MySpace. An experiment gone awry.
The full article was originally published at Marketing Vox, but is no longer available.
DAILY NEWS — Oct 2 — Piczo (teenage focus) is one of a raft of second-tier social-networking sites. XuQa is run by San Francisco startup iVentster, which lets users play games against their online friends and offers awards to the top scorers. Hi5 comes with a built-in music player. Last month, Piczo attracted 10.2 million uniques, compared with Facebook's 15.5 million (comScore). Instead of trying to get people to ditch their MySpace and Facebook accounts, they're persuading kids to sign up for a third or fourth social-networking site, along with the ones they already use. Funtigo shutting down in February 2004 and created a new page at funtigo.com/switch, which led to Piczo. The founder wrote back to ~100 of the teenagers who had emailed him earlier, telling them they could keep using the service if they switched to Piczo. It was Piczo's first and only marketing push.
The full article was originally published at Daily News, but is no longer available.
Mark Brooks: Friendster started similarly, with a small group of avid core users. Bebo (BirthdayAlarm.com users) and MySpace (eUniverse) had more of a marketing push, and faster growth rates.
BUSINESS WEEK — Oct 2 — Mark Cuban, the tech entrepreneur and owner the Dallas Mavericks, said on Sept. 29 that anyone who buys YouTube, one of the most popular video sites, is a "moron." Analyst Jordan Rohan of RBC Capital Markets argued that MySpace, the social networking site that generates a huge volume of video traffic, could be worth $15 billion in three years. News Corp. is now shifting more assets into the Internet. Members of the so-called Millennial generation, who were born starting around 1980, don't watch TV the way their parents did. Research firm Frank N. Magid Associates said in a report Millennials spend 2.48 hours a day online, the same amount of time they spend watching TV, and about 2.2 hours a day listening to music. Sorting out the intellectual property rights issues of video on the Web is a thorny issue; what Cuban had in mind when he made his comments.
The full article was originally published at Business Week, but is no longer available.
CNW — Oct 2 — Lavalife Magazine charts dating, relationships, sex, life and style among urban singles, featuring regular lifestyle stories, advice columns, pop culture digressions and opinion pieces infused with humor and common sense. Editor, Kim Hughes is a widely published writer and editor whose work has appeared in NOW, The Globe & Mail, National Post, Toronto Star, Report On Business, Salon, Amazon.com and Billboard. Features include "A History of Sex Toys," "Dating after the Death of a Partner" and "How to Avoid Dating a Jerk."
Mark Brooks: Adding compelling content to your dating site is a good move. Their are two methods. 1. Pay writers, 2. Encourage users to write. Match and Lavalife have gone with option 1. FriendFinder and PlentyofFish have gone with option 2 in the form of a user contributed magazine where readers vote up the good articles, and in the case of PlentyofFish, user forums.
PR NEWSWIRE — Oct 2 — TRUE's lawsuit against a convicted felon who misrepresented himself on TRUE has been settled. He agreed to not sign up to any online dating or relationship service, do community service and pay monetary damages to be donated to the Safer Online Dating Alliance or another organization dedicated to the mission of improving consumer safety.
Mark Brooks: TRUE started this suit back in Oct/Nov last year. See link. Your comments please.
Here are the top 5 Google Adsense Earners:
1) Markus Frind: PlentyOfFish.com – $300,000 per month
2) Kevin Rose: Digg.com – $250,000 per month
3) Jeremy Shoemaker: Internet Marketer – $140,000 per month
4) Jason Calacanis: Weblogs, Inc – $120,000 per month
5) David Miles Jr. & Kato Leonard: FreeWebLayouts.net – $100,000 per month
FULL ARTICLE @ JOHN CHOW BLOG
Mark Brooks: Online dating sites really can make money with advertising. Markus has proven it. TRUE is offering contextual advertising now.
PR WEB — Sep 27 — The most common searches purchased by members of services like eHarmony.com, Cupid.com and Match.com include background checks, marriage and divorce searches and criminal history checks. FULL ARTICLE @ PR WEB
TRICITY NEWS — Oct 1 — With work and kids and soccer practices and doctor appointments, how and when do people find the time to connect with one another? It's hard and that's why internet dating sites such as Lavalife and plentyoffish are so popular with singles of all ages. "The internet dating thing is huge – it's almost like a candy store!" a user exclaims, noting she could converse with – even date – several men at once.
OPW — Oct 1 — Just when you thought there were no more open niches left for dating sites, along comes Lonelybloggers. See blog. It’s prelaunch. LonelyBloggers, sounds daft…but, think about it. Who’s most likely to spread the word about this site. (I think I just bit the lure). Their marketing could be viral (cheap) enough for them to make a few bucks. – Mark Brooks
FIND LAW — Sep 28 — The federal government hasn't gotten into the business of regulating online dating but it does regulate international marriage brokers. There's 200 operating in the U.S. and each year several thousand American men meet their spouses through them. Some of the wives become victims of domestic violence. So congress passed a law, effective March 2006, requiring international marriage brokers to obtain criminal and background information from all of their members and disclose the information on their site. This law is a good idea. But it is one thing to move across the globe and get married, and entirely another to simply meet online and then to have a date. Congress has been right to stay out of the area of online dating so far, and the states may want to follow suit. New York is the only state that has a law specifically regulating online dating sites. But rather than attempting to ensure user safety, New York law targets fraud, regulating the quality and number of referrals the sites provide for a fee.
California, Florida, Michigan, Ohio, Virginia and Texas introduced online dating legislation recently. Some states want to mandate warnings on internet dating sites stating that no background checks have been conducted on users. Warnings are a good idea – preventing any false sense of security on the part of users. Sites should adopt them as liability protection. Other states may require checks be conducted. Criminal records vary from state to state, and from record to record, in their thoroughness, accuracy, and completeness. This poses a legal risk for the website. A user falsely branded a felon could sue for libel. (Communications Decency Act protections against libel liability don't apply to the author of a posting, only to its host; if the site authored "felon" notices, it could still be liable.) Conversely, a user who relied on an "all clear" result from the site, but then was assaulted or raped, could sue the site for a variety of torts including misrepresentation.
eBay users could be con artists or swindlers – yet eBay does not require a criminal background check. Instead, it relies largely on user feedback to police its marketplace. Some dating sites have used reputation in creative ways – either negatively, as with Dontdatehimgirl.com, or positively, as with sites where users get recommendations from exes with whom they are still friends. FULL ARTICLE @ FIND LAW
Mark Brooks: At the end of the day, cheap background checks fall short and can lead to a false sense of security. Many felony convictions are talked down to misdemeanours which are far harder to identify. But these background checks are still better than nothing. Dating services still offer a vast improvement over blindly meeting someone at a bar. Referrals from friends are still the best and safest way to meet someone…but internet dating sites offer the best selection of people where you can get all the 'difficult questions' out of the way right up front. Wants kids, doesn't smoke, social drinker etc. Singles should engage their friends, go to some of their parties, get on PlentyofFish (hey, it's free), get on a couple of paid services, and if they're so inclined ( i.e. very horny) join a casual dating site before they jump into the sack with someone and make it serious when it shouldn't be.