BUSINESS WIRE — Dec 6 — Mobestar today announced a Heads of Agreement to provide Telefuture International a branded version of its mDate mobile video dating product with an intention to complete commercial terms by February 2007. Telefuture are a Dutch-based interactive chat and dating service provider whose cross-media Television and Mobile products dominate the Dutch dating scene. FULL ARTICLE @ BUSINESS WIRE
Month: December 2006
Largest Dutch Dating Operator Selects Mobestar
BUSINESS WIRE — Dec 6 — Mobestar today announced a Heads of Agreement to provide Telefuture International a branded version of its mDate mobile video dating product with an intention to complete commercial terms by February 2007. Telefuture are a Dutch-based interactive chat and dating service provider whose cross-media Television and Mobile products dominate the Dutch dating scene. FULL ARTICLE @ BUSINESS WIRE
MySpace to Offer Technology to Block Sex Offenders
Paid Dating Sites Discover Local Spam
THE PARADIGM SHIFT BLOG — Dec 5 — Paid dating sites have now all adopted the strategy I created 3 years ago and taken it to the extreme. Check out google searches like garrison dating. Date.com Matchmaker.com take the top spots. Followed by match.com, AmericanSingles, Meetic and Match.com UK. Matchdoctor and others have started retooling their entire sites to try and rank high for local queries. Its like everyone just caught on in the last couple of months.
The full article was originally published at The Paradigm Shift, but is no longer available.
Online Ad Spend Growth
MARKETING VOX — Dec 4 — Internet ad spend will grow 28% in 2007, while the rest of the advertising market grows 3.9%. Apart from the internet, only cinema and outdoor are forecast to grow faster than the market to 2009. Paid search is the largest sector in online advertising and will account for nearly $14 billion in global ad spending in 2007.
The full article was originally published at Marketing Vox, but is no longer available.
Oodle Launches Personals
BUSINESS WIRE — Dec 4 — Oodle, the search engine for classifieds, launched Oodle Personals for consumers to search over a million public profiles from sites such as OkCupid and PlentyofFish as well as smaller community sites Nerve and GolfMates.com. Launched in April of 2005, Oodle provides an index of 19 million listings from 75,000 sources.
Mark Brooks: Lycos Dating Search has gone away. Dating sites paid on a cost per lead basis and fed them a flat file of members periodically. The lead stream wasn't what partner sites were hoping for unfortunately. Oodle seems like a better bet. No flat file, no CPL. Nice! I called them and they tell me they grew 463% since last year. They're funded by Greylock Ventures and Redpoint Ventures. Featured listings are available if you want to move your listings up in the search rankings and pay them some money.
U.K. Web Advertising Boom
NY TIMES — Dec 4 — Online advertising is racing ahead in Britain, growing at ~40%, and is expected to account for ~14% of overall ad spending this year, the highest level in the world, and more than double the percentage in the U.S. FULL ARTICLE @ NY TIMES
Mark Brooks: I heard from the CEO of Parship that advertising rates in the UK are the highest in Europe for online dating. I hear from other UK heads that the conversions are also some of the highest in Europe. Your comments please.
All That’s Fit To Print
MEDIA POST — Dec 4 — Newspaper circulation continues to fall. Online newspaper usage is up but online revenues are not making up for the loss and it could take as long as 30 years for online revenue to represent at least 50% of a newspaper's top line, according Merrill Lynch. According to the Newspaper Association of America, online newspaper advertising is up ~35% to $613 million in Q1 this year. The number of users who visit online newspaper sites is up 51% this year. Consumers want relevant, up-to-the-minute content.
Mark Brooks: Don't miss the boat. If you're a major dating site you need to have partnerships with newspaper sites now. Front load your CPA deals and lock them in for as long as possible. Then pamper them. AnotherFriend.com, along with Parship.de have done well in Europe through their newspaper deals.
A MySpace For Grown-ups
CNN MONEY — Dec 1 — Reid Hoffman's MySpace-for-grown-ups is at a tipping point. These days you're either LinkedIn or left out. LinkedIn (8 million members) is all about business: recruiting, sales, investment. After a slow start, the service has nearly doubled its membership during the past year. Seeded with Hoffman's own high-powered network, LinkedIn has raced past its rivals. Sequoia Capital and Greylock pumped ~$15 million into LinkedIn. The private company says it's profitable and on track to hit $100 million in revenue by 2008. LinkedIn makes money from advertising, and services. People – mainly the site's 60,000 recruiters – pay an average of $3,600 a year for premium features. Corporate members pony up six-figure fees for access to the network. FULL ARTICLE @ CNN
Mark Brooks: fyi, Reid Hoffman also invested in Friendster early on. LinkedIn is a 'high integrity' network. By that I mean, the associations that people make on the site are likely to be real associations. High integrity networks take a little longer to build. LinkedIn will eventually be worth as much, and more, than the likes of Facebook. Facebook recently expanded it's focus by opening up to the whole world. It's no longer a school Facebook. It;s no longer special or exclusive. It will grow in the short term but lose it's core market (students) in the long term to more focused competitors. WAYN.com also took a while to build but is growing very fast now. OurStory.com will take a long time to build but will do very well also.
Bharat Matrimony CEO, Muruga – OPW Interview
OPW INTERVIEW — Dec 1, 2006 — Murugavel Janakiraman is the Founder/CEO of BharatMatrimony which is based in Chennai in Southern India. In India, matrimonials sites are the norm. Matrimonials sites allow users (and their families) to post their profiles and find potential marriage partners. BharatMatrimony charges $10 to $15 per month for its services and provides 40 physical stores for customers without Internet access. Muruga's service recently received funding from Canaan Partners and Yahoo. – Mark Brooks
What is Bharat Matrimony's Founding Story? Who inspired you?
In 1997, I created a portal in US primarily to cater to the NRI (Non-Resident Indian) community as a platform to stay in touch with their hometown traditions and festivals. The portal was well received by its members and noticed that the matrimony segment of the portal being used widely by the members. This triggered the thought of starting an exclusive matrimonial website. And then I came back to India and started BharatMatrimony.com. Over the years, we developed successful regional portals like hindimatrimony.com, tamilmatrimony.com to serve the select audience. Today, we are the largest matrimonial portal in India with 7.5 million registered users. We have created a world record in marriages by arranging 8 times more marriages than our nearest competitor. Recently we officially entered into Limca Book of Records for highest number of online marriages. Limca Book of Record is equivalent to Guinness Record in India.
How do the offices/agents help members? Where are the members located?
Though an online portal, we as an organization always believed in the brick and mortar model and had 23 offices set across the country. These support offices handled telemarketing, payment collections and also helped customers who walked in for registrations. This interactive model inspired us to start our offline venture – BharatMatrimony centres. Our BharatMatrimony centres are positioned as the network of match making centers that provide easy access people who do not access internet. At BharatMatrimony centres, members can walk into any of our centre, located at 50 centres across 46 cities covering 16 states in India, and access millions of profiles with the help of our associates.
We have also tied-up with Department of Post, Government of India, to provide a unique service called "Pay at Post Office", which allows members to purchase BharatMatrimony membership cards from any of the Head Post offices across 18 states to upgrade or renew memberships. This new service has strengthened our brick and mortar model. We aim to have about 300 BharatMatrimony centres by 2008 across India and in select markets around the world. So, we are looking at over 4500 BharatMatrimony footprints across India through 3500 sify i-ways, 160 payment associates and 700 post offices thus becoming the largest networked service provider in matrimony.
How is Bharat Matrimony different from Shaadi?
BharatMatrimony is perceived as a most trusted and successful marriage portal because of its unique features. Marriage itself is a very serious concept in India and by understanding the market so well, we have consciously developed this brand identity. We are the largest player in the market today. This is a result of long list of innovations that we have initiated since inception. We are the only portal to provide Verified Profiles, Verification Services, 15 region specific portals, free horoscope generation in 9 languages, real time horoscope matching in 6 languages, Multi-lingual interface, Matrimony Reference and Mobile Alerts to name a few. The number of marriages we have arranged is far higher than any other site in the world and created a world record. Agencies like JuxtConsult and Alexa have ranked us as the most visited and the best recalled brand name in India. Click on this link to check for more details.
What have been your biggest challenges with Bharat Matrimony?
The biggest challenge for any online portal in India was the level of internet and PC penetration. And initially people were not really looking at internet as an option to find their life partners. So, the challenge was to build trust on online marriages with the members.
What are your top three goals for 2007? What business deals are you seeking?
With global leaders like Yahoo and Canaan partners investing in our group, we have plans of expanding our network in parts of UK and South East Asia to cater to the Indian Diaspora.
We have plans to significantly expand our presence on-ground and will also invest in the global personals space. We are looking at increasing our offline initiative, BharatMatrimony centres from 50 to over 300 across the country by 2008.
We also have plans to foray in to mobile services and launch new matrimony services, which will make us stronger in the industry.