WLD — July 8 — WhiteLabelDating.com introduced the ability for its members to upgrade using mobile payments last week. Since this introduction, they've seen a 10% increase in new partner revenue.
Month: July 2009
Adult Dating Market Players
E-COMMERCE — July 8 – Last year adult dating sites' growth rate was about 70%. AdultFriendFinder.com is the most popular adult-oriented dating site drawing millions of unique visitors per month. Besides AFF, there are many other sex-oriented dating sites including Fling.com, SexSearch and IWantU.com. Similar to the traditional dating sites, users lie about their personal information – age, marital status and appearance, so what you see may not be what you get. Sometimes men pretend to be women and women pretend to be men. Specialists suggest that up to 30% of all dating profiles are misleading.
The full article was originally published at E-Commerce, but is no longer available.
Mark Brooks: People tell white lies. iDaters should ask 'is your photo up to date' and 'is your profile and marriage status info accurate.' Sometimes profiles can be online a looong time. Users will join and cycle in and out of relationships (and their idating memberships) and neglect to update their profiles. ProfileHelper.com, LookBetterOnline.com and e-cyrano.com help users put their best profile forward. IWantU is dead and dying at this stage. (Full Disclosure: Fling is a client. The Founder of ProfileHelper.com is on the Courtland Brooks team.)
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Mobile Entertainment Seeking Players And Payment
REUTERS — July 8 — Online entertainment has increasingly moved to the mobile handset. According to the trade association Mobile Entertainment Forum, the global mobile entertainment industry is now worth $32 billion. The industry also remains confident that it can continue to grow strongly despite the current economic challenges, predicting average revenue growth of 28 % for 2010. CCS Insight analyst Paolo Pescatore believes the most popular sites such as Facebook might struggle to charge on mobile as users would still expect the service to be free. Other services that could prove to be successful will be those which offer a core aspect for free and then charge a small fee for premium content. One online and mobile service that has followed this route is Flirtomatic, a fun dating social network that allows users to post their profiles and rank each other from "freak" to "off the radar." Over 1m profiles have been posted so far. FULL ARTICLE @ REUTERS
Single Parents Prefer To Date Other Single Parents
PRWEB — July 8 – 92% of single parents would prefer to date other single parents according to a recent survey conducted by MumsDateDads, a new single parent dating site. The main reason was that they felt more comfortable dating someone with the same commitments and responsibilities as themselves. FULL ARTICLE @ PR WEBMark Brooks: SingleParentMeet.com is far the leader in this segment with 350k unique visitors last month. Meanwhile, ParentsAlready.com, SingleParentLove.com, SingleParentMatch.com, Singlemums.org, and others have a thousand uniques a month or less. I think I recognised the former CEO of a white label dating site on SingleMummy.com. Is that you Tim?
iDate L.A. Photo Montage
OPW — July 9 — Julie Spira has put together a photo montage of the West Coast iDate 2009, which took place on June 25-26 in Los Angeles. You can see the video below.
Review Of Four Of The Top Instant Messaging Service Providers
COURTLAND BROOKS — July 8 — Dating site owners are faced with a difficult question about how to position IM on their sites without negatively impacting conversion rates. We have reviewed 4 top IM service providers; toksta.com, ekko.tv, Meebo.com and Omnidate. We analyzed their feature sets, technology, fees and how they can be a fit for the online dating industry. VISIT COURTLAND BROOKS BLOG FOR MORE DETAILS
Domain4Sale: FriendshipDirect.com
OPW — July 8 — Friendshipdirect.com and FriendshipDirect.co.uk are for sale by jack.knowles@forces365.com
for 35k GBP all in. "You probably know that 'friendship' is fast
becoming more popular on the internet and 'DatingDirect.com' is a very
well-known domain." They've had offers on the domains close to this
pricepoint, apparently. Contact Jack directly if you're interested.
Got
a domain or site to sell? Send 'em our way and we'll list them for
free. Just let us know when they are sold and for how much so we can
list that as well.
Google Chrome OS?
OPW — July 8 — I love Google Chrome. It's simple, maximizes my screen real estate for browsing, and is the fastest browser I've used yet. IE, Safari, Opera move over. Chrome rocks. Now Google has announced that its going to build it into a simple OS for netbooks for the web-inclined. Nice move, but how about the Mac version? I'm using the Chromifox Extreme skin on Firefox while waiting for the Mac intro. This Chrome hack for Mac wasn't so stable. Anyway, rant aside, what implications does this have for the iDating/SNS industry. Flock is nice, but I'd expect more integration opportunities for iDating/SNS services within a Chrome OS. IM providers should definitely take note of this news. Userplane's Desktop app never got traction but there's still an opportunity for an integrated and reliable ever present app melded into a Chrome OS. Dating sites and SNS have an opportunity to get one step closer to being ever-present in front of their users, when the Google Chrome OS is introduced. Your comments please.
The Right One, Internal Memo
OPW — July 7 — The Wisconsin Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against Great Expectations (GE) alleging that the Milwaukee-area branch of the national dating service engaged in “deceptive and illegal sales practices,” according to the Chicago Tribune. The Wisconsin DoJ suit specifically accuses the GE office of distorting its fees, embellishing its number of member marriages and defying the state’s no-call policy, according to the Tribune.
The Right One and Together Dating are competitors to GE and CEO Paul Falzone and owner Brad Megahan wrote in a June 25 memo “The Right One/Together Dating has always and will always conduct its business in an ethical manner.” Falzone and Megahan referenced the GE lawsuit: “Also mentioned in the investigation were high pressure sales tactics, such as holding onto a perspective member’s driver’s license and credit cards to prolong interview. We will not tolerate these practices at The Right One and Together Dating.” The pair went on to instruct all employees to review The Right One/Together Dating training curriculum, which details the organization’s ethics policies and proper business guidelines. They also reminded staff never to quote membership statistics, due to the constantly changing makeup of the company’s clientele.
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Top Dating Apps
OPW — July 7 — Here's the social networking app rankings for the top lifestyle-datingesque apps today. From AppData.com
1. Zoosk 5.60m MAU (drifting down since mid-May)
2. Are You Interested 2.60m MAU (trending slowly downards)
3. Mon Coeurs 1.50m MAU (fast rise, slow decline)
4. Speeddate 0.70m MAU (growing)
5. Meet New People 0.55m MAU (slow decline)
MAU – Monthly Active Users