NY TIMES — July 2 — Spark Networks, the owner of JDate, runs 32 dating sites. In the first quarter of 2009, JDate’s sites accounted for $7.6m of the company’s $12m revenue. JDate is the oldest of the company’s services, which partly explains its success. Ron James’s marriage of 13 years ended so he joined JDate. In 18 months, he e-mailed 500 to 600 women and dated 40 to 50. “Internet dating in the 21st century is a hard process,” he said. Over that year and a half there were women he met who lied about their age, posted photos that were 10 years old, misrepresented their jobs and pretended to be more successful than they were. “A lot of the photos didn’t look like them,” he said. “I learned to watch out for sunglasses.” FULL ARTICLE @ NY TIMES
Month: July 2009
Match.com To Acquire People Media
PRESS RELEASE — July 7 — Match.com has signed an agreement to acquire People Media, a leading operator of 27 targeted dating sites including BlackPeopleMeet, SingleParentMeet, SeniorPeopleMeet, BBPeopleMeet and LDSPlanet, with a combined 255K paying subscribers. IAC will pay $80m in cash for People Media, which had $11.6m of EBITDA in 2008. FULL ARTICLE @ WASHINGTON POST
Mark Brooks: Spark Networks is going to have some stiff competition now. Match will be able to circulate traffic around multiple properties and monetize better. That will allow them to get more volume with their improve ARPU. Your comments please.
iDate L.A. Photos
OPW — July 7 — If you were at the 2009 West Coast Internet Dating Conference, it’s time to see if you got caught on candid camera!
Photos from this year’s event at the posh SLS Hotel in Beverly Hills are now up online at the iDate website. Hundreds of Internet dating and social networking executives were in attendance, along with venture capitalists, marketing organizations, advertising firms, payment processors and background search companies. Check out pictures of the expert panelists, who included Bravo TV star Patti Stanger (Millionaire's Club), Deepak Thomas (Match), Alex Mehr (Zoosk), and Mark Brooks (Online Personals Watch). Plus, relive all the action from the lavish evening party and delicious lunchtime buffet to the exhibit hall, where virtual goods provider Viximo and other companies had their cutting-edge products on display.
iDate conventions are considered some of the most prominent and beneficial events for executives in the online personals and matchmaking industries. The next Internet Dating Conference will take place in London on Sept. 24-25, followed by Miami on Jan. 28-29. Click here to register!
Final Panel Session
Userplane General Manager Interview
OPW — July 7 — I'm very happy to report that Userplane is not going to close in the foreseeable future now. Darin Ohlandt is the GM of Userplane and was able to attend the Internet Dating Conference / Social Networking Conference and officially announce that Userplane is not going to be 'retired' and everything is business as usual. I followed up with Darin with a few questions, and here's the official word.
– Is Userplane going to shut down?
No. Userplane is not going to close and services will continue to be provided.
– Can clients be assured that AOL will keep Userplane live and alive for at least the next year?
Yes. AOL fully supports the Userplane services and customers.
– Are there any 'classes' of clients (i.e. adult dating) that Userplane is no longer servicing?
Userplane remains committed to providing services to our customers, regardless of any ‘classes.'
– How many people work at Userplane now?
AOL does not disclose specific staffing levels. However, we can confirm that the staffing of the Userplane team was reduced in March as part of a general reorganization that affected all AOL divisions.
– How many of those are involved with client/customer service?
Userplane has a dedicated team for tier-one customer support, in addition to support from other Userplane groups including development, operations and business development. The staffing of the tier-one support team has been constant for well over a year. We have continued to provide customer support and have responded to our customer service and new customer integration requests, with no breaks in service, although response times can be affected by the depth of service queues.
– Are there any new product announcements coming up that you can let us know about?
We have no new product announcements at this time, but will certainly work with you when we have any new developments to announce.
Borders UK Connects Singles In Matchmaking Game
MARKETING VOX — July 6 – Borders UK runs Happily Ever After, a service for single customers looking to meet other singles with an interest in books. According to The Bookseller, for an introductory period the monthly membership fee is approximately $1.66 USD. The fee will eventually rise to about $16.60 USD, writes Retailer Daily. In addition to dating services, Happily Ever After features dating books for discounts as high as 25%. Online dating support services company Whitelabeldating.com provides the software and database, as well as payment processing, customer support and hosting services.
The full article was originally published at Marketing Vox, but is no longer available.
Dating In The Digital Age
CAHOOTS MAGAZINE — July 6 – "Perception of dating services is changing. Acceptance comes through education," says Christine Hart, Calgary-based dating coach. Hart suggests that singles are more aware of their choices, and are therefore more particular, developing higher personal standards. She also says that ages 35 and under are comfortable online, while 35 to 40-year-olds are about half and half, and the 40+ group still refers coaching and meeting in person.
The full article was originally published at Cahoots Magazine, but is no longer available.
Mark Brooks: Dating sites offer a world of choice. People can be choosy. I fear they may be being too choosy. Are personal standards too high? Your comments please.
Greg Arnot, CEO Of Kalerion
OPW INTERVIEW — July 4 — Greg Arnot is he’s the CEO of Kalerion Computing and also runs a product called Jivebug.com. Jivebug has been recently launched on Facebook so everyone, everywhere has the ability to know when their Facebook buddies are around. – Mark Brooks
How long has Kalerion Computing been around and what does Kalerion do?
We founded the company in 2004 and we’ve been doing a lot of good engineering work since then. We’re kind of a dating site with a difference. We’re using peoples’ mobile handsets to put them in touch with other people. So if I get close to somebody who is also in the community, my phone beeps.
And this is on a mobile phone as opposed to a land based phone?
Yes, it wouldn’t go very far with a land based handset. The communication protocol that we use for one phone to identify another is Bluetooth.
In order for those 2 phones to communicate, do both of those phones need to be registered within the network?
Yes, they need to be part of the network and they would typically need to have our mobile client running, but not necessarily. We also have a kind of clientless support for phones by changing the friendly Bluetooth of the user’s device to something recognizable to our mobile client. That way we are able to give a similar suite of functionality to somebody with a mobile phone that is not necessarily running our mobile software.
We have just launched a new functionality for Facebook. Somebody on Facebook can install our mobile application and be alerted or warned proactively when they come close to somebody else from Facebook. Let’s say I’ve got hundreds of friends on Facebook that I’ve never met. My phone beeps when one of my friends is close to me. I can send him a message or I can go over and start talking to him.
And more interestingly… if 2 people are on Facebook and they’re not friends, then in that case we apply a dating criterion. The resulting alert in that case would be anonymous.
But if I was at a party with all my friends that signed up to your system, my phone is going to go crazy then?
We would love that to be the case. Most dating attempts around proximity alerts have failed miserably because they didn’t do enough to foster proximity. There are only 1 or 2 mobile dating applications in the world that can do multiple simultaneous Bluetooth detections in a multi-threaded Java client and not crash the phone. Ours is one of them.
So our application can be simultaneously queuing up multiple incoming alerts for different people whether they are friends on Facebook or simply available singles.
So this is Jivebug™?
Yes, that’s the product you install on your phone. At the moment our application has a different name on Facebook but when it goes live in May it will be called Jivebug.
What is your background? How did you end up learning all this stuff?
I was in international marketing for about 13 years before I decided to get into dating. I came to Spain and when I went to parties, I was surrounded by beautiful women and I didn’t know which girls were single. Then even if you knew…how do you make the approach? How do you go over there and make that first introduction? So that’s how I got into it and started Jivebug.
How did you learn all those technical skills?
I was trained as an electronics engineer but I don’t program. I’ve learned this by having very good people working for us.
Are you looking to work with some of the other dating companies?
If you look at some of the success of the dating companies that have launched recently on Facebook, we think there is a lot of potential to grow with relatively little outlay in marketing dollars. That is an avenue that is interesting to us.
In terms of collaborating with the likes of the big players, I really don’t think that they believe we’re a threat yet. If we ever become a threat, maybe they’ll want to talk to us. We certainly are open.
How does the revenue model work for this kind of system with blue dating as you call it?
At the moment it’s pretty much free. We offer as much as we can for free and the basic currency of communicating with someone over the website is going to be free because we’re so closely matched to what Facebook is doing.
In the future, we’re going to be offering premium services. One part of our business is based on key learnings from the parties we’ve thrown; we know that girls in particular don’t like to meet the person the same night. So there is a “morning after effect” where people come to our website the next day to make contact with the person they met the night before and that’s an opportunity for us. So most of the time communication is free but in certain cases you might just have to pay.
Downturn Dating
ASSOCIATED PRESS — July 2 — Some singles are now hunting for dates with the same fervour others are showing hunting for jobs. Membership on eHarmony is up 20% despite monthly fees of up to $60, and activity has soared 50% since September at OkCupid.com. “People are looking for something that’s genuine in a world that isn’t very secure,” said Bathsheba Birman, co-founder of the Chicago dating event Nerds at Heart. Attendance at the monthly gatherings, where mostly young professionals pay $25 for a drink and a chance to spend the evening clustered around trivia and board games — was more than double expectations in April and has stayed high since.
The full article was originally published at Lethbridge Times, but is no longer available.
Friendship First
WLD BLOG — July 2 — There are still people out there that would rather seek friendship in the hope that it turns into more. Friendsormates.com, friendsofyours.com and ukfriendsdating.co.uk are examples of sites that approach dating in a much more subtile way – focusing on the friendship aspect, trying to match people with people who have similar interests and hobbies.
Outsourced Online Dating
PRESS RELEASE — July 1 — Done For You Dating is a new service that lets singles delegate their online dating to a representative who manages their profile and exchanges messages under their name. Dating representatives at the company are selected to be socially savvy, skilled writers who are knowledgeable about popular culture. They receive specific training in online dating and personal branding. Company founder Luke Chao is the managing director of The Morpheus Clinic for Hypnosis, where he first started helping men overcome problems interacting with women. He is the ghostwriter of several books, including Sydnee Steele's Seducing Your Woman.
The full article was originally published at eMedia Wire, but is no longer available.
Mark Brooks: I like the idea of these virtual matchmakers, but they MUST disclose that they are a matchmaker. Of course, as soon as they disclose they are a matchmaker they'll be flagged and kicked off most dating sites. Does your dating site allow matchmakers? Lets take this into the comments section. Your comments please.