OPW – June 25 – Contact John Sprague if you are interested in his portfolio of brandable/geo "cupid" and "matchmaking" domains including:
– AvatarCupid.com
– XCupid.com
– HollywoodCupid.com
– BabyBoomerCupid.com
– LasVegasCupid.com
– MandarinCupid.com
See the full list.
John is willing to sell most names individually, or all 139 names as one lot for $12,999.
THE BIG MONEY – June 27 – Most subscription-based sites have been
battling a downward trend for a while. And since last year, Match.com's
traffic has been flat at best. As Techcrunch notes, Match.com does most
of its growing these days by buying competing Web sites, rather than
reinventing the world's oldest dance. Match.com is also becoming
Yahoo's official personals service. In the same vein, eHarmony found
itself last summer trying to explain how a 20% increase in
registrations led to a 33% drop in traffic. The numbers suggest that
while singles in search of a match may post a profile, they're not
finding who they're looking for. The true threat is "noneconomic"
competition that steals market share and has no interest in selling
out. Markus Frind created Plenty of Fish as a coding exercise in 2003.
Primarily supported by advertising, Frind this year introduced a paid
membership level for users who are "serious," but the site still has
free access. But as in any good arms race, even Frind is now promising
that his site can predict whom its users will end up marrying, so he is
taking the fight to paid sites' intellectual turf. FULL ARTICLE @ WASHINGTON POST
See all posts on Match.com
See all posts on eHarmony
See all posts on Plentyoffish
3) AmberCupid.com
4) AsiaEuroCupid.com
5) AvatarCupid.com
6) BabyBoomerCupid.com
7) BabyBoomersCupid.com
8) BronzeCupid.com
Top 10 most popular Chinese languages:
1) MandarinCupid.com (Mandarin
2) WuCupid.com (Wu-Ranked #11 in the world; 77 million people)
3) CantoneseCupid.com (Cantonese–
4) MinnanCupid.com (Min-Ranked #23 in the world; 60 million people)
5) JinyuCupid.com (Jinyu-Ranked #24 in the world; 45 million people)
6) XiangCupid.com (Xiang-Ranked #29 in the world; 36 million people)
7) HakkaCupid.com (Hakka-Ranked #31 in the world; 34 million people)
8) GanCupid.com (Gan-Ranked #45 in the world; 31 million people)
9) HuiCupid.com (Hui-3.2 million people)
10) PingCupid.com (Ping-2 million people)
11) YueCupid.com (*Yue is often referred as Cantonese)
12) MinCupid.com (*Min is the abbreviated version of Minnan)
Other Top-50 World-Wide languages:
1) JavaneseCupid.com (Javanese
2) TeluguCupid.com (Telugu–
3) OriyaCupid.com (Oriya–
4) SundaCupid.com (Sunda–
5) BhojpuriCupid.com (Bhojpuri
6) MaithiliCupid.com (Maithili
7) HausaCupid.com (Hausa–
8) AwadhiCupid.com (Awadhi–
9) YorubaCupid.com (Yoruba–
10) SindhiCupid.com (Sindhi–
1) AfghanMatchmaking.com
2) AfricanMatchmaking.com
3) ArgentineMatchmaking.com
4) ArmenianMatchmaking.com
5) AustrianMatchmaking.com
6) BangladeshiMatchmaking.com
7) BrazilianMatchmaking.com
8) BritishMatchmaking.com
9) BurmeseMatchmaking.com
10) CambodianMatchmaking.com
11) ChileanMatchmaking.com
12) ColombianMatchmaking.com
13) CroatianMatchmaking.com
14) CubanMatchmaking.com
15) CzechMathmaking.com
16) DominicanMatchmaking.com
17) DutchMatchmaking.com
18) EgyptianMatchmaking.com
19) EthiopianMatchmaking.com
20) GermanMatchmaking.com
21) GreekMatchmaking.com
22) HaitianMatchmaking.com
23) HongKongMatchmaking.com
24) IndonesianMatchmaking.com
25) IranMatchmaking.com
26) IraqiMatchmaking.com
27) IsraeliMatchmaking.com
28) ItalianMatchmaking.com
29) JamaicanMatchmaking.com
30) JapanMatchmaking.com
31) KenyanMatchmaking.com
32) KiwiMatchmaking.com
33) KuwaitiMatchmaking.com
34) LituanianMatchmaking.com
35) MexicanMatchmaking.com
36) MorrocanMatchmaking.com
37) NigerianMatchmaking.com
38) PakistaniMatchmaking.com
39) PersianMatchmaking.com
40) PolishMatchmaking.com
41) PortugueseMatchmaking.com
42) RomainianMatchmaking.com
43) SaudiMatchmaking.com
44) SerbianMatchmaking.com
45) SingaporeanMatchmaking.com
46) SouthAfricanMatchmaking.com
47) SouthKoreanMatchmaking.com
48) SwedishMatchmaking.com
49) TaiwaneseMatchmaking.com
50) ThaiMatchmaking.com
51) VietnameseMatchmaking.com
BIV BUSINESS TODAY – June 25 - Markus Frind, the founder of PlentyofFish.com, said that he will launch an iPhone app within the next few weeks. That will give the site’s 6.1M unique visitors in May another way to check their e-mails and browse for potential suitors.
The full article was originally published at BIV Business Today, but is no longer available.
THE 33TV – June 24 - Entrepreneur Dave Wilkie says, on average, it takes online daters 2-3 weeks to finally meet someone in person. That's why he decided to create a tool that speeds things up. It's called Weopia: a 3-D dating world where daters get to know each other by playing games and quizzes and talking to each other live. Wilkie says going on a virtual date is less intimidating and takes less time. Another added bonus: It's safe. There's no need to leave your house, and there's no awkward first encounter. "You don't have to finish a 2-hour dinner," Wilkie said. At Weopia, you just reject with one mouse click. A 1-day pass to Weopia is $4.95, or $18.95 a month.
The full article was originally published at The 33TV, but is no longer available.
BENZINGA – June 24 - Compute.org, a non-profit foundation founded by Andrew Conru, will put its money where its mouth is by giving out substantial seed grants to a wide variety of Internet and software startups. The foundation hopes to reach its target goal of $5M in financial support by the end of 2010. Compute.org will have no ownership in any of the companies chosen to receive funding, nor will they receive any financial gain or equity as a result. The foundation hopes to seed between 50-100 startups, with the goal of at least 1,000 new jobs. Conru founded Compute.org with a $5M donation from his own pocket. His most recent business, which was sold for $500M, was started with money earned from a small web development project for a non-profit organization. FULL ARTICLE @ BENZINGA
Mark Brooks: Could Andrew Conru become the Bill Gates of the idating world? (FD: I worked for FriendFinder '03-'04)
OPW INTERVIEW – June 24 – One day dating sites will combine mobile, with location based services and hey…looks like Skout is doing this already. Keep your eyes on this young buck company. They’re innovating up a storm and gaining traction with younger hipper, social, iphone touting audiences. – Mark Brooks
What are some of the features that you’ve found that people have been using the most across your mobile dating apps?
Definitely the “See who is around” feature. If a guy is looking for Asian girls in San Francisco he can see who is active tonight and reach out to them with an instant messaging solution. There is also a lot of chatting as well as photo sharing. People can also publicly comment on the photos being posted. Those are the features that we feel are of the highest use.
With the location based service, one of the concerns that always comes up is safety. How do you safeguard the user’s privacy? When they want to be found how do you help them? When they don’t want to be found how do you make sure they’re not?
Privacy is something we have to address very carefully. Since we’re in the people discovery business we don’t show exactly where someone is. We would never show you on the map. We only display that you are within a certain distance of someone, so the service is very different from Foursquare, for instance. If you choose to connect with someone, you have to explicitly tell them where you are. It’s more than an opt-in solution for revealing where you are.
Given that the location based services are down to meters, wouldn’t it be more accurate to use a new term? Either vicinity based systems or district based systems?
Yes I think proximity is a pretty good word – proximity based dating. Nobody calls it GPS tracking. It’s good for tracking cargo on the sea, it’s good for down to the meter tracking of inventory but I don’t think people would need to track other people on the granular level. You can only locate them through cell tower positioning, which might be in a 0.5 mile radius. I personally think that’s close enough. If you can get to the person in a 10 minute cab drive, it is close enough. It doesn’t have to be down to the meter at all.
What kind of demographics use the service?
It ranges between 20 to 35; young professionals who live in large cities, LA, Bay Area, New York and so forth. They spend a lot of time in the bars having fun. They are very outgoing and social and not looking to commit tomorrow. They’re not there to get married but they are there to meet new friends and potential dates as well as expand their network.
Now that you run Skout and BoyAhoy.com, what would you say would be your top competitors?
For BoyAhoy, which is our gay brand, Grindr is our top competitor. They provide a similar service. There are some differences of course but it is still a location based service. For Skout, which is a brand for everyone, for straight and gay people, we don’t have any big threats that we can even track at this point.
How big are both services at this stage? How fast are they growing?
At Skout we’re seeing 200,000 new members per month and at BoyAhoy we see around 70,000 new members per month. The growth has been phenomenal. In the past 7 to 8 months we’ve seen 25 to 35 percent growth month over month. It’s through the roof.
What platforms are you on?
We are on the iPhone, and Mobile Web; we have a destination site as well. We’re launching Android shortly as well as Symbian.
How are you promoting the services?
It’s been a lean start up and we haven’t done a ton of ads. We get a lot of attention from the media. Then of course there is the traditional word of mouth where people recommend us to their friends.
Moving forward, we’re definitely looking into how can we leverage other social graphs to fuel the growth even faster. And we definitely plan expanding to new platforms that will give us better reach.
How are you making money at this stage? Are you break even?
We are profitable. The way we monetize is with a hybrid model. We offer premium accounts, we have a virtual economy where users can buy virtual gifts with virtual currency and we also have a feature where users can buy advertising for themselves.
We’re definitely looking into transaction versus subscription models and doing a lot of experimentation in those regards. So we’ll see in a few months what we have to settle for, if it’s going to be a hybrid model or be a transaction only or subscription.
Is there any advertising in the works?
There isn’t a lot of money in mobile advertising. It’s not performing really well.
You also have an iPad app in the works; can you tell us more about that?
Yes we have an iPad app and its core functionality is the same as the iPhone but it does have a really new cool feature coming out. We call it “hot map”. Depending on what type of people you want to meet tonight, we use historical data and real time data to figure out where you should go.
CHANNEL NEWS ASIA – June 24 - A regional dating survey of singles in Singapore, Malaysia and Hong Kong has found that Singaporeans are the most open to the idea of online matchmaking and dating. 85% of 630 singles in Singapore polled were willing to try an online matchmaking agency. 41% have used online dating compared to 26% last year. Violet Lim, founding director, Lunch Actually, said: “In the past, when we did a similar survey online dating did not rank so high". The company has launched eSynchrony, a personality-based matchmaking platform that seeks to integrate online and "offline" dating. “The key difference to eSynchrony compared to other personality tests platforms out there is that we actually arrange the dates. This is a good compromise to dating between online and offline and encourage more singles to be pro-active to go out there and find love", said Violet.
The full article was originally published at Channel News Asia, but is no longer available.
LA TIMES – June 23 - Last week business owners and industry experts discussed the latest trends and ideas at the iDate 2010 Internet Dating Conference. We asked Mark Brooks, an industry expert and the event's spokesperson, to tell us a bit about what's going on. Upwardly mobile: Over the last few years, mobile dating has skyrocketed. (In February, Whitney Casey, Match.com's relationship expert, said that the mobile members alone grew 250% from 2008 to 2009). More important, Brooks says users are now willing to pay for it, thus helping the industry have "moderate growth over the year and looking up for 2012." Brooks praises GPS-based dating site Skout, which certainly thought bigger. Called the HotMap, Skout's iPad app gives a real-time rundown of nearby singles. Brooks also said that dating sites need to "look at other industries" like movie-theater chain Cinemark, or Starbuck's. "They're there anyway, they might as well form an alliance or bond," he says. FULL ARTICLE @ LA TIMES