Month: August 2011

College Students Using ‘Sugar Daddies’ to Pay Off Loan Debt

Posted on August 2, 2011

Sugardaddy seekingarrangement HUFFINGTON POST – July 29 – Saddled with piles of student debt and a job-scarce, lackluster economy, current college students and recent graduates are selling themselves to pursue a diploma or pay down their loans. "Over the past few years, the number of college students using our site has exploded," says Brandon Wade, founder of SeekingArrangement.com. Of the site's ~800K members, Wade estimates that 35% are students. Wade rewards students who use a .edu email address to register on Seeking Arrangement by automatically upgrading their free, basic membership to a premium membership, allowing them to send unlimited free messages and granting them exclusive access to the site's cadre of VIP sugar daddies. Married men account for ~40% of the site's sugar daddies. Sugar babies outnumber sugar daddies by a ratio of nearly 10 to 1. Noel Biderman, founder and CEO of Avid Life Media, runs a number of arrangement-seeking sites. On one such site, EstablishedMen.com, Biderman estimates that 47% of its 1.3M members are women currently enrolled in college. And on ArrangementSeekers.com, he says 31% of its 387,000 members are female college students.

by Amanda M. Fairbanks
See full article at Huffington Post

See all posts on SeekingArrangement
See all posts on EstablishedMen

Zoosk Launches Employee Recruitment Campaign

Posted on August 2, 2011

Zoosk logo new DIGITAL JOURNAL – Aug 1 - Zoosk has launched 'Find a Job. Get a Date.' recruitment campaign to attract talented software engineers to the fast-growing company. Anyone who applies for open engineering positions at Zoosk and begins employment by September 30, 2011 is eligible for a chance to go on a date with Samantha, the star of Zoosk's latest TV commercial, 'Office Romance,' or Steve, star of Zoosk's popular TV commercial, 'Athlete,' which recently aired in the US, UK and Australia.

See full article at Digital Journal

See all posts on Zoosk

Inside Match.com

Posted on August 1, 2011

Match logo new FINANCIAL TIMES – July 31 – With the number of paying subscribers using Match approaching 1.8M, the ­company has had to develop ever more ­sophisticated programs to manage, sort and pair the world’s singles. Codenamed “Synapse”, the Match algorithm uses a variety of factors to suggest possible mates. While taking into account a user’s stated ­preferences, such as desired age range, hair colour and body type, it also learns from their actions on the site. Academics call this “dissonance”. Amazon uses similar ­technology to recommend new products for people to buy, Pandora learns from likes and dislikes to customise its internet radio stations, and Netflix famously offered $1m to anyone who could improve the effectiveness of its algorithm by 10%. Match began “weighting” variables differently, according to how users behaved. For example, if conservative users were actually looking at profiles of liberals, the algorithm would learn from that and recommend more liberal users to them. The Match algorithm is constantly at work behind the scenes, scouring terabytes of data and working to find possible matches.

by David Gelles
See full article at Financial Times

See all posts on Match.com

Young Adult Dating Trend Slows Road to Marriage

Posted on August 1, 2011

Reuters article REUTERS – July 31 - "stayover relationships" is a dating trend that allows singles to enjoy committed relationships without living together, new research shows. A study from the University of Missouri-Columbia revealed that as an alternative to fully cohabiting couples are spending three of more nights together a week and still maintaining their own homes, which could help to explain recent U.S. census data that indicates people are getting married later. Comfort and convenience are the biggest attractions of stayover relationships among young adults.

by Paula Rogo
See full article at Reuters

The Marriages Made in Cyberspace

Posted on August 1, 2011

Indian matrimony1 THE NATIONAL – July 31 - Online matchmaking companies in India are becoming evermore popular as the population becomes increasingly engaged with the internet. In 1996, Anupam Mittal went from house to house, trying to arrange a match. Every visit that resulted in a wedding earned him a tidy commission.The marriage broker got Mr Mittal thinking: how many houses is it possible for a broker to visit each day? Was the choice of potential spouses restricted only to his limited pool of clients? That is how shaadi.com was born, some 15 years ago. The web portal – which currently has 20M users and is responsible ~ 2 million weddings so far – was last year listed among the top 20 digital brands in the country by Brand Equity and the Nielsen company. The communications company MSL Group Asia says ~10% of India's internet users have at some point accessed a matrimonial site. Two market leaders – Mr Mittal's shaadi.com and bharatmatrimony.com, founded in 1997 by Murugavel Janakiraman – together control 70% of the online matrimony market between them, according to JuxtConsult.

by Anuj Chopra
See full article at The National

See all posts on Shaadi
See all posts on BharatMatrimony

Daters.ru to Sponsor iDate in Russia

Posted on August 1, 2011

Datersru logo PRESS RELEASE - Daters.ru, an affiliate message board and community for dating affiliates, is supporting the 8th annual iDate on September 29-30, 2011 in Moscow. iDate Moscow covers the business of online dating, affiliate marketing, matchmaking, social dating, mobile and the personals industry in Europe and Eastern Europe.

See full article at Benzinga