PRESS RELEASE – Jan 17 – Bing.com, the decision engine by Microsoft, will present at the annual Internet Dating conference. The event takes place on January 23-30, 2012 at the Miami Beach Convention center. Jason Dailey, Director of Bing Evangelism and Microsoft Advertising together with Duane Forrester, Senior Product Manager, will talk about the Bing / Yahoo Resources and strategies specifically for dating sites at Search and Online Dating track.
THE TELEGRAPH – Jan 16 – AshleyMadison, an online dating agency targeting people seeking extra-marital affairs, is expanding its company in Australia due to high demand for the service. The growing dating trend has already attracted ~500K members in Australia with women accounting for 40% of its clients. Ashleymadison.com founder and CEO Noel Biderman said Australia had the fastest growing female membership in the world due to the high proportion of successful career women.
DAILY MAIL – Jan 16 - Sky-high tuition loans are turning more college-aged girls to the internet in hopes of wrangling in a wealthy suitor through an online dating site since it appears to be more profitable than an extra shift at the local coffee shop. SeekingArrangement.com brands itself as ‘the elite sugar daddy dating site for those seeking mutually beneficial relationships’ and was established in June 2006. The site has announced that it is seeing a spike in the number of female college students. New York University students top the list, followed by those at the University of Toronto and Penn State University. Even Harvard and UCLA made the top ten.
HINDUSTAN TIMES – Jan 13 – Shaadi.com got inspired by the now-legendary game Angry Birds and launched a Facebook game called Angry Brides. They have launched the game in the effort of creating awareness and discouraging the practice of dowry in India.
by Shayon Pal The full article was originally published at Hindustan Times, but is no longer available.
TECH CRUNCH – Jan 13 - Cupidtino, a dating site specifically for Apple fans, is still around. Last night they quietly debuted an iPhone application to complement their dating website. The app, which you can download here, is free and pitched as a “Mac-inspired dating app designed exclusively for fans of Apple products”. Users can upgrade their membership via in-app purchase for $4.99 per month, to read unlimited messages and chat with other Apple fans.
OPW – Jan 16 – I'm presenting on Monday 23rd January at iDate. This special 3 hour session is designed as an introduction to the online dating industry and will cover:
Overview of the Online Dating Industry
Business Models for Online Dating
Software Choices, Selection and/or Programming
Marketing Strategies
Latest Business Trends
New Technologies including Mobile
Customer Service Issues
Pitfalls Other Sites Face
This session is ideal for business executives and entrepreneurs looking to enter the business, and new hires.
OPW INTERVIEW – Jan 16 – Eric’s story is similar to Joel’s at Grindr. He runs a gay dating app, and its doing quite well. Here’s his story. – Mark Brooks
How many users do you have now? We’ve had more than a million registered users since we launched in 2010.
You’re MIT educated and you worked at Intel, Microsoft and Google. What led you to create the Scruff App and what’s your founding story? It was the end of 2009 and I wanted to learn more about app development. I looked at the apps that were on the market at that point and I really wanted to do something different for the gay community. I partnered with my good friend Johnny and after some exploration we launched Scruff. In addition to Scruff being a dating/social app for the gay community we wanted to create a new kind of brand that people wouldn’t be embarrassed to say: “We met on Scruff”.
Are you going to launch a straight App? Right now we’re happy with where we are so probably not any time in the near future.
You’ve replaced winks with woofs. How many woofs are people sending around the world? Quite a lot. It’s a really easy way to interact with people in addition to chat. At this point we see more than 30 messages a second being sent over our platform.
How else is your service different from the likes of Grindr? We’ve built a rich, multi-platform set of features. We’ve also thought a lot about different ways that people can interact with each other in addition to chat. For example; woofing, rate one another, see how you’ve been rated. We’re building a community around Scruff and Scruff is a group that encompasses lots of different types of people. It’s definitely resonated.
You’ve got a couple of paid subscriptions now. What do people get for the paid services and how much are they? We’ve launched a premium version that includes Browsing Pro and Messaging Pro. One enables you to view more profiles and customize your grid to a greater degree. The other gives you an unlimited inbox and message history.
Are you profitable at this stage? We have just become profitable.
Are you looking for funding? No we’re not looking for funding right now. It was a challenge in the beginning but we got through it and now it’s really exciting for us.
Where are you going to be in a year’s time? We’ve recently relocated back to Manhattan, which is really exciting! We’re seeing great growth globally and hope to do more global travels. In the next year we have a lot of really cool features we are going to launch – more with albums, search filters and a lot of events. We hope to bring Johnny Scruff and our team to even more events around the country and the world.
OPW – Jan 15 – Online Personals Watch is for executives and marketeers and innovators at internet dating sites to stay ahead of the news. Also for the press to research the industry. In 2004 when I was working at FriendFinder, friends would forward me news but I'd rarely find time to review the news. I thought it would be nice if someone could summarize it. There was no such service, so I started OPW. There's nuggets of wisdom and things worth knowing in most news. But it takes some digging. We've been digging since June 2004. You can find all the top news on your company in summary format by clicking on the name of your company at our Company Index.
We've also got some specialty blogs for you that focus even further in on the idating industry: So you can subscribe to InternetDatingJobs.com if you want to get job listings. InternetDatingScience.com if you want to get summaries and analysis of some of the top research relevant to the idating industry. Or perhaps you'd like to keep an eye on the news relevant to you as an investor in the internet dating industry. Go to InternetDatingInvestments.com. Are you an internet dating affiliate, or run a program, then subscribe to the InternetDatingAffiliates.com blog.
Mate1.com is an online dating service that is free to join. It is free for females in all aspects, whereas males must pay for certain features, such as email, chat and extra pictures. Mate1.com was registered as a website at the end of 2003 and founded as a company in 2004. Headquarters are located in Montreal, Quebec, but the site is international. Mate1.com is open to all people. Some say it targets certain age groups, like people over 25 as well as people over 40. It is also aligned with types of relationships, as in shorter but still intimate relationships as opposed to long term and very serious relations. Beyond any ideals the site hopes to create, Mate1.com is allowing of all persons (over 18) and one can find people seeking serious relationships, causal dating, social networking and many other types relationships.. There are over 25 million registered members on Mate1.com. The site is available to people anywhere in the world. Mate1.com offers 1-on-1 chat, free voice recordings, personal photo galleries and detailed profiles that enable users to find matching profiles in order to provide an interactive multimedia site.
OPW – Jan 17 – Our Courtland Brooks analyst reviewed the top payment providers, mobile payment and alternative payment providers that the dating industry are using. Email me at mark@courtlandbrooks.com for a copy. Here's why you should consider using a prepaid card payment system.
