OPW – Feb 13 – Here is a list of internet dating related domains. Please contact Marco Lavanna if you are interested.
- thesocialnetwork.org – $15,000
- nodates.com – $350
- datereality.com – $350
- dateclone.com – $350
- datecrate.com – $300
- howtomeetgaymen.com – $1,000
- asiandatingonline.net – $5,000
- findyourlovematch.com – $2,500
OPW – Feb 14 – iDate has a Valentines Day special registration price for the next mobile focused Internet Dating Conference that is held in Los Angeles, June 20-22, 2012. The price is today $575 vs $1250 at the door. Photos from Miami iDate are live now.
BLOOMBERG – Feb 13 – Every time dating sties are successful, they lose two customers. Shayan Zadeh and Alex Mehr think they have a solution. They're the co-founders and co-CEOs of Zoosk. They have been thinking of ways to spur growth by becoming more like LinkedIn, a hub for job seekers that's also a destination for people not actively looking for a new gig. This month, Zoosk will begin offering features to keep happy couples engaged with the site. These include anniversary gift ideas, digital scrapbooks, restaurant discounts and relationship advice from experts. Most of the extra features will be free to Zoosk couples who keep their profiles active. Zoosk became profitable in the fourth quarter and revenue surpassed $90M last year, according to Zadeh.
FT – Feb 13 – Internet dating companies are expecting a boost in business in the run-up to Valentine’s day as increasing numbers of people log online for love. "We start to see an increase in activity from the end of Dec and that builds up to Valentine’s day,” said Karl Gregory, managing director of Match.com in the UK and Ireland. The UK market, with an estimated £120M a year in revenue, has more than 800 dating websites. Edinburgh-based Cupid, which trades under names including benaughty.com and girlsdateforfree.com, is the sector’s only London-quoted company. The company projects achieving £100M in revenue by 2014, a fourfold increase on 2010. It has spent more than £10M on acquisitions to raise client volumes, expanding operations to 16 countries using 10 different websites. Unlike Match.com, which builds up strong single brands, Cupid focuses on a lot of niche markets such as expat Indian dating and single parents.
by Christopher Thompson and Jennifer Thompson
See full article at FT
THEAGE.COM.AU – Feb 12 – A 2010 Nielsen random survey of 2K Australians found a quarter had tried online dating, of which 16% had formed long-term relationships as a result. One technology that has dramatically altered the playing field is Grindr, the mobile app that employs GPS tracking to allow gay men to check out other users in the area (a version for straight users, Blendr, recently entered the market). Grindr is so popular that Melbourne comic Nath Valvo created a show around it for this year's Midsumma festival and sold out every performance. The comedian says he knows men who wouldn't have been able to come out if they hadn't had access to the relative safety of chat rooms and other internet tools, and it's a case that extends beyond the gay community. Online dating can provide a sense of empowerment in that it can offer people a high level of control in how they manage their interactions and self-presentation.
PC WORLD – Feb 12 – The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) reports online dating sites come with big holes in security that compromise at least the privacy and possibly the financial security of their users. EFF points out six major weak points in the security and practices of online dating sites.OREGON LIVE – Feb 12 – More 20-somethings are on online dating sites than ever, and their numbers are growing. Only 8% of users on Match.com are under 30. Free sites like OkCupid and PlentyofFish report much stronger numbers among 20-somethings. In fact, the majority of OkCupid's 8M members are under 30, with the most common age being 24. In the past year, countless more sites have sprung up promising to be the next big thing in online dating for the young adult. They tend to be more tech-savvy, carefree and interactive. There's MeetMoi, a mobile-based site that tracks your location through your phone, allowing you to invite nearby users on a spontaneous date. There's Clique, a site that lets New York City singles meet friends of friends by linking their profile to social networks like Facebook. There's Assisted Serendipity, which uses Foursquare check-in data to monitor a user's favorite hangout spots and notify them when the male-to-female ratio tips in their favor. There's even Spoondate, which lets users plan dates based on a mutual craving for, say, udon noodles.
by Kelly House
See full article at The Oregonian
See all posts on Match.com See all posts on MeetMoi
See all posts on OkCupid See all posts on Clique
See all posts on POF.com
THE NEXT WEB – Feb 11 - New data suggests that there has been a 57% increase in online dating revenues in the past year. Digital marketing and billing manager Vindicia has been tracking the global activity for its online dating clients. Social networking, and in particular Facebook, is contributing to the growth. Vindicia’s online dating clients attracted £3.4 million (US$5.4 million) in revenues in January alone this year, compared to the £2.2M (US$3.5M) spent in January 2011. Sales have increased steadily over the weekends leading up to Valentine’s Day too – with dating companies seeing individual spikes of up to 40%, and a combined global spike of 23% last weekend (February 3rd) against the previous weekend’s spend (January 27th). These figures are global, and are taken from across all of Vindicia’s online dating clients, which include SNAPInteractive, SpeedDate.com, Online Buddies and AvidLife. Online dating spend grows by 60% on last year, and the industry can only get bigger
MIAMI HERALD – Feb 12 - Jewcier, a new dating site for Jewish singles, is now open to the public and joins nearly 20 other general and niche dating sites owned and operated by Avalanche, co-founded by Meir Strahlberg and his business partner Kris Covino in 1997. Among Avalanche’s largest sites are Date.com, launched on Valentine’s Day in 1997; Matchmaker.com, which Avalanche bought in 2005, and Amor.com, a Latin dating site also launched in 2005, which has more than 20K members in South Florida alone. Avalanche’s domain names are words people naturally type into the Internet, so they don’t have to spend a lot in marketing, Internet dating experts say. “They’re well respected within the industry for being savvy operators,” said Mark Brooks, an online dating industry analyst and editor of onlinepersonalswatch.com. Within the last six months, Avalanche has added five gay dating sites to its portfolio, which already included GayDating.com, GayMen.com, GayMarriage.net, PinkWink.com, which is oriented toward gay women, MyPartner.com and Gay.mx, a Mexican site. Gay sites are “a growing part of our business,” Strahlberg said. Overall, the company’s sites have 10M members worldwide, and 5-10% of them are paying members, Strahlberg said. Strahlberg, who owns half the company, declined to disclose Avalanche’s revenues, but said it is “highly profitable” and has been since its inception. This year, the company may be looking for outside investors for the first time, he said.
by Ina Paiva Cordle
The full article was originally published at Miami Herald, but is no longer available.
See all posts on Date.com
See all posts on Matchmaker.com
See all posts on Amor.com
OPW – Feb 12 - Each year, more and more people are turning to the Internet to find romance. At the same time, cyber-criminals continue to seek opportunities to exploit the vulnerability of singles on a global scale. Security is a major challenge for internet dating sites, which can attract scammers, spammers, stalkers and predators. A device fingerprinting solution such as iovation ReputationManager 360 provides unique insight into the computers being used to create multiple accounts and exposes hidden device account relationships that identity-based fraud solutions often miss.