PEOPLE'S DAILY ONLINE – Aug 10 – With the rapid development of dating sites, scammers also began to transfer their attention to these sites. Due to the deficient identity authentication system, fraudulent behaviors such as coaxing people to spend money on wine and meals and even swindling money through sham marriages were seen on some dating sites including jiayuan.com, baihe.com and zhenai.com. According to a survey, ~50% of interviewees believe that dating sites have turned into a hotbed for cheaters to defraud money in various ways. It takes 30 seconds to register a member on jiayuan.com with fake personal information. A professor of social sciences from the Zhengzhou University said, "It is necessary that the real-name registration should be carried out in this area."
MARKETWIRE – Aug 9 – MeetMe, the social discovery service, reported its financial results for Q2 2012. MeetMe revenue was $13.1M, up 706% YOY. Mobile revenue grew 73% sequentially to $1.3M, and 152% versus the same period a year ago. On June 5 the company announced the rebrand of myYearbook to MeetMe and the name change of the company from Quepasa Corporation to MeetMe.
PR WEB – Aug 9 – Founder Janis Spindel of 2LoveToday.com is holding an invitation only live event in LA on September 12th and SF on September 13, 2012. 2Love Today online dating lets members to register for free and search and contact other members on their own. 2Love Today digs deeper into that free membership pool of women and invites those that Spindel wants to be part of her Private Registry where they qualify to attend live mixers.
SMH.COM – Aug 9 – The RSVP Date of the Nation report, published this week, has found that just 41% of singles would like to get married. 67% of Gen Y respondents want to get married, compared to 39% of Gen Xers and 12% of Baby Booomers. Gen Y (born between 1980 and 2000), Gen X (1960 to 1980). Relationship and sex expert Jacqueline Hellyer believes the institution of marriage is "good and strong" but that "it is the Baby Boomers who have lost their naivety." Divorce has put many off approaching the aisle again.
PRESS RELEASE – Aug 9 – Men’s Health, the largest men’s magazine in the world, and Women’s Health, which reaches 13M consumers monthly, have partnered with social network MeetMe, the social network to meet new people and 18th most trafficked site in the US, to conduct “The Definitive Survey on the State of Friendship in America.” The survey reflects all aspects of friendship – from how we stay in touch to how many close friends we have, to why friends sometimes “break up.” 72% of men and 84% of women report having a “best” friend. 58% of men and 69% of women have “friended” a person of the opposite sex online just because she or he was hot. 57% of men and 66% of women are still friends with a former girlfriend or boyfriend. 62% of men and 53% of women have had post-breakup sex.
WEBWIRE – Aug 7 – Peter Glaeser, CEO of Sponsormob will cover mobile marketing and mobile advertising methods for the German dating market. The iDate Cologne event on September 10-11, 2012 precedes DMEXCO, also in Cologne on Sept 12-13.
OPW – Aug 7 – SinglesAroundMe is one of the first great mobile dating brands. Find out about SinglesAroundMe new developments, thoughts on outsourcing, and marketing advice. – Mark Brooks
What’s your founding story? SinglesAroundMe started in 2009. Before that I was running an Internet job board in Canada called JobShark which I sold to one of the biggest IT job boards in UK, called JobServe. Online dating has always been one of the successful fields within the Internet. When smart phones came around, with the capability to do geo-location, I thought there might be a niche that I could jump into. Clearly, you don’t want to play in a game that everybody else is playing in because you’ll never catch up. That’s how we started and where the premise came from.
How much was first mover an advantage for you? I think that was clearly important from the very beginning. To be out there, to be first.
Might I ask how many users you have? We are approaching about 80,000 new downloads a month at the moment.
How many of those are still active three months later? It’s not so easy for us to monitor that so I don’t have accurate information but we know it’s a fun tool that users tend to keep on their mobile phone.
Tell us more about the user experience. As soon as you download the app, it will plot you anywhere in the world, and from there it will show you singles within 100 feet to 100 miles or 100 kilometers of you. When we first started, you’d open it up in London and there’d be nobody. A couple months later, there’d be two or three. Now, if you open it up in London, there’s thousands and thousands using it. You can get that feeling in almost any city around the world right now.
What’s the demographics of your user base? It stretches right up through every decade. The 20’s, 30’s, we even have a senior citizens’ plan.
What’s the fastest growing demographic? 30’s and 40’s. But newer versions are soon coming out which we call it our Mars upgrade. That should be really targeted to a younger audience.
So you’re very geo-centric. What other features are very essential to the app for you? There’s two core features to the app – SinglesAroundMe and Destination Search. The SinglesAroundMe aspect plots you and everyone from 1 kilometer to 100 kilometers. If you want to go to a certain bar, The Destination Search Tool will show you the singles in that bar.
How do people make the first communication? The actual connections are very typical of traditional dating, so winks and messages.
You could actually do a VOIP call within the app. What’s your thoughts? I think these tools are very exciting to have; voice and even video. I think we’re moving that way with the smart phone capabilities. We tried that a bit too early and nobody really had the technology to run videos.
What technologies did you build SinglesAroundMe on? We’ve built a native iPhone, a native Android, and a native Blackberry. The next version of our Mars upgrade will be native in everything.
Do you think there will be a day when HTML5 will be able to deliver the kind of functionality that you need? Yeah, I hope so.
Is the iPad on your roadmap? Yes, we are releasing iPad app very soon.
Let’s talk about your team. Did you go in-house or did you use a third party provider? Somebody abroad, perhaps? We’re probably 70% in-house now and 30% out of house.
What are the pros and cons of each? One thing is control. If you go out of house, you lose a bit of control. In-house you can go over things. At the end of the day, if you’re going to be serious in this business, and you’re going to be here long term, you have to be in-house.
Are the out of house folks abroad? No, they are just a couple of miles away. You can easily pick up developers all around the world, but I think you need to be very close to these guys so you can just drive down the street and have a quick meeting with them and go over things.
Imagine you’ve got a friend who’s building a mobile dating app, how much is it going to cost him? I think you could get in the game for $50,000, but when you’re downstream, you realize, no. You’re in there for a lot more than just that initial start-up cost. You’ve got costs associated with each different platform that you’re building out. And these things double or triple.
What do you think is the best way to grow to a beginning level of critical mass? I may be the wrong guy to ask that. We’re early. We got our mass organically. We’ve been lucky from that standpoint. You had to be a lot smarter than just throwing money at the traditional media route.
So you’re not advertising? No, we don’t advertise. We just work our channels with the secrets we know how to do.
So you’re generally discovered on the platform, on Apple’s platform then? We are. But it’s what happens when you’re an early leader and you’re changing, and you’re disrupting. People want to talk to you.
Are you out reaching to the media or are they just calling in? I’d say it’s about 90/10. 90% are calling in. We’re doing the traditional things like press releases.
What other social media channels are you actively managing? Twitter and Facebook.
How do you make money? SinglesAroundMe has got in-app capabilities on different platforms. We’re experimenting on different platforms. On some platforms, we’re completely free. On other platforms, we’re experimenting with an in-app capability.
How do you feel about paying Apple 30%? Do they really earn it? Well, they created this industry, so it’s hard to argue against that. I’m happy to pay them 30%. We wouldn’t be in the business if they weren’t around.
What’s your vision for SinglesAroundMe for a year’s time? I think we’re going to be really gaining a lot of traffic hopefully from the younger generation. People in their twenties. As we do the Mars software release and improve our platform.
Who are your competitors and who are the people you are concerned about, inspired by? Skout, I think is doing very well. They’re one of the guys we look at.
EHARMONY BLOG – Aug 6 – eHarmony has deleted its eHarmony Advice Discussion Boards, deleting five years of member discussions and 20,000 community members. Some members of eHarmony community have started a new community. The unofficial community is up and running. Presently, they are calling it Online Dating Advice. It has 201 members and 8,600 posts right now. eHarmony Advice comments are now powered by Facebook using the Facebook social plugin. The worst part of deleting the forums is losing the biggest eHarmony community and losing the history.
The full article was originally published at eHarmony blog, but is no longer available.
SMH – Aug 7 – In Australia alone, ~400K people are actively seeking affairs online. They are paid-up members of infidelity dating website Ashley Madison. The website's founder and CEO, Noel Biderman, says he isn't out to encourage affairs, he's just providing a safe environment to those who have already decided they want one. Since its launch in 2002, Ashley Madison has attracted ~15M members in 25 countries. A new person is said to join every six seconds. AM has been in Australia since 2010. In June, Ashley Madison released the results of a global survey. 88% of men and 91% of women claimed the affair was an attempt to save their marriage.
