SALON.COM – Sep 6 – Buck Angel,
female-to-male transsexual star, launched Buck Angel Dating, “a dating
site for those seeking out relationships or just fun with trans men and
the people who love them.” Already, the site, a partnership with the Dating Factory, has ~2,500 members. Many users detail exactly where they
are in the transition process, for example: “three years on T, no
surgeries yet but will be having top surgery later this year.”
Q: Why did you decide to start a dating site for those seeking out trans men? A:
So many people were asking me questions about how to meet guys, how to
meet transmen. I hadn’t found a company that I felt I would be
respected where guys wouldn't come gawk at us and fetishize us.
Q: How do you avoid fetishization? A: That’s definitely not gonna be easy. If people are going to be
disrespectful, they’re no longer going to be able to come on the site.
Q: The site isn’t just for those seeking transmen, right? A: I realize that it’s very important for me to expand my site, which I am doing, to include more of the fluidity of gender.
Q: What’s the best point, if you do just meet someone in a bar, to reveal that you’re trans? A: I’m a huge advocate for disclosure and the dating site puts it right out there.
PRESS RELEASE – Sep 6 – LOVOO will present at the 9th European Dating Conference (iDate) on September 10-11, 2012 at the NH Hotel Köln in Cologne, Germany. Florian Braunschweig, CTO of LOVOO, will discuss the advantages of LOVOO's hybrid business model. Furthermore Florian will tell about LOVOO's experiences with different types of advertisement, subscriptions and virtual goods.
PAID CONTENT – Sep 6 – The diversified search, email and portal firm Mail.ru
Group has seen half-year user payments from its community services
rocket 107% since last year to 3.2 billion rubles ($98.5M) –
becoming its biggest single revenue line. “The main driver of this
growth is the increase of paying user engagement,” said CEO Dmitry
Grishin, "especially in virtual gifts and services, as well as in our
API platform and self-developed social games.” The payments are coming
from the Odnoklassniki social network, My World social service, love.mail.ru
dating site and from social games Mail.ru syndicates to third parties.
Display ad revenue grew 30.2%. Company net profit hit 4 billion rubles
($123M).
PR WEB – Sep 5 – Cupid plc is implementing Scamalytics anti-scammer technology from RecSys. It is already operating on BeNaughty.com and GirlsDateForFree.com, with rollout planned on other sites within months. Cupid is now catching scammers 35% faster and scammer detection is up 10%.
PR WEB – Sep 5 – Lovestruck.com, UK dating site, and Vini Italiani, the home of Italian wines in the UK, launch Speed Tasting – 9 ladies, 9 gentlemen and 9 wines to taste in 90 minutes. The first event is already sold out and will be held on Sep 7th at Vini Italiani's wine store in South Kensington.
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WEBWIRE – Sep 4 – Henning Wiechers, CEO of Metaflake.de
will provide the keynote presentation at the European online dating
conference (iDate) in Cologne, Germany. He will discuss the German and
Swiss online dating market. Mr. Weichers is one of the largest
affiliates in the European dating industry by running a large network of
Online Dating review sites in 12 countries and by publishing market
reports.
OPW INTERVIEW – Sep 4 – eHarmony does beautiful mobile apps! Arvind heads the product group and here’s what he had to say about eHarmony’s work on mobile dating. – Mark Brooks
Let’s talk about your pride and joy, the iPad HD app. The eHarmony HD app was developed a little over a year ago. Our first iPad app was a very functional reproduction of what you would get on the site. We built an experience that was unlike any other dating app. It is warm and encouraging, rich and distinctive. When we demoed it at LaunchPad in 2011, Jason Calacanis said it was one of the most beautiful apps on the iPad in and out of the dating category.
What was the most beautiful part? eHarmony has the relationship questionnaire that takes people 40-45 minutes to get through. We were able to get that down to 5 minutes.The other thing is we made it very visual and very touch oriented. We revamped the personality profile. We’ve turned it into a product that we call the “Book of You”. Your profile is literally a book, and we use the iPad basic gesture controls for turning pages.
How do you think eHarmony is vastly superior to a real world matchmaker? We have compatibility, and I think matchmaking in the real world. It’s largely done through intuition. We have an algorithm that is based on research that’s over 30 years old. And then we have the size of our database. In general, your network is only as strong as the amount of people you have in it.
How many questions are on the mobile app? There’s about a hundred, down from 270 questions.
So knowing that you wanted to have that fast, smooth experience, HTML5 is out the window. You couldn’t have really done HTML5? There are more challenges. I think HTML5 is kind of in its infancy in terms of developers getting to know the ins and outs of it.
What’s eHarmony’s philosophy on geo-location? I’d be a liar if I said that we’re not thinking about geo-location. Our user base isn’t exactly clamoring for it. So we have to do it in a way that is very responsible where people’s privacy is protected.
So how’s the Android app different? The Android app largely mirrors the iPhone app. I think there’s one or two features that we don’t have on Android yet, and that’s just been a timing thing more than anything.
Is there much difference in the monetization between the two apps? We do see two slightly different types of people that use the iPhone versus the Android. iPhone tends to be used more by women. But for monetization, we’re not seeing huge differences there.
In terms of monetization, you’ve gone the Apple route. So how useful is Apple in leading people? eHarmony’s advertising all the time. Do you really need Apple? We are reaching new audiences with the product and we are able to do it in a very cost efficient way. So for the time being, it is something that we are keen on keeping.
Are you finding that you’ve got more marketing channels available to you now on mobile? Absolutely. We are reaching a lot more people, and they’re different people than the ones we were reaching just through TV, radio or print ads.
In terms of the development of the application, were you entirely in house or did you have a portion of the team external? We’ve fluctuated. At the very beginning we relied more on outside vendors, but as mobile has become a more and more important segment of our business, we have moved about 80% of it in-house.
Are they in USA or abroad? They are all in USA.
What kind of login ratio is eHarmony seeing on mobile now? We’re seeing around 30-35% of new customers coming from the mobile channel.
Are there any user behaviors that you’ve notice on mobile that surprised you? Absolutely. We were pleasantly shocked, that we could get people to take a relationship questionnaire on a mobile device. The second surprise was the level of engagement.
You gather more data on users than most other sites. Why not suggest dates to people? I can’t say that we haven’t thought of that.
What’s your vision for eHarmony mobile in a year’s time? Geo-location will be part of it. I think giving people different ways to interact when they are in person also becomes pretty important. I think one interesting way to go is being people’s dating allies.
At SXSW social discovery was a hot topic. I wonder if there’s some potential for you to develop along a social discovery line? There is and there isn’t. A lot of people don’t want those worlds to mix. It’s hard to think that someone’s going to say: “I need to find a hiking buddy, let me go to eHarmony.”
STANDARD.CO.UK – Sep 4 – A family-run matchmaking agency based in Mayfair, Gray & Farrar has clients in Brussels, Geneva, Paris, Monaco, New York and Dubai. Their business has quadrupled over the past three years. It now has ~1,750 members, split evenly between the sexes. The clients are “educated, cosmopolitan and accomplished people who meet people all the time but lack access to the right ones, who are genuinely committed to a long-term relationship”. Operating in a similar sphere is Seventy Thirty, whose offices are in Knightsbridge. Seventy Thirty’s membership fees start at £9,5K but climb to £50K. Seventy Thirty has a team of psychologists and relationship experts who matchmake members.
Mark Brooks: Should matchmakers even be in business now? Most people would have predicted their demise with the rise of Internet dating. Quite the opposite has happened. Never before have so many people been open to the idea of spending money to get help. More money = more help! Right? Whats your thoughts?
TECH CRUNCH – Sep 3 – According to new data from U.S./German carrier billing company mopay, mobile gaming is currently the biggest generator of carrier billing revenues, accounting for over half of all transactions and growing at a rate of ~30% YOY. Traditional mobile games currently bringing in $4.50 per month, and have grown by only 10%. Social gaming is seeing a much stronger rise: its average revenues per user are up by 40% to $5 per month. Social media apps accounted for 5% of all carrier billing transactions. Online Dating has grown by 25% and is currently bringing in $6.50 per month in revenues among individuals using these services. But some countries seem more taken by carrier billing than others: Italy has a lot of single users who return only 25% of the time. Brazil’s carrier billing users, meanwhile, return 70% of the time, with two-thirds of that group making more than five carrier-billing based purchases.
SALON.COM – Sep 6 – Buck Angel,
