FORBES – Oct 25 – Coffee Meets Bagel, a dating site aimed at young people. At noon every day all the single ladies/gentlemen are sent one match based off of their Facebook connections. Then they have 24 hours to choose to go on a date or pass and wait for who will be sent tomorrow. The site is launching in the San Francisco area using $600K in funding from Lightbank (started by the Groupon founders) and Peng Ong of Match.com. In fact the entire Coffee Meets Bagel team set up a new headquarters in SF. The site first launched in New York and Boston but already has ~1K users in SF. After the SF launch CMB is looking to expand to Chicago, Seattle and LA.
Month: October 2012
Researching Dates Online: Addition To Modern Dating
TIMES OF INDIA – Oct 25 – Match.com's annual LoveGeist report found that 62% of singles now research their dates online before they meet them. 71% of people 18-24 investigate their date prior to meeting. Search engines like Google are used by 30% of those contemplating a first date, while 20% check out a partner's Twitter account. Facebook is a major source of information with 71% of those suffering pre-date doubts while 36% use dating sites for the research.
Let’s Get Digital: An Oral History Of Online Dating
BULLET – Fall 2012 –
JON BOEDE, CO-FOUNDER MATCHMAKER: In 1984, my friend and I were running [dating] bulletin boards. The Internet obliterated the bulletin board world. Boede converted the business to a website. Lycos bought for $44.5 million. By 2004 there wasn’t much left of it.
GARY KREMEN, FOUNDER MATCH: I started Match in ’93. I needed to get married. I wrote some software that matched people through email and attached profiles. Kremen partnered with VCs who sold Match.com to Cendant for $7m in 1998. Nine months later, Cendant sold it to IAC for ~$50m.
JONATHAN CRUTCHLEY, FOUNDER MANHUNT.NET: Jonathan was a successful Boston real estate investor. In 1992, he bought half of a popular gay telephone chat line that became Manhunt.net. Phone-line revenues peaked ~year 2000. We organized events at gay bars and advertised in gay newspapers in new York and Philadelphia.
ANDREW CONRU, FOUNDER FRIEND FINDER: In 1993 I started WebPersonals.com. It had ~150k members by the time I sold it in early ’95. Conru then focused on FriendFinder. People started uploading risqué photos. I put a link on the site: “If you’re looking for erotic relationships, click here” to a duplicate of the site, AdultFriendFinder. Conru sold for $500m in 2007.
MANDY GINSBERG, PRESIDENT MATCH: I don’t know how to prove it, but there’s been a shift. We started to see a lot more people who felt comfortable putting out personalized things, commenting on things, uploading their own pictures of things.
SAM YAGAN, CO-FOUNDER OKCUPID: We’re helping erode the stigma for the entire industry. I think it helps that we’re free, which makes it all seem less intentional.
MARKUS FRIND, FOUNDER PLENTYOFFISH: The reason for our success is that we actually helped people meet. Our mobile traffic was around 6% in the under-30 category. Now it’s sitting at 70%.
The future of online dating might very well be its own demise, a movement toward a place where the distinction between meeting in the real world and meeting online no longer exists.
by John Ortved
The full article was originally published at Bullet, but is no longer available.
See all posts on Match.com See all posts on FriendFinder
See all posts on Matchmaker.com See all posts on OkCupid
See all posts on POF.com See all posts on Manhunt
MeetMoi Has Quietly Reached 3 Million Users
BUSINESS INSIDER – Oct 24 - MeetMoi is a location-based dating app that started in 2007. Today, the company has finally crossed three million users. MeetMoi has also a big app update coming today with iPhone 5 compatibility and Facebook Connect. The following is an interview with Alex Harrington, MeetMoi's CEO:
Q: What would you say the success rate of finding someone, connecting, and going on a date is?
A: Every introduction we make is a live connection. Our response rate is currently at 70%.
Q: eHarmony CEO, Dr. Neil Warren, commented that, "a lot of other dating services aren't research based," dubbing them online bars, how do you feel about this?
A: It is a place where people can mingle and meet each other in a low-pressure. I'm ok with the term online bar.
Q: Are people using MeetMoi to date, hook up, or find relationships?
A: People use MeetMoi for any reason but by in large its for dating.
Q: What do you do to protect users privacy?
A: We never share a user's location with any other user or any third party under any circumstances. Users permission us to use their location data to find location based relevant matches, but we don't place them on a map and we don't disclose their exact location.
Meetic Q3 Results
PRESS RELEASE – Oct 24 – Meetic revenue for the first 9 months of 2012 totalled 122.8M Eur, reflecting a 4% decrease in the number of subscribers, which totalled 767,803 at 30th September. The third quarter revenue remained stable compared to the previous quarter (40.8M Eur). Net profit for the first 9 months of 2012 came to 16.9M Eur giving a net profit of 13.8%, compared to 9.0% over the same period of 2011. As a consequence of the marketing expense leverage, profitability improved significantly, with EBITDA coming to 27.6M at 30th September 2012 compared to 19.2M at 30th September 2011. The EBITDA margin was thus 22.5% at 30th September 2012.
Mark Brooks To Speak At iDate In Sydney
WEBWIRE – Oct 23 – Mark Brooks, CEO of Courtland Brooks, will provide a presentation entitled “The State of the Dating Business” at the iDate Down Under Conference. The event takes place on November 7-9 in Sydney. The session will discuss the most popular sites and mobile dating apps, the market size, and business models.
China’s Dating App Momo To Go International
TECH IN ASIA – Oct 24 – The Beijing-based startup behind the flirty hook-up app Momo is preparing to take it international, with an English version of its iPhone app submitted to Apple last week. The dating app has been picking up users at an incredible rate; it was 500K last December, 2M by this March, and 10M by August, and now 16M users. ~10% are international users. Momo attracted $40M in series B funding this summer.
MyLovelyParent: Over-50s Online Dating Site
TELEGRAPH.CO.UK – Oct 24 – With ~5.8M people 45+ living alone and ~1.7M women 65+ who are widowed in the UK, online dating for the over-50s has become big business. New entrant myLovelyParent.com goes live on Friday. Matt Connolly conceived the idea when his single mother asked him why he couldn't help her find somebody. He found was that most single parents would never consider online dating without their child's encouragement. At myLovelyParent.com, instead of a friend describing the hopeful singleton, the adult children describe their 'older' single parent.
IAC Announces Management Changes At Its Match Segment
PR NEWSWIRE – Oct 23 – Sam Yagan, co-founder and CEO of OkCupid, has been named CEO of Match, making him responsible for IAC's Match segment, which comprises all of IAC's online dating and related operations, domestically and internationally. Mandy Ginsberg, President of Match.com, has been named CEO of Match.com, with responsibility for the segment's "Core" businesses: Match.com U.S., Chemistry and People Media. Josh Meyers, CEO of People Media, will leave the segment to focus on new initiatives at IAC, specially DailyBurn.
The full article was originally published at Sacramento Bee, but is no longer available.
See all posts on OkCupid See all posts on Chemistry.com
See all posts on Match.com See all posts on People Media
French Leaders Featured In AshleyMadison Billboard Campaign
TELEGRAPH.CO.UK – Oct 23 – France's last four presidents, including its current leader, François Hollande, Nicolas Sarkozy, Jacques Chirac and François Mitterrand, have become unwitting poster boys for AshleyMadison. The poster depicts photos of presidents with lipstick marks on their faces and the caption: "What do they all have in common?" None of the three living leaders have reacted to the poster, but Mr Sarkozy has previously taken legal action. Budget airline Ryanair was forced to pay out 50K pounds for a press advertisement before he married Carla Bruni in 2008 with a picture of the couple captioned: "With Ryanair, my whole family can come to my wedding."