DIGITAL LIFE TODAY – Jan 4 – Statistics suggest that the time period between Christmas and Valentine's Day is when romance flourishes online. Match.com typically sees a 30% increase in new members registrations between Dec. 26 and Feb. 14. Trends in relationship status changes in 2010 and 2011 on Facebook show that some of the biggest net increases in new relationships occurred on Dec. 24, Dec. 25, Feb. 14, and Feb. 15. 40.5% of relationship status fields went from coupled to "single" over the last year. On the bright side, 29% of profiles updated to "in a relationship," 8% to "engaged," 7% to "married," and 7.5% were toggled to a blank.
by Rosa Golijan The full article was originally published at DigitalLife, but is no longer available.
WEBWIRE – Jan 4 – Online voting closes on January 4, 2013. The winners will be announced during iDate Las Vegas. iDate takes place at Harrah’s Las Vegas from January 16-19, 2013. The awards ceremony is on January 17, 2013.
TECH CRUNCH – Jan 4 – Tinder is a new dating app that focuses on the social and mobile aspects of dating. It launched in October and took off on a few college campuses. The co-founders say that they’re continuing to listen to users, tweaking the experience based on feedback and, with traction building, they’ll be looking to build off their seed funding from IAC and raise a series A in the coming months. CEO Sean Rad says that Tinder is resonating with college students because the app has taken a more subtle approach to dating, it is location-enabled. The experience is anonymous until someone you like returns your interest.
THE ATLANTIC – Jan 3 – Most of the online dating CEO's agree that the rise of online dating will mean an overall decrease in commitment. “The future will see better relationships but more divorce,” predicts Dan Winchester, the founder of a free UK dating site. “Historically,” says Greg Blatt, the CEO of Match.com’s parent company, “relationships have been billed as ‘hard’ because, commitment has been the goal. You could say online dating is simply changing people’s ideas about whether commitment itself is a life value.” “I think divorce rates will increase as life in general becomes more real-time,” says Niccolò Formai, the head of social-media marketing at Badoo. “Societal values always lose out,” says Noel Biderman, the founder of AshleyMadison. “Premarital sex used to be taboo,” explains Biderman. “So women would become miserable in marriages, because they wouldn’t know any better. But today, more people have had failed relationships, recovered, moved on, and found happiness. Even at eHarmony, Gian Gonzaga, the site’s relationship psychologist, acknowledges that commitment is at odds with technology. “You could say online dating allows people to get into relationships, learn things, and ultimately make a better selection,” says Gonzaga. “But you could also easily see a world in which online dating leads to people leaving relationships the moment they’re not working—an overall weakening of commitment.
In 2011, Mark Brooks, a consultant to online-dating companies, published the results of an industry survey titled “How Has Internet Dating Changed Society?” The survey responses, from 39 executives, produced the following conclusions: “Internet dating has made people more disposable, and may be partly responsible for a rise in the divorce rates.” “Low quality, unhappy and unsatisfying marriages are being destroyed as people drift to Internet dating sites.” “Internet dating has helped people of all ages realize that there’s no need to settle for a mediocre relationship.”
Alex Mehr, a co-founder of Zoosk, disagrees. “Online dating only removes a barrier to meeting,” says Mehr. Surely personality will play a role in the way anyone behaves in the realm of online dating, particularly when it comes to commitment and promiscuity.
WLD – Jan 3 – With smartphones and tablets topping most-wanted gift lists this Christmas, the surge in new handheld devices also had a knock-on effect with users signing up to dating sites through their new gifts. WhiteLabelDating.com saw revenue from mobile increased by 928%, making up 15% of all revenue generated during the last week of December (24.12. – 30.12.).
WEBWIRE – Jan 3 – Dr. Neil Clark Warren will participate in a 45 minute Q&A session on the company and the direction of the dating industry. iDate2013.com will be held on January 16-19, 2013 in Las Vegas.
OPW INTERVIEW – Jan 2 – Geoff Cook is the COO and co-founder of MeetMe, a leading publicly traded ‘people discovery’ company. (Full Disclosure: MeetMe is a prior client of Courtland Brooks)
You have one of the most fascinating founding stories in the industry. Tell us about it. It all started in April 2005. My brother and sister (15 and 16 at the time), had an idea for a social network to replace the yearbook for high school with online profiles. I liked the idea and invested some of the early money into it, and it was off to the races.
In the first week 400 people joined. 9 months later we had 1 million registrations. By 2006, we opened up an office and hired about 15 people, scored $4.1 Million Series A funding with US Venture Partners and First Round Capital. Then in 2008, we did a Series B round with Norwest Venture Partners.
We merged with Quepasa, which was a Latin American based social discovery network in November of 2011. MyYearbook had been considering changing its name, because we thought of MyYearbook as essentially connoting Classmates.com. We wanted a name that really showed what we wanted to be perceived as…the best place to meet people. That’s where MeetMe came from.
Quepasa’s audience transitioned over to MeetMe in October of this year. In order to complete that step, we needed to internationalize MeetMe in Spanish and Portuguese. Now we are going beyond Latin America with a European launch in French, Italian, and German.
Are you really competing with Facebook, or not? What we call ourselves is a social network for meeting new people and we play broadly in the social discovery space. We are very different from Facebook. We think of Facebook as the place you go to connect with friends and family. Social discovery is the area we focus on.
There are sites that try to make casual relationships and there are sites that try to focus on the intimate relationships, and I think we are clearly in the casual space. When you ask people why they join MeetMe and why they continue to log in, 90% say to make new friends; 37-38% say that they found someone they consider a best friend on the site.
You are a public company now. Has that really helped you or hindered you? Mostly helped. The reason is that it really does focus the team on the things that are going to drive growth and continued value.
How do you make money? It’s a combination of advertising and virtual currency. Traditionally, it was very skewed towards advertising. That has changed quite a bit since our focus on mobile. Our mobile revenue is roughly 50/50; it’s about 45% virtual currency, which is very different than how it works on the web, where it is a much heavier advertising skew.
60% of our daily active users are mobile. We have found that for the same virtual currency products that we also sell on the web, our mobile user are far more likely to buy them.
On Android, it’s roughly 3 times more likely than on the web; on iPhone, 5-6 times more likely than the web. Monetization on mobile is really a function of two things; one is virtual currency, and one is advertising.
We think the virtual currency side is the most promising, because that’s where you have this big benefit of users being more likely to pay you. On the advertising side you also have this pretty picture, because today only 1% of the global ad spend is in mobile, despite more than 10% of the total time spent in media being in mobile. Most people think that 10% number will go to 20-25% of all time spent. So there’s going to be an explosion in mobile advertising, because there has to be, because that’s where people are.
Facebook just announced in Q3, $3 Million a day just in mobile feed advertising. It think it’s just a very exciting time for mobile advertising as well.
We can agree that mobile was the big trend for 2012. What do you think is going to be the big trend for the people discovery category in 2013? You are going to see continued focus on mobile. The other thing you are going to see is interests being brought much more to the front of the application. We now have over a million active users every single day logging in from the U.S., and a growing number logging in overseas.
In September we said about 29% of our MAU was international, up from 17% in June. Once you start getting to that level of scale, you start getting a million plus people logging in every day, you start to enable some of the connections and allow some of the interests to enter the equation. We are starting to think through what that means for MeetMe.
What are you focused on for 2013? I would say mobile monetization is the number one. On the web the average revenue per daily active user is 14 cents. On mobile, the average revenue per daily active user is 3c. A dramatic chasm. Yet on a percentage basis that 3c is up dramatically from where we were just a year ago. In fact, in Q4 of last year, only about 5% of our MeetMe platform revenue came from mobile. That number has actually expanded to 20% in Q3 of this year. You can say that’s great progress, but I think that there is a lot of room to grow. Every one penny increase in mobile monetization, and closing of that gap from 3c to 4c, is more than $2 million in annualized revenue. So I don’t know that the 3c will close to 14c, although certainly we are committed to closing that gap.
OPW – Jan 2 – The Matchmaking Institute is conducting an industry survey in USA and Canada and would appreciate your help. If you are an owner/manager of a dating site please fill out this questionnaire. Your answers will be kept anonymous and in February you will get the survey results for free.
UP TO DATE – Jan 2 – In 2012, Stir held ~1,600 events with ~150K attendees. Each month, Stir has hosted ~300 events in 80 cities across USA, and partnered with 800 different venues to host these single events.
The full article was originally published at Up To Date, but is no longer available.
CHINA DAILY – Jan 2 – China's young singles under pressure from parents and family to get married are increasingly turning to dating sites. There are 249M unmarried Chinese 18+, and men are more anxious than women to get into dating, relationship and marriage. Among the unmarried population in the post-1970s, post-1980s and post-1990s, there are 23.15M more males than females. The imbalance between men and women is obvious and the ratio among the post-1970s population is about 2 men for every woman. NetEase unveiled its free dating site Huatian in November. Jiayuan has ~73M members and every day, ~7K change their status to "in a relationship" or "married".
DIGITAL LIFE TODAY – Jan 4 – Statistics suggest that the time period between Christmas and Valentine's Day is when romance flourishes online. Match.com typically sees a 30% increase in new members registrations between Dec. 26 and Feb. 14. Trends in relationship status changes in 2010 and 2011 on Facebook show that some of the biggest net increases in new relationships occurred on Dec. 24, Dec. 25, Feb. 14, and Feb. 15. 40.5% of relationship status fields went from coupled to "single" over the last year. On the bright side, 29% of profiles updated to "in a relationship," 8% to "engaged," 7% to "married," and 7.5% were toggled to a blank.
