Category: All Interviews

Oodle CEO, Craig Donato – OPW Interview

Posted on August 6, 2007

CraigOPW INTERVIEW — Aug 6, 2007 — Oodle is trying to beat Craigslist at its own game by bringing together classifieds from numerous classifieds site on one site.  Including personals. Here's my interview with their CEO, Craig Donato. – Mark Brooks

Tell us how Oodle got started.
I started the company back in early 2005. At the time, I was using classifieds for a number of different things and found the experience incredibly painful. I was finding great deals, but it was just too difficult. I was going to a lot of different sites, newspapers, local online sites, local community sites, etc. and then sorting through each of their listings. And because a lot of the classifieds data is unstructured, going through the listings was a fairly time-consuming and difficult process. On top of that, good listings were flipping very quickly. So if you were looking through the listings and found a great deal, you had to act right away. If you weren’t on top of it, it was gone before you knew it.

The whole process was a really big problem. So, it just occurred to me one day that there was an opportunity here. I could create a site where someone could see all the listings in a particular market and easily search through them thanks to normalized, well-structured data. On top of that, people could tell the site what it is they were looking for and when listings like that popped up, emails could be sent out to alert them. That was the founding vision behind Oodle – essentially to make shopping through the classifieds an easy process.

How do you drive traffic to your site?
We drive traffic in a number of different ways. We’re fortunate enough to have good growth. People keep coming back to our site. One week they may be looking for an apartment, the next for a job or new car. We do invest money into search engine optimization. We do a limited amount of search engine marketing, though not a lot. We also actively pursue and get distribution deals. We’ve done distribution deals with a number of different folks, like Lycos Classifieds. We also work with newspaper companies, like The Washington Post and the San Francisco Tribune. We’re actually working with a number of different local media organizations to power their classified sites.

How does Oodle make money?
Oodle makes money primarily by enabling the folks in our index to feature their listings. A while ago when we launched the service, our main revenue stream was advertising. And we started hearing from a lot of the folks in our index comments like, “We love the traffic we’re getting from Oodle. How do we get more?” It occurred to us that there was a great opportunity to allow the folks in our index to feature their listings.

Now, if a publisher wants to pay us, we’ll feature their listings. This has several benefits, including prominent search result rankings. For instance, if someone is looking for a Honda Accord and that publisher has a good Honda Accord ad, we will display it at the top of the results list. We also show featured listings in the right-hand bar. If there are multiple featured listings in the results, the top spot will go to the one with the highest bid. It’s a bidding-based model.

AnotherFriend, Kevin Greene, CEO – Interview

Posted on July 24, 2007

Img_kevin_on_ownOPW INTERVIEW — July 24, 2007 — Kevin Greene runs Ireland's AnotherFriend.com and is a regular attendee at the European internet dating conference. He has based his company in Poland, and is planning a Polish dating site, amongst other things. – Mark Brooks

What is the founding story of AnotherFriend.com?
Over seven years ago, I was working as a freelance web developer and tended to move around quite a bit. I was doing a lot of internal work, like intranets, and needed a showcase for my talents. At the time, there were only a handful of websites making money and online dating was one of them. So, AnotherFriend.com was born on New Years Eve, 2000. 

We only got really serious about it, though, in the last three to four years. Now we're the No.1 online dating service in Ireland – probably four to five times larger than our nearest competitor.

What would you say are the main differences between the UK and Irish online dating markets? Who are you competitors?
The UK market is probably a year or two ahead of us. Consumers there are definitely more accepting of online dating. When we first started, very few people in Ireland were willing to put their photos online. That's changing slowly, for sure, but it's not there yet. About 85% of our membership base is from Ireland. We also get quite a lot of members from the US and UK, and have had a few of the marriages between Americans and Irish people. But our core focus is Ireland.

To maintain our dominant market position, we use various marketing strategies. Online marketing certainly works for us and Google is fantastic for that. We've also partnered with a few other websites and a number of newspapers in Ireland, such as The Irish Examiner and The Irish Times, since 2004. Also PR, member events, viral marketing and member testimonials have played their part.

Because Ireland's population is quiet small, the market is not as attractive for competitors as is the larger UK market.  However, we have seen the Irish market filling up with competitors over the last year or so. Our nearest competitors are MaybeFriends.com (owned by Scottish Radio Holdings) and MeetingPoint.ie (Owned by Independent Newspapers). We are one of the few indigenous independently managed sites. Bebo hasn't really impacted our business because it tends to cater to the younger age group (the 15-23 year olds). Our site is aimed at the main serious dating age group – the 28-48 year olds.

What have you been up to lately?
This year, we launched a new niche site, http://www.SingleParents.ie aimed at the growing single parents population in Ireland. While running AnotherFriend.com, we noticed there were a lot of single parents on it and figured there was a big demand for a site that catered to them and their situations. Now, there's no need to wait until one is in a relationship to say, "Oh yeah, by the way, I have a child." Everything can be out in the open right from the start. Members have found this to be a great benefit.

We've also recently partnered with Pluto Life Mobile. AnotherFriend.com members who subscribe to the service now can view other members via their mobile phones. At the moment, they can only view very, very short profiles that are purely for SMS. We are looking at adding photos and more stuff later on. We need to do more work on this and it might be another year or two before Online dating gets popular, but we aim to have the technology in place.

We've also partnered with Vivox, a Voice Over IP (VOIP) company, that combines instant messenger with voice. This will allow people to do speed dating either through a phone or computer. Several people can go into a "room" and talk to each other for a specified amount of time before being switched to the next person. I think from a revenue point of view this will be quite good. They also have "bar stools", which are five people going into a room and chatting away via phone or instant messenger. All the while, we can micro bill and generate extra revenue. We'll release this hopefully within the next three or four months.

Are you planning to launch any new sites?
Yeah, we actually moved our development over to Poland and, as a result, are really looking at the Polish market. We've recently launched http://www.nightlife.pl but it will be a few years before any money can be made, but there are 38 million Polish citizens and I think that market can be quite lucrative in a few years. We've also launched ProfileApproval.com, which is more of a B2B service for other online dating sites. It's a way for them to outsource the approving of profiles, photos, etc.

What are your thoughts on being acquired?
Actually, six months ago we probably had no planned exit strategy – we were quite happy with building the business, which is growing rapidly. Over the last few months, though, we've been approached by a number of different people, so it certainly is something we would consider now. We pretty much have the whole dating market in Ireland tied up. So, if anyone was looking for a starting point, we certainly would be a very good one. I'd say we're worth between 6 million and 10 million Euros. We're talking to a couple of people but we're still growing rapidly and are very happy with the business, so we are not in any hurry to sell.

Saïd Amin, CEO World Singles – Interview

Posted on July 14, 2007

Said_amin_pictureOPW INTERVIEW — July 14, 2007 — Saïd Amin runs World Singles which operates several leading niche dating sites such as Eligible Greeks and Arab Lounge. I often inform prospective dating industry entrepreneurs to shoot for a niche, or plan on raising $10 million+ if they want to build a generic dating site. Saïd tells me that building a niche dating site is not that easy these days. Many search terms have been bid through the roof on the search engines. – Mark Brooks

What's your background Saïd?
I was born in Iran. I lived there for three years before moving to Paris. Five years later, once my mother finished her PhD work at the Sorbonne, we moved to the US.

Professionally, I worked at Fannie Mae in Washington DC for several years after graduating from Clark University in Massachusetts. My responsibilities at Fannie Mae ran the gamut from admin work, to project manager. While at Fannie Mae, I had the good fortune of getting lots of exposure at the executive level and learned a lot from the experience. It's really a top notch company with very talented and politically well connected folks.

From there I went on to work for a small telecommunications company specializing in Voice Over IP, with operations in over 45 countries. I was in charge of business development and implementation for East Africa and the Middle East. My work had me traveling extensively between Egypt, Ethiopia, Kenya, the UAE, Bahrain and Yemen.

The nature of the work was quite risky and illegal in the countries where we operated. It entailed getting a trustworthy partner, successfully getting our equipment into the country and then setting up hardware like a 2.4 meter dish at our partners' location without getting caught by the authorities. Man, the crazy stories I could share about this job. I loved that it was such an adventure and challenge. 

Why did you start World Singles?
In my mid 20s I had an itch for connecting with like minded Iranian Americans and was tired of working for others. The Internet and all of its possibilities for bringing people together was blowing me away and so, after launching a few niche online sites for fun, IranianPersonals.com was born. There was very little competition in the Iranian market and I thought that I could do better than the Iranian dating service that many were using at the time. Having traveled extensively my whole life and as someone who embraces diversity, I thought to myself, why not offer a similar service to other ethnic groups.

World Singles was created in 2001. Michel, who at the time was my web designer for IranianPersonals.com and other sites, became my partner – he taught himself Cold Fusion and built our dating application from scratch; a rather brilliant dude if I may say so and more importantly, he's a great guy.

The first thing I looked to do with World Singles was target ethnic niches that had little to no competition from other niche dating services. World Singles was operating on fumes; I think that my initial investment was a mere 10 or 12 thousand dollars with even less in reserves. Bootstrapping it, we really had no choice but to go after those "blue oceans" and went at it for several years without pay. Heck, for a while we tweaked our business and offered a private label service because we could not afford to advertise on any of the niche sites that could drive traffic to our sites. Once money started coming in, we managed to reverse our deals with sites using our private label service in favor of pushing our own brands. To this day, we have not taken any outside investment.

What sites have inspired you?
The netzine Iranian.com was a huge source of inspiration. I first stumbled upon it back in 1999/2000 and I think that it was the first time that I came across a niche site that offered compelling content that brought Iranians worldwide together through articles and comments. I remember thinking, damn, where did all these Iranian Americans come from? Very cool.

Dating sites that inspire…mmm…despite rejecting my profile a few years back because I was deemed not pious enough, I generally like eHarmony's angle – they introduced a new way to find matches. The industry has not seen that sort of creativity in some time. I definitely like to check Match.com regularly. They are always up to something, testing this or that.
 
Other sites…hmm, I really take something from every site but the Internet as a whole is inspiring. It's alive, evolving and has amazing reach. The world is shrinking.

What is Nuzizo?
Nuzizo is a social network that my good friend Darren Romeo and I launched a few months back. It's an online city and culture engine that brings together dozens of ethnic and lifestyle communities. Rather than launching stand alone ethnic sites, we created a place that unites people from all backgrounds and celebrates culture. Operating as a portal, Nuzizo City offers a great opportunity to make connections with people from similar and different backgrounds. Again, the world is shrinking.

The site is still in beta, but we really believe that in time, Nuzizo City will be one of the most visited sites on the Internet. My mother, knowing how passionate I am about this project, enthusiastically asks me several times a week, "Has Nuzizo taken off yet? Does it have millions of users yet?" She's very cute but I politely remind her to exercise patience. After all, great cities like NYC and Rome were not built overnight.

What are your goals for 2007/2008?
Well, for starters I'm looking for us to more than double World Singles revenue in 2008. We have been giving away so many features for free. For example, it's currently free to read and reply to messages on all World Singles sites. We won't go as far as charging people to read emails, but members will soon be required to pay for some of the features that are currently free. Until recently we operated with only one programmer and limited staff. In the last few months we have hired some quality folks who are helping us get through our "to do" list faster. As a result, we're getting better at converting our traffic and the extra horses have freed me up to do more business development. In the next few weeks, we will be announcing several overseas partnerships with highly trafficked sites and I am looking to launch two ethnic niche sites that I feel are wide open and there for the taking. Life is good!

Ross & Steve, WhiteLabelDating.com – OPW Interview

Posted on July 12, 2007

WldOPW INTERVIEW — July 12, 2007 — I talked with Ross Williams and Steve Pammenter the co-founders of White Label Dating. I’ll be interviewing more executives of white label services shortly. Meanwhile, email me at mark@onlinepersonalswatch.com if you’d like a copy of my preliminary overview of white labels services. – Mark Brooks
 
Ross, what’s your founding story?
White Label Dating actually originated from a web development company I started back in the mid-90’s. In 1998 I founded a digital media company called Rawnet Limited that developed websites and web-based applications for a range of clients. Like a lot of web design companies at the time, we had done a few dating sites here and there, but I felt the market really wasn’t being utilized in the most effective ways. Everyone was focusing on their own brand dating site but all these sites that we developed they had their own database, they had their own technology. So the concept was to develop an application that anyone with a brand, anyone who could do design, any web master could use to launch their own online dating site in a few minutes and then get access to a shared database of members and both shared payment technology and shared support and hosting. That original idea is what evolved into Whitelabeldating.com.

What are both of your backgrounds?
Ross: I’ve been an Internet entrepreneur and the owner of  a web development company since we established it in 1998. Since then we’ve set up Whitelabeldating.com as well as a couple of other web orientated businesses. 

Steve: My background is actually remarkably non-technical. In fact, my previous career was almost entirely based in sales. That experience has been invaluable in helping us in acquiring partners. So I tend to concentrate on the acquisition side of the business.

What kind of partners are you targeting?
Right now, a lot of our focus is on the targeting of offline partners. Typically, we are talking about magazine publishers who have an existing website but no dating channel. We have obviously targeted the existing online communities who are looking to monetize their existing databases by adding a free, fully populated dating channel onto their database.

What kind of money can they earn?
Depending on what partner does with what we give them, they can do quite well. Some of our partners earn thousands of pounds and up per month. Last month, our top earning partner earned 175,000 pounds.

Ross, what do you regard as your biggest differentiators over other co-brand dating service providers?
First and foremost, we are a really strong community. We have integrated instant messaging that works without any plug-ins that members can use across the network. Say for example,  members from site A find someone in the database that interests them who happens to be a member of site B. Through our integrated chatting instant messaging system, the customers from each site can talk to each other. We also have dating diaries which are very popular feature. It’s surprising how many people amongst the customer base will actually create a diary of their dating experience. These diaries can be viewed and shared across the network to all members.

We also have articles; real content that is distributed through the site that gives a compelling reason for people to join, for people to pay for our partners to make money.

And moreover what is a critical differentiator for me is the ease of use for our partners. It is incredibly easy to set up sites. Someone can go to WhiteLabelDating.com, click on the new site button and have their own co-branded site up within a minute or two. That’s the biggest differentiator I feel.

What are your goals gentlemen for 2007 through 2008?
Steve: I think the first goal is really to become the number one White Label provider throughout the world, obviously. Really, to show we are working with some of the largest brands at the moment and that we are attracting some of the real big names.

Ross: I think also to follow on that, we recognize what our skill is in; we have a technology platform that works. People pay, our partners earn a lot of money but we’re not the marketing experts and we don’t have the brand.

So we want to attract partners in the US and Europe and in Asia and China, India, places like that who know their local market and know how to market to these people and just want a platform to make money on. And that’s where we want folks to be for the next year.

Table For Six Founder, Julie Paiva – OPW Interview

Posted on July 11, 2007

Julie_blackOPW INTERVIEW — July 11, 2007 — Table For Six is expanding to Orange County and Sacramento after ten years of operation in Northern California. The model is simple. Tables of six people, dinner, that’s it. Simple on the surface at least. There’s a lot more going on underneath. I interviewed the founder, Julie Paiva. – Mark Brooks

What will Table for Six do for people?
First of all, we combine being the only full spectrum dating service in the country with a social networking club. To make our members feel comfortable, we create a social community. I believe, when people feel at ease, they appear the most attractive to others. In their comfort zone, their true self emerges, allowing them to meet like-minded people, which leads to longer relationships.

So all of our members are involved in all three departments.

The first is our 3 Men/3 Women dining. Here, we put together three men and three women who are carefully matched. We match according to interest, life style and physical characteristics. Each of our five clubs sits more than 15 tables a week.

Secondly, we provide our members an adventure department. These groups go out and enjoy sporting events, wine tasting, hiking, white river rafting trips, even trips to Vegas. Cooking classes are popular. In another arena, we work with volunteer activities. For example, more than 60 of our members built a Habitat for Humanity house. Community activities score with our members because they meet other like-minded members who give their time and talent. We offer three of these activities each week for each club.

Thirdly, there’s our Just for Two department, our one on one matching. Each member gets 12 matches per membership year. Our staff is out there in the field with our members before we match them for one on one, so we really get to know them. We learn about their sense of humor, what they do for fun, and what their values are. By the time we match them, we’re more likely to have a successful match.

By creating this community for members, the average member is meeting about 50 new singles every month. More importantly, they’re able to really get to know them by seeing them in real life. Almost as important as matching, they make friends. And friends make happy lives and happy lives make happy relationships.

What’s the founding story? How did you start the company Julie?
I was the West Coast Director of Barbizon, a modeling school and agency. And I was also a dating and relationship coach. Once I helped them get rid of the barriers keeping them from connecting with others, then I wanted to refer them somewhere where they could start meeting people. So I went out and I visited personally, posing as a prospect to companies like Great Expectations, for example. I didn’t feel comfortable referring my members to these agencies. I was looking for something that would help them learn to get past the first superficial image of an individual. The concept of Table for Six resonated for me.

So I gave up a six figure income and risked everything to start Table for Six. I had a 5-year-old daughter at the time and a husband who thought I was crazy. But I just felt a compelling need. There was nothing that could stop me. So we find we’re able to serve and solve all of our member’s social needs from finding someone to fall in love with, to helping them make great friendships to leading them to community. So we’re dealing with the entire person.

What does it cost to join the Table for Six community?
It depends on the different locations. Our prices range from $2,495 to $2,995 for a one year membership.

Did the matchmaking industry go through a slight slump in the last several years?
We never personally experienced a slump because we always were a very social activities, social community based company. People were attracted to the whole Table for Six concept. 

So how has business been in the last year for the industry and for Table for Six?
For Table for Six, we’ve seen an enormous increase in memberships. I think that’s because people are disenchanted with Internet dating sites and that they’re look for an opportunity to meet real people. I believe loneliness is the number one disease in America. One of my driving forces is we’re helping people have real connections. People develop a lot of social self-confidence. Often, they are successful in their business life, however, in their personal lives they need coaching and direction. All of our members have at least three membership directors for them to work with per club. 

How has business been overall, the actual industry?
I think the industry has picked up because people are getting a little bit bored perhaps with Internet dating sites. They want to meet people who are who they say they are. I think, especially for women, there’s definitely more safety in an on the ground dating service then there is on the Internet.

What do you think of Internet dating?
I think that Internet dating will always have a place. I think that they’re very attractive to men because they’re able to scroll through and look at all of these pictures of women. Men are very visual. For women, it could become a fun hobby to just scroll through. It’s so inexpensive and I think for a lot of people its just sheer entertainment value. But I think people are turning to on- the-ground dating services because they want to have more one on one contact. Often, they need coaching and direction and they want to meet more quality people.

How do you currently work with Internet dating sites?
We don’t.

How would you like to? How do you think the industry could?
Certainly we’ve been contacted by a couple of different Internet dating sites. They wanted us to do their events program and possibly their dining program. We have talked with several of them. They could have an opportunity to be unique within their own industry and offer something specialized. So that can be a really nice marriage for us as well as, of course, it’s an opportunity to develop another lead source for us through their database.
 

myPartnerPerfect CEO, Patrick Perrine – OPW Interview

Posted on June 24, 2007

PatrickOPW INTERVIEW — June 24, 2007 — It’s Gay Pride! Time for an interview with the gay Hitch, Patrick H.Perrine, the CEO and Founder of myPartnerPerfect.com. – Mark Brooks

What is your background?
I originally started with St. John’s University where I studied psychology. My main focus was on human dating preferences, specifically drawing parallels from Darwin’s Evolutionary Theory research and Kinsey’s research on sexuality, then applying those to the LGBT community.

From there I continued on to get my Master’s in Human Sexuality Studies and started focusing again on the gay male population, doing counseling and working with individuals. Following my Master’s I continued on to get my PHD in Psychology.

myPartnerPerfect.com just launched. Why did you start myPartnerPerfect?
It was when I was doing my counseling for gay men that I uncovered that a lot of gay men, like myself, have issues based either around the lack of relationship or in the current relationships that they’re in. Once I started doing research as to how I could better serve these individuals through the counseling process, I uncovered that there really aren’t that many tools for gay men to develop healthy and happy relationships.

The online dating world was pretty void of any site that would help facilitate those relationships. That’s why I started the private matchmaking service to work with clients one-on-one to help them identify their needs and wants. We’re specifically going to work for them to develop that happy and healthy relationship that they’re seeking. That’s what brought us to today.

How does heterosexual compatibility testing differ from homosexual compatibility testing?
They’re very similar when you look at relationship styling, personality profiling and elements of relationship compatibility. The difference with gay men and with gay relationships is that there are a multitude of different cultural factors that go into how they seek and pursue a relationship.

I think one of the biggest differences we need to look at is that from the get go there aren’t too many relationships for gay people to identify with as they’re growing up, identifying and uncovering their sexuality.  There’s a major gap in representation. Just that alone affects the way that gay men are able to identify the appropriate relationship styling for them.

Who would you say are your competitors for myPartnerPerfect?
I think the direct competition for services like ours are going to be the comprehensive relationship based sites. Sites that offer profiling systems, compatibility systems that are, of course, focusing on the gay men market. I think Chemistry.com does a great job of presenting a relationship focus for the gay community unlike any other site. eHarmony obviously doesn’t provide these services for the gay community, which is what opened the door for myPartnerPerfect.

Are there any particular sites that have inspired you as you were working on myPartnerPerfect?
Definitely, eHarmony. I think eHarmony does a great job of presenting the message of commitment and there’s a large segment of the gay community that is looking for a long-term life partnership. The methodology that eHarmony uses, even though it is applied to heterosexual couples, is very similar to the methodology that myPartnerPerfect.com uses in the sense that we’re looking for compatibility based on a series of different dimensions. They were a good model for us.

In closing, what are your goals for 2007 through 2008?
Our goal is really to be able to position myPartnerPerfect as a sophisticated and classy website that caters to the gay population and not only is provides a lot of successful matches for that user base but also just presents a representation that’s different from the current online environment. We will let people know that gay individuals do, in fact, want to have committed relationships and that it does take work to make those relationships happen.

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Marc Simoncini, Meetic CEO/Founder – Video Interview

Posted on June 17, 2007

OPW INTERVIEW — June 17, 2007 — Marc Simoncini's Meetic.com is taking on Match.com head on to become the pre-eminent matching service in Europe. Marc (French) knows Europe. He says that Meetic is different from other dating sites becuase Meetic merely promises 'dates' and that's a more European approach. But Marc hasn't stopped short of Europe, he's advancing on China now. In an acquisitions spat earlier this year, Meetic acquired Yeeyoo in January and Match acquired eDodo in China, and picked up Netclub around the same time to take a stronger position in Meetic's back yard, in France. Here's my video interview with Marc at the Asian internet dating conference. – Mark Brooks

Thomas Enraght-Moony, Match.com CEO – OPW Exclusive

Posted on June 8, 2007

Match_ceoOPW INTERVIEW — June 8, 2007 — Match.com continues to go from strength to strength. Here’s a summary of key financials from the last three years.xls. Here’s my interview with the new CEO, Thomas Enraght-Moony. – Mark Brooks

The new Chemistry.com TV ad campaign is the most competitively aggressive campaign I’ve ever seen in the online dating industry. Why are you gunning for eHarmony?
Oh I wouldn’t say that Mark. It’s a lighthearted playful campaign based on factual statements that pokes a little fun at our competitors. But I think the broader point is that Chemistry is a product that is built on a value proposition that we call ‘Come as you are.’

The nature of relationships in 21st Century America is changing and we don’t think it’s for us to prescribe to somebody what the right kind of relationship is. We think it’s up to the person looking for a relationship to define what success means for them and that’s one of the underlying philosophical basis’ on which we built Chemistry. We’re very pleased with the results so far.

Earlier this year you introduced a pilot platinum program out of Dallas. How is the Match Platinum program going for you?
We’re very pleased with the early results and we’ve seen good response to this product. One of the things that is tremendously exciting for us is the insight and information that it gives us into our customers. Having someone from Match who is in daily contact with people seeking a relationship is a little different than what we’ve ever had with the online side of the business. So we’re really pleased with the early results and it’s a great source of customer information too.

What major hurdles do you think Match.com, and the market as a whole, will need to go through as you work towards building Match.com into a billion dollar a year company?
When I think about taking Match to being a billion dollar business, I think about doing it in two ways. The first way is we’re going to execute on our current strategy of product innovation based on customer insights.  So whether it’s a service like MatchTalk that we added last year, the Dr. Phil Mind Find Bind program, our platinum pilot, and Chemistry.com, these are all products that are driven by profound customer insight and which are aimed to help us further penetrate the category in the United States. There are over 92 million single people in the US and about 3 million or fewer are paying for some kind of online dating service. I think there’s a tremendous amount of runway ahead of us here in the US market. 

The second area of growth is in the international markets. The recent acquisition of eDodo in China and Net Club in France are examples of how we’re expanding internationally. We’ve got tremendous traction in all of the other countries that we are in as well. 

Do you see social networks as posing a threat or offering an opportunity? And how would you say the online dating and social networking industries might be able to work with each other?
I see the social networks as offering a real opportunity for Match. They bring more people online; they get more people to engage online. They get people comfortable with online. And what we know from our research is that social networks are a tremendous way for people to keep in contact with people they already know. There are huge benefits to being on the social networks. But what we also know at Match is that our only focus is on helping someone find a relationship. We created this industry when we launched Match in 1995 and we give customers the best opportunity to find a relationship that they’re looking for. From the upfront screening that we do with profiles to make sure that the people on Match are real to our advanced matching algorithms. Everyone in this building that comes to work every day is focused on nothing but helping people find the relationship they’re looking for. Match is complimentary to social networks. Social networks are a fast growing acquisition channels for us.

What’s your primary measurement of success right now?
When I talk about how do you get this to be a billion dollar company, it’s about driving more people into the category. That’s the primary metric that I look at for long term success of the business: Are we bringing enough new people into the market with innovative products and services? That’s how I measure our success.

Dr Song Li, SinoFriends Founder/CEO – Video Interview

Posted on June 6, 2007

OPW INTERVIEW — June 6, 2007 — Dr Song Li is Founder/CEO of SinoFriends.com a.k.a. 96333.com, the oldest online dating service in China. He also runs Yeskee.com, one of the leading social networks. Here’s my video interview with Dr Li, the father of online dating in China. See About Us page at SinoFriends. – Mark Brooks

Dr. Li can you tell us more about the site that you run?
I'm the founder of SinoFriends Inc., which operates an online dating site 96333.com. We started about 2 years ago and now we have a database of about 5 million registered users. It's a paid online dating site with a business models similar to business models in the West. It's free to search and pay-to-communicate. Most of our paid users are professionals over 30 years old. We are based in Shenzhen, which is right across the river from Hong Kong.

How much are people paying on the site?
Our price is 999 RMB per year ($140) and we only offer yearly subscriptions. One of the major reasons that we do that is because in China most people don't have credit cards so therefore it's not possible to set up auto renewals, so we offer the annual fee. 

Michael Jones, Userplane CEO – OPW Interview

Posted on June 2, 2007

MikejonesOPW INTERVIEW — June 2, 2007 — Michael Jones is CEO of Userplane and VP at AOL. AOL acquired Userplane last August. Userplane offers instant messaging  and chat tool with text, voice and video capability, for online communities.  A web recorder for users to record voice and video, a site search tool, and a Desktop user presence tool. Userplane has come a long way, and it’s tools are now best in class, reliable and scalable. – Mark Brooks

What are Userplane’s biggest clients to date?
Well looking at network usage overall, we have a few top tenors, PlentyofFish being one. MySpace uses a tremendous volume of our products, Spark Networks uses a tremendous amount, and Date.com. Currently our client base ranges from major brand names down to small, completely unknown websites. There’s around 1,500 clients in our integrated portfolio.

Did you have to customize the Userplane service for many of your clients?
No, they typically use the API driven application as it stands. When clients have specific needs we slate their requests for development for a future release and then we work with them on those timelines. For instance, we’re doing some large media partnerships with companies like NBC that have some specific needs. But in general, everybody works off the same API driven version, which makes it very scalable and very safe for everybody. We have a centralized hosting center that hosts all of our applications in basically the same cluster. So if NBC is using it or MySpace is using it they’re all pulling from the same network. 

What improvements have you made to improve scalability?
We upgraded our network substantially and added a substantial amount of redundancy in the standard application service. We’re now working on opening up a point of presence internationally to diversify some of our bandwidth. We architected quite a bit of our system to be able to deal with large volumes of overflow or unexpected traffic bursts, as MySpace is growing. We implemented a better system to balance out the volume. So if a client starts with us on a 10 connection package and then they suddenly bump up and they’re hitting 5,000 or 10,000 connections we can actually handle that unexpected jump. At this point, we can handle MySpace size traffic and AOL size traffic.

Why are you offering an ad-supported version?
We’re using what we love to term as the “freemium model.” We have premium services, which are not ad-supported, but then we also have free services that are ad-supported. We had so many clients move over to ad-based websites, they were expecting large volumes of traffic growth and they didn’t want to have cost associated with our services. Even a large Userplane client on a premium model may only be paying us $10,000 or $20,000 a month, if they are extremely large. Our hope is to be able to open up a revenue sharing system back to all of our clients and become a key portion of their revenue. That’s what we’ve really been working towards.

What sort of CPM’s rates are you charging for advertising on Userplane products?
Anywhere between a dollar, up to tens of dollars for video ad units. It depends. We have in-house ad sales here that handle a lot of requests and we also work with AOL media groups that take care of monetizing some of our traffic as well.

Can a site customize the kind of ads that will appear on their Userplane services?
Yes. It’s customized automatically through preferences you select in the set up process for the instant install services. If you don’t like particular ads showing, you can email us the ad ID’s you want pulled, or if you want a specific type of category shown you can notify us and we can make sure we’re only showing that category.

What new products and developments do you have in the works Mike?
We just rolled out our integrated user list, which is a new type of buddy list for our integrated clients. That’s pretty exciting. It’s a fun list that shows when your friends are online, or the people you’re interested in are online. The sites that have started playing with it now are seeing substantially longer engagement times for their users, and a better frequency of communication between their users.

We are also pushing out a new version of our desktop application called Userplane Desktop. Originally we saw the desktop application as being a component of IM to allow people to generate IM’s down to the user’s desktop. That’s definitely one feature of it, but we found that the clients that were deploying it most successfully and were getting the most usage out of it were actually using it primarily for alerts to say you have a new email to view, somebody has marked you as a friend, somebody is interested in meeting you, and driving traffic back to their website. This is actually the first product that we’ve ever had that has really driven external traffic back to the website. Most of our products are about increasing user engagement once you’re at the website. So we think this is actually going to be a pretty fundamental shift for us and also really improve our client’s traffic patterns.

Clients so far that have used it have had impressive adoption rates. Its definitely at a point that a lot of the fears that our clients had about users downloading an application are being shown as unfounded. If users love your community they probably will download a desktop application, install it, and be pleased if you tell them, “Hey there’s this activity and you should jump in right now and find your friend” or “You should jump in right now to respond to this message.” I think that’s being welcomed.