Category: All Interviews

Kevin Greene, AnotherFriend CEO – OPW Interview

Posted on May 18, 2007

Anotherfriend OPW INTERVIEW — May 18, 2007 — Kevin Greene is the CEO of Ireland's leading internet dating site, AnotherFriend.com.  This is the second of five OPW interviews on the subject of scamming in the internet dating industry. – Mark Brooks

What kind of scammers do you normally encounter in Europe and Ireland?
Firstly, someone dies and they have stashed away $30 million and if you send over some money they can transfer the money into your account and you get 50%.  These scammers will send messages to hundreds and hundreds of members. The second is the Russian angle. A girl develops relationships with a number of men on the site and basically tries to scam them for cash. “I’m trying to get my ticket to come over to Ireland and I don’t have enough money for the ticket,” etc.  Those are the main two types of scams that we’ve come across.

Is scamming a serious issue?
For us, we probably catch it pretty quickly and if we don’t catch it pretty quickly our members will let us know. It’s more of a problem for customer support when we get a 100 emails in from our members saying that somebody is scamming. It’s also an issue if we catch a scammer and delete their emails.  Then we have members saying, “I got a notification that I had this email in my inbox and its not there, where is it?” So from customer support point of view, it’s a lot of time but if we can catch it quickly it saves that problem.

Is it affecting your site’s reputation?
To a certain extent. Where we have some problems is in chargebacks because scammers will generally come in and pay straight away, then we get chargebacks. Obviously, we lose money and we get kind of fined for the chargebacks. Our gateway only allows so many chargebacks before they could possibly cut us off. That’s a big, big issue. Probably about 50% of the chargebacks tend to be from scammers.

So you could half your charge back rate if you didn’t have any scammers?
Yes. We would catch a lot of them but sometimes they actually come in and set up an account and upgrade and leave it for a month or two before they actually do anything with it. So it’s very hard to catch them at that stage.

Generally speaking what are you doing right now to combat scammers?
We have a number of different things that we’re doing. We block IP address based on location. Our membership primarily comes from Ireland and a certain percentage from the US, the UK, and Australia. We block pretty much the whole of Africa, Russia and a few other places. That certainly has reduced our chargebacks by 80%. Now people still get through because they could be in the US or whatever, which is a bit harder.

The other thing we do is we scan for certain keywords in the mail and if it matches the criteria we’ll stop the mail. The mail will never be sent but the person sending it thinks it is. They can see everybody but nobody can see them. I know a number of sites that are using that system and I would say it’s pretty common in the industry. If they’re in the ‘ghost table’ and they try to make a payment a page will just keep saying the card was rejected. We also have triggers. If an extreme amount of mail is being sent by a particular user. If its over a certain number of emails in a certain time period it rings an alarm bell somewhere.

What would you save if you could eradicate scamming?
If we had no system, it would be a lot of revenue. We have a pretty good system in here at the moment very few get through. What I would worry about is the problems that we would have with Mastercard or Visa.

How can the industry work together to combat scammers?
One is educating the users, but the problem with educating them is you don’t want to scare them either, especially if they’re new to online dating. I think it’s important that your customer service is pretty much on the ball and you have systems in place that minimize scamming activity. I think it would be great if there was a central resource whereby the industry as a whole got together. But the problem is anyone I’ve talked to is very secretive about what they’re doing. Personally, I reckon everyone’s doing the same thing but no one’s saying what they’re doing. It’s kind of surprising that people still fall for scammers. It happens though.

Nelson Rodriguez, Love Access CEO – OPW Interview

Posted on May 15, 2007

LoveaccessOPW INTERVIEW — May 16, 2007 — Scammers are a proverbial pain in the neck for internet dating and social networking companies. Over the next ten days I’ll list five interviews on your least favorite subject matter.  These will be slow news days while I’m at the Asian Internet Dating Conference. Nelson Rodriguez is CEO of LoveAccess, along with TogetherChristian.com and MatchRanger.

What kind of scamming do you encounter?
Primary scamming comes in three flavors. The first flavor is the typical Nigerian Ghana. Over the last 6 months to a year, they’ve changed tactics. They say they are either a traveling businessman and they’re overseas or they’re a young girl overseas. They befriend people and instantly fall in love with their target. Then there’s the tragic event that occurs. Their mother’s very sick back in the States and they don’t have enough money to go travel back or they were coming home from work and they were mugged and had their rent money stolen and they’re going to be thrown out by their landlord.

The second set of scams is where they’re basically trying to find targets for mail drops. The scammer will make up some story where they are traveling abroad and they have an important package, something happened (e.g. their laptop failed) and they need to get it delivered, and they need someone they can trust that can sign for it and forward it over to them wherever they are. (The merchant ships the laptop before discovering the purchase was made off a stolen credit card. The forwarder sends the laptop on to the scammer in Nigeria, etc. The forwarder may be liable for the laptop).

Then there’s the Russian mail order bride scammers, which fall into two distinct groups. There’s the one set where a girl will string “x” number of men along at one time, befriend them, talk to them on the phone, instant message them, then  the tragic event occurs where they need some financial assistance. Then there’s actually a second set which is quasi-legitimate. There are actual dating agencies in Russia who charge top dollar, I mean ridiculous amounts of money, for these Russian women to find them American men. So basically the girl comes down to the dating office and signs up for whatever service and the agency then goes and floods all the dating sites with their profiles to get the correspondence going immediately to their Yahoo or Hotmail addresses. So the girl pretty much doesn’t know anything about where this person was contacted. They go to the office, because most of them don’t even have computers, open up their Hotmail account and they correspond back and forth. So the dating agencies in Russia use our dating sites to basically spam everybody to try and get a few leads for these girls.

The majority of scammers are just looking for money. And then the other form of abuse we encounter, which is not a scam per se but still a problem for us, where our site is used for credit card verifications. What happens is, they want to buy something at a Best Buy or Circuit City or something and these guys need to make sure that when the transaction goes through its perfect the first time around. So they’ll basically just run credit cards on us first before they go make their big purchase. This is a problem for us. We end up voiding the transaction if we catch it in time but the sad part is there’s no mechanism to be able to report to Visa or Mastercard or Amex that this is a very suspicious transaction and we believe that this credit card could be compromised. There’s no recourse for it. So there is no repercussions for them to use us. That’s really problematic because if we get enough of those we could lose our merchant account.

Have you encountered much in the way of affiliate scamming?
There’s always some scam they’re trying. And even the affiliate scamming guys have gotten really, really good. Before they would just go at it with a brute force method and all of a sudden make 500 accounts in one day. Now they’ll make 2 or 3 accounts every day and they’ll spread them out over the day. The CPA’s that we have to pay these days is very significant. Any affiliate program we use we pretty much have to assume we’re going to have to write off 10% to 15%.

Is that worthwhile for them?
Yeah I mean look if you make 10 profiles a day you know its $40 a day in commissions times 30 and, especially overseas, $40 a day turns into a lot of money. So like I said it’s not that hard, it takes a matter of 2 minutes to make a profile and they’ve gotten very, very, very good at doing it.

How much worse has scamming gotten and how serious of an issue is it?
I don’t think the levels have really changed much. It’s always been just a part of the business that you deal with. But as a percentage of the business as a whole it’s actually very small. You figure maybe 5% or even less of the profiles are fraudulent but that small percentage causes a lot of headache because in order to catch the 5% you have to scan the 95% to make sure everything is good and that’s what adds to all the operational overhead that we get. It’s very frustrating to catch that 5%.

Beyond the financial effects the scammers have, how do they affect your site’s reputation?
Oh it’s terrible. People send us customer service emails, ‘well I’m thinking about upgrading but I don’t know if this person is real or not.’ It’s not good for a business if the consumer isn’t confident what they’re getting is legitimate. Then it becomes very problematic because let’s say the person upgrades and then we catch the scammer, they’ve upgraded and the account they were trying to contact is basically banned, and these people are frustrated. They get very upset and then question anything and any kind of contact throughout the whole site. It leads to a full loss of confidence. If you’re getting let’s say five emails today and three of them are coming in from scammers, any reasonable person is just going to assume that all of them are fraudulent and basically you’re going to sign off the site. It hurts both sides and ultimately we’re the main losers here. It’s definitely a big problem.

We’re offering matchmaking services and doing background checks and that’s been very, very effective in keeping the scammers away. Most of them won’t come through but a couple of them have tried. They still try. They’re very, very aggressive and they’re always looking for new creative avenues.

You have to remember one thing with these guys, this is how they make their living. They have nothing to do all day long except try to figure out how to beat the system, work around it, and look for any holes in the armor. So they have every single advantage while we’re at a complete disadvantage. I’m focused on building services and quality into the site, not trying to figure out how to stop scammers.

How much time does it take from your teams day?
We have one person who manually reviews each and every single credit card transaction. And then we have a couple of people that review every single profile that comes through the system. Like I said, as they get better they slip through. You can only be so proactive and then you have to be reactive and wait for customer feedback. They’ll say, “Hey there’s something with this profile, check it out.” And then you can go in there. We’re always at a disadvantage waiting to react rather then trying to nip it in the butt before it becomes a problem.

How can the industry work together to combat scammers?
We could have some sort of common database that we can run like a hash on say an email address and IP address or something and compare it against the database and say, this IP address and this email address have made 40 accounts on 20 different dating sites today. But still it’s a lot of work. While valuable who wants to spend the money and time to do it.

How high on the priority list should it be for the industry to stamp out this problem?
It’s a daily priority for us. It’s built into operations. Like I said if it affects 5% of the business it’s not that ‘big’ of a problem. But is it a top priority? Of course it is, it always has to be. We have to work Saturday a
nd Sundays because those scammers realize that on the weekends we were staffed less. So they would start working much harder on Friday nights and Saturday mornings to try to get some mileage out ahead of us, until Monday morning. We had to put on weekend people.

Erik Neraal, Plutolife CEO – MobileDatingWatch Interview

Posted on May 6, 2007

MDW INTERVIEW — May 5, 2007 — Plutolife loves mobile dating (MobiloveTM) and is the company behind several well known mobile dating services. Beyond that it also offers speed dating (Mobiflirt) and a picture dating product (Mobimodels). – Mark Brooks

How much can dating companies make with mobile dating?
Pay-outs vary a lot depending on the country, regulations and the operator pay outs. In North America and Europe we get  15 to 33 Euros of average revenue per user (ARPU), generated over the course of 3 to 4 months average user lifetime. The carriers take a cut of 40% to 70%. Carrier cuts in Europe are less aggressive than in America. The ARPU also depends on the country. Some countries have very strict regulations on the way you can price and bill customers while most leave it to us.

What factors should dating companies consider in their selection of mobile dating enabler?
The experience and commitment of the mobile dating company is most important. The experience because there are lots of hurdles and regulations that can knock you over in different countries. Look at the international track record of the partner. Plutolife has rolled out mobile community services in 22 countries. And that’s something that is not easy to do because you’re talking multiple languages, different cultures and a wide range of technical capability. Your mobile dating partner needs to know how to deal with multiple networks per country and multiple billing systems per country. The last thing, and tough thing is understanding the cultural differences because you want to run the most efficient marketing campaign in every country.

What branding and advertising strategies have been successful in the past for you?
Having a strong online brand will make it relatively easy to convince mobile operators to provide a good position on their mobile Internet pages. However, “off deck,” activity is becoming increasingly important and lucrative. We create many simplified WAP versions of a web portal specific to mobile community installations. For advertising, you’re TV and radio on youth oriented TV stations. You’re talking web advertising, Google ads, banners, other search engines, etc. What is on the decrease, we’ve noticed, is the “quick print ad.” The return of these kinds of investments is going down. Consumers are now looking for new types of marketing stimulation.

Also, there are a range of advertising opportunities specific to each country in Europe. For instance, in most Scandinavian countries Teletext is usually efficient. If you know how to play with it, it’s one of the most profitable advertising investments you can make. In Ireland and the UK, I didn’t believe teletext would be as good as in Scandinavia but it looks like it is. In Southern Europe teletext doesn’t really fly but other media like print seems to be more efficient than in Northern Europe. We have tried radio and TV focused on local markets, if possible, or focused on youth markets. MTV is a good example. We have bought several thousand spots on MTV in Scandinavia, Norway and Sweden and it works nicely.

Do you have any market numbers you can share for any of your markets?
We have a very strong position in Norway, for instance with a thriving mobile dating activity. I just looked at the stats this morning again. In Norway we have a base of 300,000 registered users. That’s out of a population of 4.2 million. Not all are active, of course. We have over 1 million users total worldwide including the USA. 

What makes Scandinavia such a hotbed for you?
Norway and Sweden are dream markets because the mobile industry is open. Mobile operators are “copeting.” They’re not restricting competition or putting up mobile “walled gardens.” They are not creating artificial walls but allowing each other’s customers to subscribe to content where they want to; as a result they’ve created quite an amazing mobile content market. It’s equal to 900 million krones just for Norway, so let me do the division, you want it in dollars? You’re talking $150 million dollars (i.e. $35 mobile content spend per year per subscriber). We were the first to offer mobile dating here and we are the leader but we’re not alone anymore, we have a few competitors, but that’s good because, in fact, it helps develop the market. We have got a better position then the competitors because we convince the main operators here that we are a thriving community, so we move up on their mobile Internet (WAP) pages.

What will you and Plutolife do in the next year to rock the world of mobile dating in Europe and USA?
One thing, we plan on doing is integration. Handsets are getting more and more advanced, so they can be a natural extension of online communities, whether it’s dating or chatting or blogging, we’ll be there. We’ll do it over multiple handset technologies (e.g. SMS, mobile Internet and Java) because we need to be able to address the whole mobile market. You can’t confine yourself to only having a java solution, if only 10-15% of mobile owners will use a java download. We guide them little by little through the different technologies and let them pick the best one for them.

What technology are you most excited about for the future?
I dream of the day when there is so much technology embedded in the mobile phone that you can use it almost as if you were on your laptop. I think we’re going to go that way. I think people who are major online players, whether they are dating players or community players, like MSN or Yahoo or MySpace are going to push for that and that’s going to have a very healthy effect on the whole industry. This reminds me of the days when we went from narrow band to broadband on the Internet and suddenly there was a second burst of the Internet because all kinds of new usage exploded. Sharing video is now hot on the Internet and nobody dreamed about that 4 or 5 years ago. It’s possible because of the broadband explosion. The same with mobile, high speeds and third generation and fourth generation speeds and more powerful handsets will enable more and more video sharing. Right now it’s a little bit like wishful thinking, but it will happen.

This interview also appears on Mobile Dating Watch

Erik Neraal, Plutolife CEO – MobileDatingWatch Interview

Posted on May 6, 2007

MDW INTERVIEW — May 5, 2007 — Plutolife loves mobile dating (MobiloveTM) and is the company behind several well known mobile dating services. Beyond that it also offers speed dating (Mobiflirt) and a picture dating product (Mobimodels). – Mark Brooks

How much can dating companies make with mobile dating?
Pay-outs vary a lot depending on the country, regulations and the operator pay outs. In North America and Europe we get  15 to 33 Euros of average revenue per user (ARPU), generated over the course of 3 to 4 months average user lifetime. The carriers take a cut of 40% to 70%. Carrier cuts in Europe are less aggressive than in America. The ARPU also depends on the country. Some countries have very strict regulations on the way you can price and bill customers while most leave it to us.

What factors should dating companies consider in their selection of mobile dating enabler?
The experience and commitment of the mobile dating company is most important. The experience because there are lots of hurdles and regulations that can knock you over in different countries. Look at the international track record of the partner. Plutolife has rolled out mobile community services in 22 countries. And that’s something that is not easy to do because you’re talking multiple languages, different cultures and a wide range of technical capability. Your mobile dating partner needs to know how to deal with multiple networks per country and multiple billing systems per country. The last thing, and tough thing is understanding the cultural differences because you want to run the most efficient marketing campaign in every country.

What branding and advertising strategies have been successful in the past for you?
Having a strong online brand will make it relatively easy to convince mobile operators to provide a good position on their mobile Internet pages. However, “off deck,” activity is becoming increasingly important and lucrative. We create many simplified WAP versions of a web portal specific to mobile community installations. For advertising, you’re TV and radio on youth oriented TV stations. You’re talking web advertising, Google ads, banners, other search engines, etc. What is on the decrease, we’ve noticed, is the “quick print ad.” The return of these kinds of investments is going down. Consumers are now looking for new types of marketing stimulation.

Also, there are a range of advertising opportunities specific to each country in Europe. For instance, in most Scandinavian countries Teletext is usually efficient. If you know how to play with it, it’s one of the most profitable advertising investments you can make. In Ireland and the UK, I didn’t believe teletext would be as good as in Scandinavia but it looks like it is. In Southern Europe teletext doesn’t really fly but other media like print seems to be more efficient than in Northern Europe. We have tried radio and TV focused on local markets, if possible, or focused on youth markets. MTV is a good example. We have bought several thousand spots on MTV in Scandinavia, Norway and Sweden and it works nicely.

Do you have any market numbers you can share for any of your markets?
We have a very strong position in Norway, for instance with a thriving mobile dating activity. I just looked at the stats this morning again. In Norway we have a base of 300,000 registered users. That’s out of a population of 4.2 million. Not all are active, of course. We have over 1 million users total worldwide including the USA. 

What makes Scandinavia such a hotbed for you?
Norway and Sweden are dream markets because the mobile industry is open. Mobile operators are “copeting.” They’re not restricting competition or putting up mobile “walled gardens.” They are not creating artificial walls but allowing each other’s customers to subscribe to content where they want to; as a result they’ve created quite an amazing mobile content market. It’s equal to 900 million krones just for Norway, so let me do the division, you want it in dollars? You’re talking $150 million dollars (i.e. $35 mobile content spend per year per subscriber). We were the first to offer mobile dating here and we are the leader but we’re not alone anymore, we have a few competitors, but that’s good because, in fact, it helps develop the market. We have got a better position then the competitors because we convince the main operators here that we are a thriving community, so we move up on their mobile Internet (WAP) pages.

What will you and Plutolife do in the next year to rock the world of mobile dating in Europe and USA?
One thing, we plan on doing is integration. Handsets are getting more and more advanced, so they can be a natural extension of online communities, whether it’s dating or chatting or blogging, we’ll be there. We’ll do it over multiple handset technologies (e.g. SMS, mobile Internet and Java) because we need to be able to address the whole mobile market. You can’t confine yourself to only having a java solution, if only 10-15% of mobile owners will use a java download. We guide them little by little through the different technologies and let them pick the best one for them.

What technology are you most excited about for the future?
I dream of the day when there is so much technology embedded in the mobile phone that you can use it almost as if you were on your laptop. I think we’re going to go that way. I think people who are major online players, whether they are dating players or community players, like MSN or Yahoo or MySpace are going to push for that and that’s going to have a very healthy effect on the whole industry. This reminds me of the days when we went from narrow band to broadband on the Internet and suddenly there was a second burst of the Internet because all kinds of new usage exploded. Sharing video is now hot on the Internet and nobody dreamed about that 4 or 5 years ago. It’s possible because of the broadband explosion. The same with mobile, high speeds and third generation and fourth generation speeds and more powerful handsets will enable more and more video sharing. Right now it’s a little bit like wishful thinking, but it will happen.

This interview also appears on Mobile Dating Watch

Jonathan Crutchley, ManHunt.net Chairman – OPW Interview

Posted on April 22, 2007

JonathanOPW INTERVIEW — Apr 22, 2007 — Manhunt is racy and gay and growing fast. It's Americas leading casual gay dating site. (MyPartnerPerfect.com sits at the other end of the spectrum as the gay eHarmony, with Patrick Perrine). I talked to Jonathan Crutchley ManHunt's chairman of the board. – Mark Brooks

What’s the founding story of Manhunt.net?
I have a business partner, Larry Basile, who invited me to be his business partner in 1992 in a gay telephone chat service in Boston, Dial Information Services. I bought out his existing partner and we went into the telephone chat line business together, in Boston. He founded the business in 1987.

It’s a local business that made a reasonable amount of money but around 2000 we noticed that our youngest users, 18 to early 20’s, weren’t using our service as much as they had. Boston has 300,000 college students and a good part of our market was young people 18 – 22. Whenever they arrive for school in the fall we advertise in the gay magazines and newspapers locally to tell the newcomers about our chat line service and they weren’t responding. We figured it was because they were using the Internet.

We made a decision to get a website launched, persuade people to use it and then persuade people to pay to use it.  At that time most people didn’t believe in paying. 

By trial and error, mostly error, we got some people to design a website for us. Neither my business partner nor I knew anything about the Internet. Then we advertised locally. It took about 2 years to grow to 10,000 users for free services at http://www.manhunt.net. Then at one point in the year 2002, we sent all of our users an email and said, “We hope you’ve enjoyed using Manhunt these past 2 years but now we’re going to ask you to pay $10 a month for the service.” We held our breath, sat back and to our great surprise they paid. People told us that they appreciated the service so much it was worth paying for and that they understood.

After we found out that people were willing to pay for this, we realized the Internet goes everywhere not just Boston. So we decided to open up the website to users in New York City, Miami, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, coast to coast USA. We promoted it with advertisements in gay magazines and newspapers, held events at gay bars and nightclubs. I started traveling to various locations promoting our website and it caught on coast to coast in the USA. Now we have over 600,000 US members and 900,000+ members worldwide. We’ve translated Manhunt into German, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Japanese, and Italian is in process. We’re in Europe and Asia and Australia and North and South America. So it’s really taken off.

I’m quite surprised at the massive popularity of Gaydar in the U.K. Hitwise ranks them as the top dating site in the U.K.
They were there first. If you noticed, they’re way behind us in the USA. I admire them. They offer an excellent service to their members, but eventually, just like Pepsi caught up with Coca-Cola, it took them 100 years, and I don’t know how long it’s going to take us to catch up with Gaydar but we’ll catch up to Gaydar sooner or later in the U.K.

To what do you attribute your successes so far with Manhunt.net?
What our members tell us is it’s easy to use. We have very prompt customer service. I’ve got 30 guys who work shifts 24 hours a day and speak all these different languages answering emails and calls on our 800 number. If guys have a problem, guys have a question, credit card billing issues, and things like that, they send us an email and in 10 minutes they get an answer. If you go on most other dating websites you’ll find they’ll say, “We’ll get back to you in the next 2 or 3 days to answer your question.”

We’ve invested in customer service because the gay community is a community and people are comfortable using our site because there’s somebody on the other end they can talk to and they have the confidence to use our site and subscribe to it.

How fast is the site growing at this stage?
Let’s just say that revenues are growing 50% a year now. Sooner or later that’s going to level off but we keep going to new countries and they think we’re the best thing since sliced bread.

Does the gay dating market tend towards being casual or does it tend towards being long term relationship oriented?
Obviously, this question is not being asked by a gay man. I have to explain this frequently to straight people who ask me this. It’s casual. When I compare our dating website with a boy meets girl dating website, what happens on a boy meets girl dating website is boy meets girl, boy dates girl, boy marries girl because many of these sites are inclined toward promoting marriage, which is fine.

The difference between that and my website is boy meets boy, boy dates boy, tomorrow night boy dates another boy, the next night boy dates another boy. Especially with the younger crowd from age 18 to 40 that’s the way young gay men live. They get out and about, they go out to bars and nightclubs and they see a lot of people. Whereas, with Match.com or True or eHarmony, once a couple has met and dated and married, that website has lost two customers. But once I get a customer, if they like us and they subscribe, they just put their credit card on automatic rebill and they renew and renew and renew and we grow.

The reason I asked was, Gayparship.co.uk launched recently and they did a survey (1,000 responses) and found that 47% of gay men were looking for a serious, long term relationship compared to just 16% that were looking for casual flings. That didn’t quite ring true.  What are your thoughts on that?
They may be looking for Mr. Right but Mr. Right Now will do. I would say that most gay men are probably looking some day for a long term relationship. Sooner or later we all settle down for a while but then they still subscribe to my website and look at the pictures. But still in the meantime, gay men will casually date.  Also, we estimate that as many as 30% of our users are married men.

Which of the mainstream sites is most popular amongst the gay audience?  I heard that Yahoo Personals is popular amongst the gay audience.
I honestly can’t imagine that, I don’t understand why. Gay men are looking for their own community and I’ve gone and looked at, for instance, Match.com and Yahoo Personals and we do market research with these others, but a website operated by straight people just does not register with gay men. The questions, when you fill out their questionnaires the questions that a woman would ask a man when she’s looking for someone to marry, like how much money do you make, do you want children? These are ridiculous questions, a gay man could care less how much money you make, could care less about wanting children. They want to know your physical attributes, they want to see pictures, they want to know what you’re into.
My website is an adult website and men pose in adult photographs, they post naked pictures of themselves and some guys will subscribe just to look at the pictures rather then go to the newsstand and buy a magazine and see the pictures. So that’s what men are interested in and the people who run straight dating websites with a gay niche in it have no clue. I don’t think that they’re serious competition.

You’re ranked by Hitwise as the 10th most trafficked dating site in the U.S.A., and gay.com is 14th. How so?
Gay.com doesn’t consider themselves a competitor of ours. They’ve said they’re going in a different direction. They’re going into the magazine publishing business, they’re going for advertising revenues, they’re going into the travel industry, they chartered the Queen Mary. They’re looking for the Fortune 500 to advertise in their properties, their magazine or their website properties. That’s what they want to do.
We stick to our knitting and we’re just in the personals business and the personals business only. I have no cruises up and down the Danube or Atlantic crossings from New York to Southampton. I hav
e none of that.

Do you believe in offline advertising or do you believe in purely online?
We’re an Internet business but actually we did promote and we do promote our website in gay magazines and newspapers, but the trouble with that is if you pick up the newspaper and you want to connect to our website you can’t push a button on the page to get there. The way you get traffic is on the Internet. It’s generally more effective for word-of-mouth to get people to come to your site and create links to your site, and things like that.  If someone has no clue as where to find a date and enters gay dating on Google they’ll find us.

What are your goals for 2007 for Manhunt.net?
To grow the business, it’s a big, big world and I only have around a million members and there are billions of people in this world.

Are you going to the Shanghai conference in China?
Oh yes, definitely. I’ll be there. Actually I’ve made contacts already in China that tell me that Gay.com and Gaydar are already marketing there. We plan to offer our service in China. We plan to offer our service in India. We are international and I’ve got a lot of work to do in the next 20 years.

Jonathan Crutchley, ManHunt.net Chairman – OPW Interview

Posted on April 22, 2007

JonathanOPW INTERVIEW — Apr 22, 2007 — Manhunt is racy and gay and growing fast. It's Americas leading casual gay dating site. (MyPartnerPerfect.com sits at the other end of the spectrum as the gay eHarmony, with Patrick Perrine). I talked to Jonathan Crutchley ManHunt's chairman of the board. – Mark Brooks

What’s the founding story of Manhunt.net?
I have a business partner, Larry Basile, who invited me to be his business partner in 1992 in a gay telephone chat service in Boston, Dial Information Services. I bought out his existing partner and we went into the telephone chat line business together, in Boston. He founded the business in 1987.

It’s a local business that made a reasonable amount of money but around 2000 we noticed that our youngest users, 18 to early 20’s, weren’t using our service as much as they had. Boston has 300,000 college students and a good part of our market was young people 18 – 22. Whenever they arrive for school in the fall we advertise in the gay magazines and newspapers locally to tell the newcomers about our chat line service and they weren’t responding. We figured it was because they were using the Internet.

We made a decision to get a website launched, persuade people to use it and then persuade people to pay to use it.  At that time most people didn’t believe in paying. 

By trial and error, mostly error, we got some people to design a website for us. Neither my business partner nor I knew anything about the Internet. Then we advertised locally. It took about 2 years to grow to 10,000 users for free services at http://www.manhunt.net. Then at one point in the year 2002, we sent all of our users an email and said, “We hope you’ve enjoyed using Manhunt these past 2 years but now we’re going to ask you to pay $10 a month for the service.” We held our breath, sat back and to our great surprise they paid. People told us that they appreciated the service so much it was worth paying for and that they understood.

After we found out that people were willing to pay for this, we realized the Internet goes everywhere not just Boston. So we decided to open up the website to users in New York City, Miami, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, coast to coast USA. We promoted it with advertisements in gay magazines and newspapers, held events at gay bars and nightclubs. I started traveling to various locations promoting our website and it caught on coast to coast in the USA. Now we have over 600,000 US members and 900,000+ members worldwide. We’ve translated Manhunt into German, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Japanese, and Italian is in process. We’re in Europe and Asia and Australia and North and South America. So it’s really taken off.

I’m quite surprised at the massive popularity of Gaydar in the U.K. Hitwise ranks them as the top dating site in the U.K.
They were there first. If you noticed, they’re way behind us in the USA. I admire them. They offer an excellent service to their members, but eventually, just like Pepsi caught up with Coca-Cola, it took them 100 years, and I don’t know how long it’s going to take us to catch up with Gaydar but we’ll catch up to Gaydar sooner or later in the U.K.

To what do you attribute your successes so far with Manhunt.net?
What our members tell us is it’s easy to use. We have very prompt customer service. I’ve got 30 guys who work shifts 24 hours a day and speak all these different languages answering emails and calls on our 800 number. If guys have a problem, guys have a question, credit card billing issues, and things like that, they send us an email and in 10 minutes they get an answer. If you go on most other dating websites you’ll find they’ll say, “We’ll get back to you in the next 2 or 3 days to answer your question.”

We’ve invested in customer service because the gay community is a community and people are comfortable using our site because there’s somebody on the other end they can talk to and they have the confidence to use our site and subscribe to it.

How fast is the site growing at this stage?
Let’s just say that revenues are growing 50% a year now. Sooner or later that’s going to level off but we keep going to new countries and they think we’re the best thing since sliced bread.

Does the gay dating market tend towards being casual or does it tend towards being long term relationship oriented?
Obviously, this question is not being asked by a gay man. I have to explain this frequently to straight people who ask me this. It’s casual. When I compare our dating website with a boy meets girl dating website, what happens on a boy meets girl dating website is boy meets girl, boy dates girl, boy marries girl because many of these sites are inclined toward promoting marriage, which is fine.

The difference between that and my website is boy meets boy, boy dates boy, tomorrow night boy dates another boy, the next night boy dates another boy. Especially with the younger crowd from age 18 to 40 that’s the way young gay men live. They get out and about, they go out to bars and nightclubs and they see a lot of people. Whereas, with Match.com or True or eHarmony, once a couple has met and dated and married, that website has lost two customers. But once I get a customer, if they like us and they subscribe, they just put their credit card on automatic rebill and they renew and renew and renew and we grow.

The reason I asked was, Gayparship.co.uk launched recently and they did a survey (1,000 responses) and found that 47% of gay men were looking for a serious, long term relationship compared to just 16% that were looking for casual flings. That didn’t quite ring true.  What are your thoughts on that?
They may be looking for Mr. Right but Mr. Right Now will do. I would say that most gay men are probably looking some day for a long term relationship. Sooner or later we all settle down for a while but then they still subscribe to my website and look at the pictures. But still in the meantime, gay men will casually date.  Also, we estimate that as many as 30% of our users are married men.

Which of the mainstream sites is most popular amongst the gay audience?  I heard that Yahoo Personals is popular amongst the gay audience.
I honestly can’t imagine that, I don’t understand why. Gay men are looking for their own community and I’ve gone and looked at, for instance, Match.com and Yahoo Personals and we do market research with these others, but a website operated by straight people just does not register with gay men. The questions, when you fill out their questionnaires the questions that a woman would ask a man when she’s looking for someone to marry, like how much money do you make, do you want children? These are ridiculous questions, a gay man could care less how much money you make, could care less about wanting children. They want to know your physical attributes, they want to see pictures, they want to know what you’re into.
My website is an adult website and men pose in adult photographs, they post naked pictures of themselves and some guys will subscribe just to look at the pictures rather then go to the newsstand and buy a magazine and see the pictures. So that’s what men are interested in and the people who run straight dating websites with a gay niche in it have no clue. I don’t think that they’re serious competition.

You’re ranked by Hitwise as the 10th most trafficked dating site in the U.S.A., and gay.com is 14th. How so?
Gay.com doesn’t consider themselves a competitor of ours. They’ve said they’re going in a different direction. They’re going into the magazine publishing business, they’re going for advertising revenues, they’re going into the travel industry, they chartered the Queen Mary. They’re looking for the Fortune 500 to advertise in their properties, their magazine or their website properties. That’s what they want to do.
We stick to our knitting and we’re just in the personals business and the personals business only. I have no cruises up and down the Danube or Atlantic crossings from New York to Southampton. I hav
e none of that.

Do you believe in offline advertising or do you believe in purely online?
We’re an Internet business but actually we did promote and we do promote our website in gay magazines and newspapers, but the trouble with that is if you pick up the newspaper and you want to connect to our website you can’t push a button on the page to get there. The way you get traffic is on the Internet. It’s generally more effective for word-of-mouth to get people to come to your site and create links to your site, and things like that.  If someone has no clue as where to find a date and enters gay dating on Google they’ll find us.

What are your goals for 2007 for Manhunt.net?
To grow the business, it’s a big, big world and I only have around a million members and there are billions of people in this world.

Are you going to the Shanghai conference in China?
Oh yes, definitely. I’ll be there. Actually I’ve made contacts already in China that tell me that Gay.com and Gaydar are already marketing there. We plan to offer our service in China. We plan to offer our service in India. We are international and I’ve got a lot of work to do in the next 20 years.

Frengo SVP, Dan Mosher – OPW Interview

Posted on April 14, 2007

OPW INTERVIEW — Apr 12 — Frengo is a 'Social Play Network.' It's MySpace on the go, with some fun bells and whistles. Frengo allows users to post to their Myspace profile, make confessions, send polls and plan nights out…via the cell phone. I talked with Dan Mosher, SVP Ops and Business Development (formerly GM of Jamster USA, and was on the Board of Directors of Intermix/MySpace for 6 years). – Mark Brooks

Dan can you tell me what is Frengo, why is it unique and why do people need it?
Frengo is a company that we put together where we created a set of games and text message services. The games revolve around sports and celebrity themes and popular culture themes. And the services revolve around the theme of bringing together groups and connecting groups and providing fun and interactive experiences for groups. We put together a set of services and games that really connect people, provide fun entertainment vehicles and really bridge together some of the social networks that are online today with people’s mobile phones. I think people need Frengo because it makes your phone a lot more useful and allows you to share and compete and connect with friends, and within groups of friends in ways that you could never do before with your mobile phone.

Personally, what is your favorite part of Frengo? What do you find most fun?
My personal favorite is being able to send out polls and questions to my friends. For example, I sent a message out to a group of four friends that I was trying to organize a Friday night with. We wanted to go to a restaurant in San Francisco. I sent out a poll of our 5 favorite restaurants and everybody voted on that over their mobile phone.

You worked with MySpace in the past.  Which of the Frengo services do you think will resonate best within the MySpace community?
We have a service around MySpace which allows you to post comments and bulletins from your phone. So I think for MySpace users that want to connect with their friends, let them know where they are, post pictures in their friends comment fields, I think that’s probably one of the most interesting things that MySpace users will be able to use. No matter what carrier they’re on, no matter where they are, they can post to their My Space profiles. Then we’ve also created a number of widgets, which we think will be interesting where MySpace users can actually post a widget which shows either their final 4 picks or a celebrity quiz that they find interesting, and people can play those games on their phone and have the leader boards and points update automatically on their widget.
 
When was Frengo started and how has the growth been so far?
Frengo launched its beta in December of 2006 and we’ve done a lot of testing of different games and services to understand the resonance with the customer base. We’re in the tens of thousands of users but it’s still very early.

As you were putting the service together, were there any competitors that you considered as role model services?
We looked at Limbo. We thought that it was interesting in that it was a fun type of game. Our service is very different and we’re not similar in terms of what we do but we looked at the aspects of virality of the service. So that’s a company that comes to mind that has done pretty well.

How will Frengo make money?
A couple of different ways. We will sell premium games so customers will pay a monthly fee or a per game fee to participate in some of our games. We also work with brands that want to create a game or a set of services for a brand. We will be paid directly by the brand to set that up.  Going forward we’ll look at advertising and other things.

How can social networking services work with Frengo?
We do a very good job of extending out some of the functionality of social networking services to the phone.  We’re not just taking a social network and trying to replicate it on the phone, we actually have intelligence in the network that allows users to participate in fun things on their phones that tie into their social networking profiles. We extend social networking site functionality and provide users with something interesting to do when they’re on the go.

Are you interested in providing co-brands or white labels?
Yes, we can definitely power an Internet dating service and provide the SMS messaging layer and games.

Which carriers are you on deck with so far?
So far the only deck deal we’ve done is with Boost Mobile and that was around our March Madness NCAA Tournament game. That’s really a wagering game where you bet points on upcoming basketball games throughout the tournament. We’re also live and working across all the major carriers in the U.S. including Cingular, Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile. We hope to announce a couple more deck deals in ’07.

How fast do you see the mobile entertainment services sector growing?
I think that the industry can continue to grow at 30% to 35% per year through the end of 2008. It’s already a multi-billion dollar industry but I think it’s poised for continued growth. Overall, the migration of handsets to higher bandwidths, with higher resolution camera phones is all good new for us.

What are your goals for Frengo in 2007?
Major goals for 2007 are to really get our name out there and then to increase adoption and get hundreds of thousands of customers, and ramp up the services. We’ll really use the feedback loop with our customers to bring to the forefront the games and services that they find most appealing. 

Frengo SVP, Dan Mosher – OPW Interview

Posted on April 14, 2007

OPW INTERVIEW — Apr 12 — Frengo is a 'Social Play Network.' It's MySpace on the go, with some fun bells and whistles. Frengo allows users to post to their Myspace profile, make confessions, send polls and plan nights out…via the cell phone. I talked with Dan Mosher, SVP Ops and Business Development (formerly GM of Jamster USA, and was on the Board of Directors of Intermix/MySpace for 6 years). – Mark Brooks

Dan can you tell me what is Frengo, why is it unique and why do people need it?
Frengo is a company that we put together where we created a set of games and text message services. The games revolve around sports and celebrity themes and popular culture themes. And the services revolve around the theme of bringing together groups and connecting groups and providing fun and interactive experiences for groups. We put together a set of services and games that really connect people, provide fun entertainment vehicles and really bridge together some of the social networks that are online today with people’s mobile phones. I think people need Frengo because it makes your phone a lot more useful and allows you to share and compete and connect with friends, and within groups of friends in ways that you could never do before with your mobile phone.

Personally, what is your favorite part of Frengo? What do you find most fun?
My personal favorite is being able to send out polls and questions to my friends. For example, I sent a message out to a group of four friends that I was trying to organize a Friday night with. We wanted to go to a restaurant in San Francisco. I sent out a poll of our 5 favorite restaurants and everybody voted on that over their mobile phone.

You worked with MySpace in the past.  Which of the Frengo services do you think will resonate best within the MySpace community?
We have a service around MySpace which allows you to post comments and bulletins from your phone. So I think for MySpace users that want to connect with their friends, let them know where they are, post pictures in their friends comment fields, I think that’s probably one of the most interesting things that MySpace users will be able to use. No matter what carrier they’re on, no matter where they are, they can post to their My Space profiles. Then we’ve also created a number of widgets, which we think will be interesting where MySpace users can actually post a widget which shows either their final 4 picks or a celebrity quiz that they find interesting, and people can play those games on their phone and have the leader boards and points update automatically on their widget.
 
When was Frengo started and how has the growth been so far?
Frengo launched its beta in December of 2006 and we’ve done a lot of testing of different games and services to understand the resonance with the customer base. We’re in the tens of thousands of users but it’s still very early.

As you were putting the service together, were there any competitors that you considered as role model services?
We looked at Limbo. We thought that it was interesting in that it was a fun type of game. Our service is very different and we’re not similar in terms of what we do but we looked at the aspects of virality of the service. So that’s a company that comes to mind that has done pretty well.

How will Frengo make money?
A couple of different ways. We will sell premium games so customers will pay a monthly fee or a per game fee to participate in some of our games. We also work with brands that want to create a game or a set of services for a brand. We will be paid directly by the brand to set that up.  Going forward we’ll look at advertising and other things.

How can social networking services work with Frengo?
We do a very good job of extending out some of the functionality of social networking services to the phone.  We’re not just taking a social network and trying to replicate it on the phone, we actually have intelligence in the network that allows users to participate in fun things on their phones that tie into their social networking profiles. We extend social networking site functionality and provide users with something interesting to do when they’re on the go.

Are you interested in providing co-brands or white labels?
Yes, we can definitely power an Internet dating service and provide the SMS messaging layer and games.

Which carriers are you on deck with so far?
So far the only deck deal we’ve done is with Boost Mobile and that was around our March Madness NCAA Tournament game. That’s really a wagering game where you bet points on upcoming basketball games throughout the tournament. We’re also live and working across all the major carriers in the U.S. including Cingular, Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile. We hope to announce a couple more deck deals in ’07.

How fast do you see the mobile entertainment services sector growing?
I think that the industry can continue to grow at 30% to 35% per year through the end of 2008. It’s already a multi-billion dollar industry but I think it’s poised for continued growth. Overall, the migration of handsets to higher bandwidths, with higher resolution camera phones is all good new for us.

What are your goals for Frengo in 2007?
Major goals for 2007 are to really get our name out there and then to increase adoption and get hundreds of thousands of customers, and ramp up the services. We’ll really use the feedback loop with our customers to bring to the forefront the games and services that they find most appealing. 

Ziki SVP Business Development, Andre Taliercio – OPW Interview

Posted on April 7, 2007

AndretaliercioOPW INTERVIEW — Apr 7 — Social networks give browsers an idea of a persons reputation through testimonials and the people they are linked with. Truedater.com reports on daters. Dating sites have considered integrating reputation management tools, but how to? Ziki is one of my favorite reputation management services and might serve as inspiration. I interviewed the SVP Business Development Andre Taliercio. – Mark Brooks

How and why was Ziki started?
Ziki was started by Patrick Chassany in New York. Patrick started a domain buying company in the late 90’s and he realized that buying people’s names and registering them to protect them was the next step. So in 2000 he decided to start a business with this concept. This was how Ziki was formed. Then I joined the company in September 2006 and we decided to add the promotion aspect. Why? Because we believe the name and identity control is a strong concept, combined with self promotion, it brings a unique feature in social networking and it address a need for millions of people.

How does the service work? How does a user use Ziki at its best?
The best use of Ziki is for users who produce content because  Ziki allows them to really aggregate all they have in one place and be visible on major search engines and the Ziki community. Sign up, put a picture and some personal information in and then all the other profiles and blogs that they have will show immediately on their home page. Ziki will allow them to be in control of everything.

How do you compare with Claim ID?
Claim ID is really restricted to the control of identity. In our case not only is all the content you produce in one place, our objective is to really make this content visible and promote it. I believe Claim ID doesn’t do that. I don’t think they want to do that.

You’re allowing people to pay on a PPC basis to bubble up their name in search results, but why would somebody want to do that?
We pay for it. Right now we sponsor our members first and last name. Then their name will show like a paid ad on Google, Yahoo and MSN. We’re paying for it. We’re doing it to show how visible Ziki members can be. So that’s why it’s free. Some people would not pay for it because maybe they don’t feel the need or understand how it works. But if people just try it they will see. It only takes one hour to do the program. You sign up and someone just turns the switch on and you will see your name as an ad, a paid ad.

How are you making money?
We’re not, yet. We just started this in September and we’re introducing the interface allowing users to choose their own keywords. They can manage their own advertising campaigns. We make money by optimizing the campaigns on Google, Yahoo and MSN. Because of the optimization we can make money from it. Of course, it makes sense if we can multiply this two cents by many, many users. This none on our business models…

Are you reaching out for any particular partners?
So far we are trying to get as many members as we can to add interesting profiles, meaning, people with content. One day we would like to develop strong intra-communities, with some leaders who will generate content on specific topics. This the beauty of Ziki: it benefits you outside and inside the community.

What are your goals for 2007?
To increase the active membership base and the number of paying customers. That’s what we want to do. We want to be visible but we don’t want to grow too fast. We want to really listen to the members and see how they feel we should evolve.

Now by the end of 2007, let’s say the community grows nicely, the number of members has increased, then we can identify common areas in this community. What we strive to do one day is, for example, to create Ziki.jobs, and Ziki.tech, and many types of sub community. Instead of growing outside with no control, we’re trying to grow inside with quality profiles and have sub communities. Why is this important? By doing this, we create the identify of the community, it’s culture.  One of the objectives for us is to create a culture within Ziki. 

Ziki SVP Business Development, Andre Taliercio – OPW Interview

Posted on April 7, 2007

AndretaliercioOPW INTERVIEW — Apr 7 — Social networks give browsers an idea of a persons reputation through testimonials and the people they are linked with. Truedater.com reports on daters. Dating sites have considered integrating reputation management tools, but how to? Ziki is one of my favorite reputation management services and might serve as inspiration. I interviewed the SVP Business Development Andre Taliercio. – Mark Brooks

How and why was Ziki started?
Ziki was started by Patrick Chassany in New York. Patrick started a domain buying company in the late 90’s and he realized that buying people’s names and registering them to protect them was the next step. So in 2000 he decided to start a business with this concept. This was how Ziki was formed. Then I joined the company in September 2006 and we decided to add the promotion aspect. Why? Because we believe the name and identity control is a strong concept, combined with self promotion, it brings a unique feature in social networking and it address a need for millions of people.

How does the service work? How does a user use Ziki at its best?
The best use of Ziki is for users who produce content because  Ziki allows them to really aggregate all they have in one place and be visible on major search engines and the Ziki community. Sign up, put a picture and some personal information in and then all the other profiles and blogs that they have will show immediately on their home page. Ziki will allow them to be in control of everything.

How do you compare with Claim ID?
Claim ID is really restricted to the control of identity. In our case not only is all the content you produce in one place, our objective is to really make this content visible and promote it. I believe Claim ID doesn’t do that. I don’t think they want to do that.

You’re allowing people to pay on a PPC basis to bubble up their name in search results, but why would somebody want to do that?
We pay for it. Right now we sponsor our members first and last name. Then their name will show like a paid ad on Google, Yahoo and MSN. We’re paying for it. We’re doing it to show how visible Ziki members can be. So that’s why it’s free. Some people would not pay for it because maybe they don’t feel the need or understand how it works. But if people just try it they will see. It only takes one hour to do the program. You sign up and someone just turns the switch on and you will see your name as an ad, a paid ad.

How are you making money?
We’re not, yet. We just started this in September and we’re introducing the interface allowing users to choose their own keywords. They can manage their own advertising campaigns. We make money by optimizing the campaigns on Google, Yahoo and MSN. Because of the optimization we can make money from it. Of course, it makes sense if we can multiply this two cents by many, many users. This none on our business models…

Are you reaching out for any particular partners?
So far we are trying to get as many members as we can to add interesting profiles, meaning, people with content. One day we would like to develop strong intra-communities, with some leaders who will generate content on specific topics. This the beauty of Ziki: it benefits you outside and inside the community.

What are your goals for 2007?
To increase the active membership base and the number of paying customers. That’s what we want to do. We want to be visible but we don’t want to grow too fast. We want to really listen to the members and see how they feel we should evolve.

Now by the end of 2007, let’s say the community grows nicely, the number of members has increased, then we can identify common areas in this community. What we strive to do one day is, for example, to create Ziki.jobs, and Ziki.tech, and many types of sub community. Instead of growing outside with no control, we’re trying to grow inside with quality profiles and have sub communities. Why is this important? By doing this, we create the identify of the community, it’s culture.  One of the objectives for us is to create a culture within Ziki.