JONGEREN BLOG – Sep 19 – According to a research by Dutch market research company Gallup.nl 21% of Dutch has found a relationship through an online dating site. Lexa.nl, the top dating site in the Netherlands, is responsible for 35,000 dates a week. 1 of the 2 respondents know someone who met her/his partner online.
See full article at Jongeren Blog (in Dutch)
PRESS RELEASE – Sep 17 – F-Buddy.co.uk, a dating site for people looking for ‘no strings attached’ sex is now the fastest growing dating site in the UK, according to Experian Hitwise. The number of visitors to F-Buddy increased by 480% between April and August.
SCOTSMAN – Sep 14 – Cupid Plc has sealed a deal to buy site Uniform Dating for £7M. Cupid will pay £3.6M up front and a further £3.4M depending on Uniform Dating’s performance. Uniform Dating has recently launched in the US, Canada and Australia. The latest takeover follows July’s £2.9M acquisition of French peer Assistance Genie Logiciel, which operates sites including Amour.com. Last year Cupid snapped up a number of Portuguese-language website operators in Brazil.
by Peter Ranscombe
See full article at Scotsman
This post also appears on InternetDatingInvestments.
DAILYMAIL.CO.UK – Sep 12 – Online dating site AdopteUnMec.com (AdoptAGuy.com) has opened an online store in which men are quite literally on the shelf. The travelling shop, which will be open in Paris for the next ten days before going to Brussels, Lausanne, Toulouse and Lyon, is showcasing single guys by putting them on display inside human-sized toy boxes. Women in the French city are flocking to the store to ogle the male models as they show off their best assets. AdoptAGuy.com, a dating site which allows men to ‘advertise’ themselves as potential partners, has been hugely popular since it launched in 2010, with a reported 25K signing up in the first year alone.
PR WEB – Sep 5 – Cupid plc is implementing Scamalytics anti-scammer technology from RecSys. It is already operating on BeNaughty.com and GirlsDateForFree.com, with rollout planned on other sites within months. Cupid is now catching scammers 35% faster and scammer detection is up 10%.
PR WEB – Sep 5 – Lovestruck.com, UK dating site, and Vini Italiani, the home of Italian wines in the UK, launch Speed Tasting – 9 ladies, 9 gentlemen and 9 wines to taste in 90 minutes. The first event is already sold out and will be held on Sep 7th at Vini Italiani's wine store in South Kensington.
STANDARD.CO.UK – Sep 4 – A family-run matchmaking agency based in Mayfair, Gray & Farrar has clients in Brussels, Geneva, Paris, Monaco, New York and Dubai. Their business has quadrupled over the past three years. It now has ~1,750 members, split evenly between the sexes. The clients are “educated, cosmopolitan and accomplished people who meet people all the time but lack access to the right ones, who are genuinely committed to a long-term relationship”. Operating in a similar sphere is Seventy Thirty, whose offices are in Knightsbridge. Seventy Thirty’s membership fees start at £9,5K but climb to £50K. Seventy Thirty has a team of psychologists and relationship experts who matchmake members.
by Rosamund Urwin
See full article at Standard.co.uk
Mark Brooks: Should matchmakers even be in business now? Most people would have predicted their demise with the rise of Internet dating. Quite the opposite has happened. Never before have so many people been open to the idea of spending money to get help. More money = more help! Right? Whats your thoughts?
GAYDAR BLOG – Aug 28 – Here are the winning vouchers collected from Gaydar during the Manchester Pride.
To claim your prize, scan or take a photo of your voucher and email to craig.mccormack@qsoft.co.uk along with your contact.
The full article was originally published at Gaydar Blog, but is no longer available.
CISIONWIRE – Aug 28 – Austria singles spend ~ €16.9M on online dating sites, according to the latest analysis of the industry observer Single-Boersen Vergleich. The top 4 dating sites (eDarling, Elite Partner, Friendscout24 and Parship) are collectively taking 60% of the online dating market share in Austria.
DER SPIEGEL – Andrey Andreyev wants to make his Internet startup the next Facebook, he says, “the next $100 billion company.” From his offices in London, Andreyev oversees Badoo, a growing online-dating and social-networking site. Badoo has 157M members globally, with ~100K more joining each day. The site is part social network, similar to Facebook, and part dating service. Market research shows that 16 of the 20 most popular websites in Europe are American, while the remaining four are Russian. Indeed, the IT boom is the Russian economy’s most notable success since the fall of the Iron Curtain. Another major player in the Internet industry is search engine Yandex. Yandex is the only comprehensive, global search index other than Google and Microsoft’s Bing. Yandex has 3,500 employees with 60% market share in Russia, outstripping Google. It has expanded beyond the borders of the former Eastern Bloc. Yandex hopes to win away up to 20% of Google’s market volume in Turkey. The climate, both in Russia and online, has grown harsher since Putin took over the presidency from Dmitry Medvedev in May. As president, Medvedev liked to be photographed with an iPad, he kept a blog and he presented himself in his Sunday speeches as the Internet’s greatest protector. As recently as December, Putin lauded the Internet as “free and enormously democratic.” But that was campaign rhetoric. The new Internet law allows authorities to block websites without a court order.
by Benjamin Bidder
See full article at The Star
This post also appears on SocialNetworkingWatch.