OPW – Feb 16 – The Plentyoffish.com team have been busy with their Portugese. Here’s the top ten dating site rankings in Brazil. POF is in the top spot now.
| Unique Visitors | |||
| 1. | POF Sites | 1,078 | |
| 2. | C-Date | 785 | |
| 3. | MSN Dating & Personals | 755 | |
| 4. | Meetic-Match | 607 | |
| 5. | be2 GmbH | 558 | |
| 6. | Chifrevirtual.com.br | 488 | |
| 7. | Twoo.com | 484 | |
| 8. | Baixocidade.com.br | 396 | |
| 9. | 1001 Cartas de Amor | 242 | |
| 10. | eHarmony.com.br | 147 |
(Source: Comscore)
HERALD SUN – Feb 16 - The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) is acting on online dating scams after receiving more than 2100 complaints in 2011. Australians were cheated out of $21M by online dating scams last year, up from $15M in 2010. The ACCC has released guidelines that call on dating websites to clearly issue warnings and information about fraudsters as well as publishing examples of scams.
See full article at Herald Sun
Mark Brooks: The ACCC is very active on the issue of scamming in Australia. The Aussie idating industry and the ACCC formed these guidelines for dating sites. Should dating sites in the USA and UK (and beyond) do similar?
INDIA TIMES – Feb 3 – Matchmaking portal BharatMatrimony.com has filed a complaint against Google in the Competition Commission of India, citing discriminatory trade practices related to its AdWords program. The AdWords program is Google's main source of revenue, whereby it sells keywords to advertisers and displays them in the form of ads online. Google earned about 96% of its total revenues of $38 billion from ads, last year. As per sources, BharatMatrimony has filed the complaint on the issue of keywords relating to its websites being sold to rival parties such as Shaadi.com, and Jeevansaathi.com.
The full article was originally published at India Times, but is no longer available.
See all posts on BharatMatrimony
See all posts on Shaadi
See all posts on Jeevansathi
TNW – Jan 19 – Founded in April 2011, I-um is an online dating service that has seen incredible success in the last seven months. Because it’s still popular practice in Korean culture to feel pressured into getting married as one gets older, young people are often set up on blind dates by family and friends instead of meeting singles on their own. I-um is primarily aimed at students and adults aged 20-39 and introduces users to one new person each day. If the interest is mutual, contact details are exchanged so they can begin talking. Since January 2011, users have increased from 40,000 to 190,000, a 375% increase. The site has also seen a revenue boost of 87%, and some 20 couples have already been married as a result of meeting through I-um.
PENN OLSEN – Jan 17 – China dating app U+ (Youja.cn) has secured $3m USD series A funding from VC funds at UMC Capital, The9 and World Trend Ventures. The funds will be used to improve service speed and grow membership further. U+ was set up by serial entrepreneurs who previously founded business social network Wealink.com and Mobile Software developer Vogins.
by Willis Wee
See full article at Penn Olsen
Mark Brooks: One to watch. Youja has a strong founder pedigree and is inspired by the best of the mobile dating apps in the West. Especially Skout, Flirtomatic and Badoo.
This post also appears on InternetDatingInvestments.
HINDUSTAN TIMES – Jan 13 – Shaadi.com got inspired by the now-legendary game Angry Birds and launched a Facebook game called Angry Brides. They have launched the game in the effort of creating awareness and discouraging the practice of dowry in India.
by Shayon Pal
The full article was originally published at Hindustan Times, but is no longer available.
What's the founding story?
51taonan was founded in January 2011 in China. We wanted to leverage from the significant business opportunities in the online dating industry in China. There's no major free dating site in China and so we wanted to take and own that position in China. Currently most dating site in China are paid dating sites. The first year has been very successful with high rates of user acquisition, and a reasonable conversion from registered users to active users. In less than two years, without much marketing 51taonan has gained over 3.5 million registered users. In May this year, we were the first dating company in China to introduce a location based mobile internet dating service, which supports smart phones such as Android, IOS, Symbian, blackberry. Now we have over 250K mobile internet users.
We're now the No.1 free dating site in China. Overall, in China, we're ranked the No.4 dating site, after JiaYuan, Baihe and Zhenai.
Would you say you’re the Plentyoffish of China?
POF is currently the No.1 free dating site in North America and UK. We're the No.1 free dating site in China in terms of the status in the market, so yes its fair to say we're the POF of China.
How is 51taonan different from POF?
POF is a very successful and mature company. We like the POF business model and want to duplicate its successes into China. However, we're a pretty young startup company with serveral million users.
We're still exploring ways to monetize. We want to learn from POF and all other successful free dating companies. Our ultimate goal is to provide a totally free dating services to Chinese users in a successful way.
What does the name 51taonan mean?
The numbers 5 and 1, means I want. Tao means find and get. Then nan means man. So 51taonan means I want to find/get a man. Women find this amusing and seem to like it a lot.
How fast is 51taonan growing?
We have about 100K users signing up at our site each month. We're seeing the hottest growth coming from mobile internet as well as 2nd and 3rd tier cities in China.
How are you monetizing?
Right now, advertising is the major source of our income. We're also looking for any other innovative ways to monetize.
Are you looking for funding?
Yes, absolutely! In order to continue our growth, we're looking for outside investment, with a focus on 'smart money.'
(Disclosure: 51taonan and POF are clients of Courtland Brooks)
THE STREET – Jan 6 – Jiayuan.com is a very popular dating site in China. However, like most of the Chinese Internet space, the shares have been pummeled recently, falling by more than 70% from 2011 highs. RenRen, which many investors felt would bottom out at $5.00, now trades at just over $3.00. On Dec. 21, Jiayuan hit an all-time low of $5.50, prompting management to announce a share buyback program of up to $10M. The share price immediately jumped as much as 20% to over $6.50. However, the initial enthusiasm has proven to be short lived and the share price has drifted back down to the $5 to $6 range once again.
KOREA HERALD – Jan 3 - A revision to the Law on the Management of Marriage Agencies was among the scores of bills that passed the National Assembly on the last few days of 2011. The revised law contained provisions to punish marriage brokers introducing women under the age of 18 and introducing two or more women to an applicant at the same time with up to three years in jail and a maximum fine of 20M won. The law requires notarization of documents providing the personal data of Korean men seeking foreign brides and raised the punishment for running an unregistered marriage brokerage business to a maximum five years’ imprisonment and 50M won in fines from three years and 20M won. As of the end of 2010, 1,253 agencies were registered with the authorities for local and overseas business. Over 30,000 international marriages are reported each year.
PENN OLSON – Dec 15 – Starting today, the Chinese dating website Baihe.com is requiring new users to register their real name upon signup, which will be verified by also inputting their national ID card number. It raises the prospect of privacy concerns and potential ID theft that might be off-putting to some people. But BaiHe – which means ‘Lily’ in English – will have presumably considered that this move might actually be reassuring to users who are looking to meet genuine candidates for marriage (which is the main purpose of the site, not ‘dating’ as such).
by Steven Millward
The full article was originally published at Penn Olson, but is no longer available.