SMART MONEY – Feb 8 - The online dating market is expected to reach $1.6 billion by 2013, up from $957M in 2008, according to Forrester Research. With online services reporting an increase in subscriptions, sites could raise their prices without losing customers, says Mark Brooks, principal consultant for Courtland Brooks. PlentyofFish.com and OKCupid.com let you troll for dates free of charge. Ignore dating-site boasts about their number of profiles. "The real measure is the number of people who have logged in," Brooks says. "A paid subscription isn't worth it unless monthly traffic is at least 10,000 unique visitors", he says. Complaints about dating services rose 62% from 2005 to 2008, according to the Better Business Bureau. Read consumer reviews about a site before signing up, says Jeannette Kopko, a spokeswoman for the BBB in Dallas. Scammers prey on online daters reeling them in with promises of love and then begging for cash to afford a plane ticket or other expenses. Sites have policies in place to weed out such users, reviewing profiles and communications for red flags, such as poor grammar, mismatched photos and details, and keywords including "wire money," Brooks says. Some also use monitoring services that recognize the scammer's computer preventing him or her from creating a new account after one gets flagged. FULL ARTICLE @ SMART MONEY
Category: Courtland Brooks Press
Highlights From The Internet Dating Conference
EXAMINER – Feb 1 – ~113M users visited online dating sites according to Comscore. This information and more came from last week's Internet Dating Conference in Miami Beach. Mark Brooks gave us the latest statistics including the Jupiter Research study estimating the industry growth to $1.9B by 2010. Brooks thinks this number will actually be higher than estimated.
Some of the key trends for online dating sites include:
* Personality Profiling
* Expert Dating Advice
* Mobile Dating and iPhone Apps
Other features include anonymous calling, video chat, and text messaging to keep members around for more than the three-month average membership term. One of the key highlights of the event was the first annual iDate Awards.
The full article was originally published at Examiner, but is no longer available.
eLove Accepts Fat Rejects From BeautifulPeople.com
MIAMI NEW TIMES – Jan 8 – After posting their holiday pictures on BeautifulPeople.com, 5,000 so-called fatties were shuffled once more into the ratings system for re-approval. Only a few hundred were allowed back. Mark Brooks, an analyst and consultant for the online dating industry, says it's normal for online networks to exclude people, but only as a matter of certain obvious preferences, like sexual orientation. "I think the BeautifulPeople tactic is rather amusing," he remarked. "We've been accustomed to magazine cover culture for over 50 years now," he said. "We need to break away from that. People have been aspiring to unnatural extremes of physical beauty." Paul A. Falzone, CEO of International Dating Ventures, which owns eLove, also believes that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but clearly he shines a different light. "We think everyone is beautiful, and frankly, were disturbed to hear about the way that these people were treated," said Falzone in a statement. eLove is coming to the rescue, opening its doors to all the rejects from BeautifulPeople. FULL ARTICLE @ MIAMI NEW TIMES
Daters Without Borders
NY POST – Nov 29 - More and more New Yorkers are searching for love on European dating sites. Lillian, a 42-year-old Manhattan copy editor signed up for Meetic.com. She Skypes with a Parisian man from the site for an hour each day. Susan, a 22-year-old grad student, also struggled with dating locally, so she widened her eHarmony parameters. Even “Real Housewives of New York City” reality star Alex McCord and Simon van Kempen met through Matchmaker.com while living on different continents. Mark Brooks, editor of OnlinePersonalsWatch.com, says international romance is a growing trend, due to singles’ increasing pickiness about potential life partners. “The longer the shopping list, the further afield you should cast your net,” he advises. A single New Yorker four years ago, he flew to Prague for a European online dating conference where he met and fell for a Czech woman. They married last April and now live in Malta with two daughters.
Here are some of the most popular dating sites from around the world:
Europeans: Meetic.com
Brits and Canadians: PlentyOfFish.com
Asians: AsiaFriendFinder.com
Australians: RSVP.com.au
Indians: Shaadi.com
Russians: Mamba.ru
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Zoosk Hooks Up With $30M
SF BUSINESS JOURNAL – Oct 23 - Zoosk, a so-called online “social” dating service, is now on a $30M annual run rate, and in 2009 it expects to generate $20M in revenue. Zoosk gets 2.3M U.S. visitors monthly, and 8.5M globally, according to Quantcast. Mark Brooks, a well-known online dating site consultant, said Zoosk’s integration with social networks means people don’t have to fill out profiles and they can more casually make connections than on traditional dating sites. Having visibility into a prospective date’s friend network also provides a sense of safety, he said. FULL ARTICLE @ SF BUSINESS JOURNAL
How A Computer Nerd Revolutionized Online Dating
VANCOUVER MAGAZINE – Nov 20 – Markus Frind, the founder, CEO, and sole owner of Plentyoffish.com, works as little as he desires. He’s been quoted as saying he works about 10 hours a week. Plentyoffish.com now has 16M users, earns tens of millions of dollars a year, and is growing 80% a year. Alexa ranks Plentyoffish.com the 35th most trafficked site in Canada and the 100th in the US. It serves up 2.4 billion page views/month.
Plentyoffish.com spends far less money than other sites do. Match.com and eHarmony.com each spend $100M a year on advertising. They run thousands of costly servers even though their traffic is smaller than that of Plentyoffish.com, which has only 11 machines.
The next level Frind aims to conquer is the world of “scientific” dating research. Companies like Chemistry.com, eHarmony.com and Genepartner.com hire psychologists and scientists to design questionnaires and even DNA tests to help people find mates. Frind did hire a relationship psychologist to create “compatibility matching tools” for Plentyoffish.com. Now he thinks he can do better with his own algorithms. “The science of dating,” Frind scoffs, “is all BS.” Those much-heralded matching tools are only 15 or 20% better than chance. And does Frind think he can optimize and tweak his way to beat that score? “I could double or triple it.”
Online Dating Giants Learn From Pick-up Artists
THE ECONOMIST – Nov 5 – Love Systems is an American firm that charges up to £3,000 ($5,000) for courses on how to pick-up women. Online dating firms such as eHarmony and eLove have also picked up on the need for dating coach services, though not on the same scale. Mark Brooks, an online-dating consultant, says, “You can meet the best people in the world and still screw it up because you don't know how to date. People need help, guidance, style counselling… feedback when a date goes wrong.” The National Dating Advice Line was launched last month and offers instant guidance from dating “experts” at £1.50 a minute. The British dating market is valued at nearly £100m, with 8% of Britons using online dating sites, compared to an average of 4% in the rest of Europe. However, the roughly 5 million visitors to British dating sites in September are a hard target. Visitor numbers in Britain fall well short of those in America. Mark Brooks believes this is because Britons are more sceptical than their transatlantic cousins. He regularly warns that overblown promises of true love are likely to repel rather than attract. FULL ARTICLE @ THE ECONOMIST
Online Dating Looks For Love On Social Media
SF CHRONICLE – Oct 27 – Some argue that social media such as Facebook or Twitter, which provide a more accurate snapshot of users' lives, can lead to better connections. Gelato, a new dating site, lets users create their profiles based on information from Twitter, Facebook, Hulu, Netflix and Last.fm. Thread, a site that opened in September, takes a jab at the awkwardness of navigating the Internet to meet strangers by helping Facebook users connect with the friends of their friends. Zoosk claims to be a combination of social networks and online dating. Co-founder Shayan Zadeh said that the site's platform is the digital equivalent of going out to a bar with friends and meeting new people. Blackbox Republic, another newcomer for sex-positive people, describes itself as a social dating site. It provides an environment where people can create networks they can retain even after finding new love interests. In a way, its goal is to challenge the shop-and-go spirit of the classifieds system, Blackbox Republic CEO Sam Lawrence said. OnlineDatingPost.com editor Dave Evans said "You're always going to have these dominant players, but the interesting stuff is with the edge cases. These guys have created a sexier proposition." FULL ARTICLE @ SF CHRONICLE
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FriendFinder Networks Could Look To Sell Non-core Businesses
MERGER MARKET – Oct 26 – FriendFinder Networks, formerly known as Penthouse Media, filed for an IPO in December, anticipating $460m in proceeds to help pay off its debt. FriendFinder could look to sell off non-core pieces of its business that may be distracting to potential investors including GradFinder and Christian dating site BigChurch, online dating industry consultant Mark Brooks said. The company would likely keep its highly lucrative adult sites. Its adult social networking and live interactive video sites comprised 95% of the company’s revenue, as of six months ended 30 June 2008. FriendFinder’s international properties could also be spun out to a media company with more expertise in certain geographic markets, said Noel Biderman, CEO of Toronto-based Avid Life Media, the holding company of dating sites like HotOrNot and Ashley Madison. He pointed to IAC-owned Match which took a 27% stake in European dating operator Meetic in February, in exchange for Match’s European operations, as an industry example of this. In the case of FriendFinder, its Latino dating site Amigos has a strong membership base, and could be sold to an acquirer that can better grow and monetize the brand, Brooks noted. FriendFinder’s sites may fetch 7x to 8x EBITDA, Biderman said, using Match’s USD 80m acquisition of People Media in July as a comparable transaction. FULL ARTICLE @ OPW
Mark Brooks: FriendFinder's successful IPO and continued strong performance is critical for the reputation of the internet dating industry. FriendFinder could indeed look to sell its non-core businesses. Here's what I told the reporter…"GradFinder is a significant property that could be developed out to compete with Classmates.com. …BigChurch is a misfit community for them. They have been chastised by the Christian community for running the site. It should really be sold. Amigos has lots of traffic, is a great name, but South America still doesn't monetize anywhere near as well as the rest of the world. So its a longer term play for a potential acquirer, but the future is pretty clear, it will eventually make good money. FriendFinder needs to have money in the bank, and make good money quickly, so I think these communities would be most suitable for selling."
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Locals Launch Dating Site
FLORIDA TODAY – Sep 22 – Mark Brooks, editor of Onlinepersonalswatch and an industry consultant, said that online dating is growing in popularity because it is a cheaper alternative to filtering your way through the real world to the match of your dreams. PlentyofFish.com, a free dating site averaging ~3M unique visitors per month, has seen a jump in growth since the economic downturn. The site saw a 94% increase in traffic from June 2008 to June 2009. eHarmony.com has seen a 48% gain in traffic since last year and Match.com saw its strongest fourth quarter in about seven years in 2008. Two Indialantic entrepreneurs have capitalized on the trend, creating a new site called vacancylove.com. It is in beta-testing until Oct. 1, when it will officially launch. Until then, users who sign up will get a free 90-day membership.
The full article was originally published at Florida Today, but is no longer available.
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