Category: Interviews – Service Spotlights

Interview With Besedo CEO, Patrik Frisk

Posted on September 18, 2017

OPW INTERVIEW – Sep 18 – I've known of Besedo for several years now. They've been diligently serving the dating industry for all those years, and have recently merged with IOSquare to provide a more intelligent and cost-effective means of doing User Generated Content review. Of course, this is a high priority for dating sites to clean up profiles and photos, and protect against abuse, scammers, spammers, the obscene and the obnoxious. Users want a high quality experience without the surprise of finding noxious profiles and content and communications. So Besedo is doing well and have managed to service and maintain the loyalty of Meetic (Match Group) for 5 years, no less. Here's my interview with the CEO, Patrik Frisk. (Full Disclosure: Besedo is a Courtland Brooks client) – Mark Brooks

What does Besedo do?
Besedo is a company that was founded on the principle of helping our clients create trust between their users. Essentially what we do is we help clients with content moderation and customer support. We’ve been doing that for over fifteen years.

What is your founding story?
The principle has always been that we are wanting to help our clients to generate trust between their users. Our founder started the company over fifteen years ago here in Sweden. We have always been working in the marketplaces and with dating companies. We have been quite focused on classifieds. That's how we got started; that's how we got into the business. Over the years, the red thread has always been content moderation, creating quality content, making sure that we fight fraud, and all the issues around that. That's what we've been focusing on. We have been working quite anonymously over the last several years; focusing quite a lot on bigger players. Over the last two to three years, we have opened our product strategy and are focusing on smaller clients. I hope we make a lot more noise over what we do and what we know about.

How have things improved and changed?
If we go back, we started by doing services, manual moderation primarily. We did manual content moderation before it was even a term out there. Over the years, we added a lot of technology to support our manual services. Over the last two to three years, we have had a hard focus on building a technology platform that helps us to be even more efficient.

Who are your testimonial clients?
Within the dating world, we have quite a few clients. The most notable ones are Match Meetic Group and Affinitas.

How long has Meetic been with you?
Meetic has been with us for years. (5 years and 1 month in total)

What is the sweet spot, in terms of client size, for Besedo?
The good thing now, Mark, is that we have the capability to handle a variety of clients. We are a company of roughly 600 people. A lot of those are moderators and agents. We also have a lot of analysts and various other roles, including trust and safety experts. We can really form ourselves around the client's needs. We have products that are suited for the large players with huge volumes, and we have products that are also suited for the smaller ones. Our focus is marketplaces and dating companies; companies that really want to make sure that they have quality content and have created a user platform that is built on trust.

What is your price spectrum, roughly?
We're probably not the cheapest out there, but we are very affordable for the quality that you are getting. We are not competing primarily on cost. We are competing on the quality that we provide, and the comprehensive services that we provide. We are leveraging the experience we have gained over fifteen years, all the data that we sit on, and the collective number of clients that we have.

Over the next year or so, what are your goals for the dating industry?
For the dating industry, we want to continue to develop our services and adapt them to specific problems they face. To that end, we will place a lot of focus on dating-specific services. That is one of our goals. We want to grow, as any company wants to do. We also value the relationship we have with our clients, so we cannot grow too fast. However, we are looking to expand. We are very strong in Europe, Asia, and South America. The U.S. is very interesting and will be a focus for the coming year.

See all posts on Besedo

Post by Mark Brooks @ Courtland Brooks

BeehiveID Launches Selfie-Authentication Service, CEO Interview

Posted on September 1, 2015

BeehiveID selfie verifiedOPW INTERVIEW – Sep 1 – Mary Haskett is the CEO of BeehiveID, who are focused on helping Internet dating sites authenticate users. (Full Disclosure: BeehiveID is a client of Courtland Brooks) – Mark Brooks

Tell me how you understand fraud issues in the dating industry and the negative consequences?
I’ve changed my perspective since I started working with the online dating industry about a year ago. My background is working for the DoD.

The problem is that everyone online is anonymous and totally unaccountable for their actions. The question isn't "Who are you?" but "Can I hold you accountable if you turn out to be a jerk?"

Most of the fraud in the online dating industry is peer-to-peer fraud. An impostor poses as a love interest, lures the victim into a romance, and ransacks his or her finances. They aren't directly defrauding the dating site (we're talking about users defrauding each other) but there are negative consequences to the reputation of the site.

But accountability is not just about the obvious scam, it is about accountability for community standards. For example, on one dating site it might be super-important that you are a vegetarian. In real-life societies, we always hold people accountable for whatever the standards of our group might be. Online, we can't do that because people can always come back under new identities.

How does BeehiveID resolve these key fraud issues and what are the features and benefits?
We ensure that customers who create an online account are real. However, we don't need to know any personal information. We just know they are real and unique, and that is enough to enforce accountability.

We have two primary methods – one is "selfie authentication" where a user makes a short video with a webcam or phone and the other uses social sites (LinkedIn, Facebook and Google).

How much does it cost?
It starts at $1 per verification for very low volumes and can go as low as $0.15 per verification for large volumes.

How easily is it too implement?
It is very easy to implement. There are two options. For sites with low volume or no technical team at all, they just send an email to their members inviting them to verify their identity with BeehiveID. The email includes a link to a branded page that guides them through the process. We then create a web report of all the users that we have verified and they manually check the report each day and update that user's profile to denote their verified status.

For sites who want to automate the process, they add a graphical button in the new account creation process. This button pops up the BeehiveID window and we verify their ID. Then we send the results to a web end point that they have to create.

Do you offer trials?
Yes. We also have a program for startups to let them use BeehiveID for free while they are building up their user base.

Post by Courtland Brooks Internet Dating Marketing Consulting

Interview With Webpurify CEO, Jonathan Freger

Posted on January 13, 2015

Webpurify logoOPW INTERVIEW – Jan 13 – Webpurify is an Internet dating industry preferred provider for moderation.  It works, scales, and will increment your conversion factors if you use their faster service options. They're a client of Courtland Brooks. We like what they do and recommend using them. They're rock solid, and have been around 7 years.  Here's my interview with the CEO of Webpurify, Jonathan Freger.

How does Webpurify help Internet dating sites? 
Quick and effective moderation is essential for enhancing user experience and protecting brands. WebPurify works with many sites in the dating space to not only moderate their image, text, and video content for offensive material but also to sort images so that they display in the appropriate areas of a site.

For example,depending on a site's needs, images with one human face may be sorted for "Profile Photos Only", whereas a picture of just a landscape will likely be sorted to show somewhere else on a user's profile. Again, each site's audience and functionality is different so we work closely with them to develop the most comprehensive and effective moderation plan for their users, and to help improve their conversion factors and improve the user experience.

How are you different? 
For starters, we don't crowd source this important work. Crowd sourcing is a dangerous solution for user's private info.  Our teams are specially trained for each unique project. Having been in the moderation business for more than 7 years, we take a very hands on consultative approach with our clients so we can address all of their moderation needs.

Why is crowdsourcing bad?
Many of our clients have come to us after a poor experience with a crowd sourcing solution. You are essentially trusting an anonymous, untrained and unaccountable work force with a critical piece of your site's success, not to mention the privacy issues.

What are the most common concerns from iDating CEOs these days with respect to content moderation? 
Turn around time is extremely important. User experience is essential in this space, which is why we moderate most content in 5 minutes or less. This keeps users engaged and coming back. Accuracy is of course extremely important as well. We pride ourselves on an impeccable track record.

What kind of services should the industry look for, and what kind should they steer clear of? 
Automated solutions for image and video moderation simply don't work. Categories like "drug use" or "violence" just can't be caught this way. Also, crowd sourcing solutions can be dangerous since you are typically using an anonymous, untrained, and unaccountable work force to handle an essential part of your business.

Our clients are typically looking for a solid partner to take this burden off of their hands. WebPurify moderates roughly 500,000 images daily so we are more than prepared to take on projects of all types and sizes.

How do you improve accuracy? 
Accuracy is essential to the success of our client's sites. We typically require 2 to 3 weeks for training and set up for any new custom moderation project. During training and when projects are live, our managers run daily tests by inserting sample photos into the stream. Results are gathered and discussed with each moderator. These results are also shared weekly at the team meetings.

How familiar are they with iDating? 
We work with many clients in the iDating space. We have found that each site has it's own unique challenges and we work with these clients to develop the most effective and comprehensive moderation program for their specific needs. Although each site is different, we have found that they all share the need for rapid moderation of all of their user generated content in order to retain their users and keep them engaged. Our automated profanity filter scans text in milliseconds and our live teams can return image moderations within 5 minutes or less.

Post by Mark Brooks @ Courtland Brooks Internet Dating Marketing Consulting

Aclipsa Interview With VP Of Business Strategy Tom Oh

Posted on June 6, 2014

OPW INTERVIEW – June 6 – With the increasing popularity of video messaging through mobile apps like Snapchat, Vine, etc., there is now the potential for dating sites to pay attention to mobile video messaging, specifically secure video messaging, as a new way for generating revenue. Aclipsa is currently the only secure mobile video messaging provider with a B2B offering. We've interviewed Tom Oh, VP of Business Strategy at Aclipsa. Email me at mark@courtlandbrooks.com if you'd like a copy of the Secure Mobile Video Messaging white paper.

(Full Disclosure: Aclipsa is a client of Courtland Brooks) – Mark Brooks

What does Aclipsa do?
Aclipsa delivers streaming video to mobile apps. We offer two different ways – through a one-way video delivery called content distribution, and a two-way conversation called video messaging.

Which other industries are you involved with?
The entertainment and sports industry. Our entertainment clients use our app that allows them to deliver entertainment content. Our sports clients uses Aclipsa to deliver team information on various sports for all of their customers.

How does it work? What, exactly, are the users getting with the integration of your product?
The user gets a very simple way to create and send private video messages.

You're also addressing the Internet dating industry. People are not using video that much because it is very personal and they are concerned about their privacy. If that video gets spread around, they could get very embarrassed. How do you help with that?
Our secure video messaging is not going to be shared or posted to any type of social site. It creates a more personal conversation knowing that it can't be shared or copied. This gives users a little more comfort to open up more.

How is Aclipsa funded?
Aclipsa is funded by the founder. He has been very dedicated and committed over the last four years.

What does it cost?
It is based on a monthly usage. It depends on your user base – how often they're using it. You pay for processing, storage, and total number of minutes. We charge clients based on what's been used, not on a flat-rate fee.

How, would you say, Aclipsa compares with the competitors?
There are companies offering social video messaging and some companies that are offering businesses video messaging, but they are not secure. We've found this niche of secure video messaging which protects the privacy of all users. From a B2B standpoint, Aclipsa makes it easy to integrate our technology into somebody's existing iOS or Android app, which makes us unique.

What does the future hold? What's your goal, by the end of the year, with this industry?
I see a strong, long-term relationship potential with the online dating industry. We want to help them increase conversions, improve the user experience and create a path or an in-app way to authenticate users.

BeehiveID Interview With co-Founder Mary Haskett

Posted on February 25, 2014

BeehiveID Mary HaskettOPW INTERVIEW – Feb 25 – BeehiveID is a new ID verification technology that is being used in online dating. It analyzes an individual's social media history, their friends and posts to determine whether a genuine person or a spambot is posting. TangoWire, a network of niche dating sites, has recently implemented BeehiveID technology. Here is our interview with Mary Haskett, who is the co-founder.

What is BeehiveID's founding story?
I met my co-founder, Dr. Alex Kilpatrick, when we worked together on a large national biometric identification project in the Middle East. We both felt that the way identity is managed online is fundamentally broken. On the Internet, your identity is tied to an email address. Individuals can have as many as they want at no cost. We wanted to see if the identity technologies could be used to verify that an online account was backed by a real person. We were accepted into the three month TechStars startup accelerator in Seattle and developed BeehiveID. 

What's your industry specific solution for Internet daters?
We prevent online fraud. BeehiveID combs through the data on social sites like Facebook or LinkedIn. All of the posts, messages, uploaded photographs, likes, etc. create an interconnected graph of data, which we sort through to find the patterns real people display that fraudulent accounts do not. We use those patterns to generate the BeehiveID score, a measure of your proof of personhood. The score is modeled after a credit score, so a low score indicates a fake profile and a high score indicates the account is backed by a real person.

How much does it cost?
The cost is based on the number of identities validated per month. There is a free tier for very low volume users. The highest price (for low volumes) is $1 per verification but the price goes down rapidly as the number of transactions per month increases.

How is it better than the likes of a Rapsheets.com felony and sex offender check?
Those services are great if you are only looking for felony and sex offenders in the US. Facebook alone has more than one billion users worldwide and so we are able to provide identity verification for a much larger number of people. Integrating BeehiveID into a dating site is as easy as adding a button to the site, and having your identity verified requires only a single click.

How can the idating industry work with you?
We would love to talk to anyone who wants to take BeehiveID out for spin. We are happy to discuss options for trial periods.

PAR Program Interview With CEO Jeremy Shoemaker

Posted on February 19, 2014

Shoemoney Jeremy ShoemakerOPW INTERVIEW – Feb 19 – PAR Program (People Acquisition & Retention) helps you capture users who would have otherwise left your dating site, convert them to paying members and retain them. Here is our interview with CEO Jeremy Shoemaker, the affiliate marketing expert and “The Most Influential Person on the Internet”, (Fast Company, 2010).

What work have you done with the iDating industry?
I was an affiliate. In 2009-2010 I had two full time people running Facebook campaigns, spending $70,000 to $90,000 per day. We were the largest advertiser on Facebook. I then became part of an advisory team that gave us a lot of access to tools they were testing at the time (api's, mass CSV uploads, etc). I gave a keynote talk at Affiliate Summit East in 2010 about Facebook advertising. 

While it sounds eye opening that we were spending that much money, we were operating on pretty slim margins. 15% max profit on good days and -2% loss on bad days.  Thank god for our American Express Plum credit card with 2% cash back that added a significant lift to our profit. (It’s now 1.5%).

At first we sent the traffic directly to the dating site but then later realized it was more valuable to send the traffic to our own landing page offering dating advice. This more than doubled our ROI as an affiliate. 

Unfortunately, Facebook put a massive strangle hold on what you could do in ads for dating. It got to the point where it was no longer worth it. 

Which affiliate programs do you respect the most?
Zoosk was a pleasure to work with. It was strange with True, Mate1 and some others because they always wanted us to go so slow and would only accept a limited volume.  But I never dealt with a company that I did not respect from an affiliate’s point of view.

Where are the greatest opportunities for iDating companies to retain their users more effectively?
Email is by far the biggest way but nobody does it right. They don’t  understand effective copywriting.  All they do is push sale. They need to engage with the user, offer them value, build a relationship with them, and measure engagement and look at its effects. 

My team and I have been doing copywriting for sales for 11 years and have sold tens of millions of dollars of our own and other people's products through email marketing.  Most of these customers being repeat buyers.  This is because we have built a relationship with them.

You've launched the PAR program, which stands for People Acquisition and Retention.  How would this work specifically for iDating companies?
PAR Program was born because of our previous experience in the dating industry.

Dating companies have 4 problems from an outsider looking in:

  1. Getting new customers to fill out a free profile.
  2. Converting them to paying customers.
  3. Retaining those paying customers.
  4. Bringing back people that cancel.

Our PAR Program can solve all of these issues or at least drastically improve them.  We have the ability to not only segment by the criteria above but also by gender, age, social interests and other key demographics. The best part is its done 100% automated.  We even do the copywriting.

What's the PAR program cost?
It’s a $2500 setup fee then a monthly fee based on the amount of active emails in your account. The beginning package is $995 for up to 15,000 active emails. The bigger the monthly package the more cost effective it becomes. 

Neo4j Interview With CEO Emil Eifrem

Posted on January 8, 2014

Neo4j Emil EifremOPW INTERVIEW – Jan 8 – What do Snap Interactive, Bang With Friends, Hinge and Meetic all have in common? They all use neo4j graph database. 

Neo4j is an open-source graph database, implemented in Java. The developers describe Neo4j as "embedded, disk-based, fully transactional Java persistence engine that stores data structured in graphs rather than in tables". Neo4j is the most popular graph database around, and was developed by Neo Technology. – Mark Brooks

What's a graph database, and why should the iDating industry care?
It’s a new type of database that is optimized for querying connections between people, things, interests, or really anything that can be connected.

The iDating industry cares about interactions and connections. Those two concepts are closely linked. If someone has a connection to another person, through a shared friend or a shared interest, they are much more likely to interact.

How do most iDating databases work in comparison?
Conventional databases, such as MySQL and Oracle, are not designed to help figure out if two people share a connection. They were designed to quickly retrieve specific information about an individual, such as for computing a payroll. Using these type of databases, there is no efficient way to figure out even slightly complex connections.

For certain types of queries, such as friends of friends, a graph database is 1000 times faster than a relational database. This is important for mobile devices, and for building web pages quickly. People will not wait 60 seconds for your query to complete.

What kind of benefits have your clients seen?
More connections, and more interactions.

Interactions are much more likely when there is a connection between you and the person you are looking at. Neo4j enables our customers to model and make sense of the friend data for millions of users. If you find a friend of a friend online, you are three times as likely to connect to that person than to a stranger. For a friend of a friend of a friend, you are twice as likely to connect than if there is no relationship.

Many sites are bound to the second degree, but expanding to the third degree creates an explosion of value. The 3rd degree provides huge volume. People have hundreds of friends, but thousands of FOF and tens of thousands of FOFOFs.

With Neo4j, our customers easily expand to the third degree. It works natively, and with no tricks. Using MySQL, it is difficult to come up with a reasonable solution. With any relational database, there is no efficient way to find 3rd degree connections.

You power BangWithFriends. Do you work with any other dating sites or apps?
Yes, in addition to Down (previously Bang With Friends), we power Snap Interactive, Hinge, Avalable (Singles Solution), Meetic. Additionally, there are some other dating sites that are building new features in Neo4j as we speak. (David Fox, Big Data Engineer at Snap Interactive, recently spoke at GraphConnect conference in New York).

What's the cost for using Neo4j, roughly?
We provide pricing options that match where the company is to its stage of growth. For startups, it’s $12K per year for a commercial subscription. We also have free trials available for evaluation.

Who should readers contact in order to find out more?
Henry Taylor, hank@neotechnology.com. He can point you in the right direction for getting up and running with Neo4j.

SafeCharge Interview With CMO Shemer Katz

Posted on September 25, 2013

OPW INTERVIEW – Sep 23 - SafeCharge has focused on the iDating business and attended iDate conferences since 2004. They’ve signed numerous significant clients in the iDating business now. They know our industry. Here’s my interview with the their CMO, Shemer Katz. – Mark Brooks

Tell us more about SafeCharge. What do you do, and what's the founding story of Safe Charge?
SafeCharge is a payment provider, established in 2000. Today, we provide services to thousands of online mobile merchants, including some of the biggest dating companies.  We provide them the connectivity to the acquiring bank risk management services, and our main objective is to give them the best payment conversion with minimized risk of fraud.

Can you tell us who you are working with?
We serve half a dozen of top dating sites in Europe you list on your European online dating ranking page on OPW.

Why are they using Safe Charge?
Because of our experience in the idating industry. We offer the best payment conversion because we know the statistics, we know how to reroute the transaction to the proper acquiring bank, and how to manage the fraud. We have a large negative database that has been built throughout the years specifically to this industry. So we know exactly who the fraudsters are and we know how to block them ahead of time.

Now that is interesting. You have a black list…..
Yes. The black list has been built throughout the 13 years that we have been serving the industry.

You work with idating as one vertical. What are the other verticals you work with?
We work with sports betting, gaming, online financial services, online games, retail, and many other digital services.

What would you say are some of the latest trends in the payment processing industry that are important for the internet dating industry executive to know about?
Mobile payment is definitely one of the hottest trends. We also accommodate our payment services to support the mobile payments. Our mobile payments page is HTML5 compliant and the users get a native payment experience.

In addition to that, dating merchants are increasing the payment options that are available on their checkout page in order to increase their conversion in each region. Of course that is a great way of increasing revenue, just offering more payment options.

What has been hot though in the idating industry specifically? What has done well in the way of alternative payment systems? What would you say would be the top two additional?
It varies by the geographic. I would say that mobile payments, premium SMS, and direct carrier billing are the most important payment options. Also the cash-based payment is growing in some regions.

Are there any new regulations that the industry should be aware of?
I think that the enforcement of PCI compliance by the card schemes is major. The merchant has to go through the process to become compliant with the PCI requirements. More and more merchants prefer to use an external card vault to safely and securely store their customer's  sensitive payment information. This is actually the most effective solution that still allows for the one click payment for repeat customers while completely offloading the burden of PCI compliance to a third party like SafeCharge.

Service Spotlight: Teligence

Posted on March 6, 2013

OPW INTERVIEW – Mar 6 – Teligence knows voice chat, and mobile dating (white label), and has a customer service outsourcing offering as well (On Q). They’ve been busy. Here’s a quick spotlight interview with the GM, Jeff Prete. (Full Disclosure: Teligence is a client of Courtland Brooks)

Tell us about Teligence, what do you do?
We’ve been in the voice-chat industry for 22 years. We’ve branched out into the web and to white label mobile apps.

How big is the business?
We’re $50 Million+ a year in revenues with a high degree of profitability.

If a dating company comes to you and says we want voice chat, can you help?
Yeah, absolutely. Voice chat is the easiest one to set up right now. It's a 22 year old platform that monetizes at a very high rate. You can be up and ready in 2 weeks.

What's the revenue split?
It's 50/50. The more you market it, the less our share is.

You can also help with customer service outsourcing, I understand?
We've got a voice customer service team, 24/7/365 email support as well as content moderation.

Are you multi-language?
English, Spanish, and Portuguese are our strengths. We can staff up and get any other language that we need to.

And I think you have an announcement for us about your white label mobile dating platform?
Yes, Here Media liked our white label dating infrastructure, so we worked with them to launch the new Gay.com website. It looks great – you should check it out. The next step is to launch their dating service on iPhone, Android, Windows Phone, and mobile web. They have a very active community and it’s been great to deliver them the next generation of services in the dating industry.

See all posts on Teligence

Service Spotlight: Interview With Neil Steinhardt, GM Of PaysafeCard

Posted on November 15, 2011

OPW INTERVIEW – Nov 15 – Facebook uses prepaid cards. Cupid.com as well. Why? Because people’s credit is shaky these days, there’s a sizable unbanked market, and some people just plain don’t want to use their credit card for a dating site. I discovered PaysafeCard at the last iDate. Here’s my interview with the GM of PaysafeCard. (PaysafeCard are a client of Courtland Brooks)

Who are your top customers?
Cupid.com and Facebook.

How do prepaid cards work?
The PaysafeCard works like a lot of pre-paid cards. We issue a card with 16 digit pin code which are sold at retail for cash and redeemed online. It works just like cash on the Internet. We don’t charge any fees, we don’t register customers.

So how does it work for Facebook for example?
If you were to buy Facebook credits you would go to the checkout screen and you would see a bunch of payment options such as Visa or Mastercard and you would also see the PaysafeCard. You would then click on the PaysafeCard and see a couple of options. If you’re new to Paysafe you can type in your zip code and it will give you a list of the closest locations where you can use the card.  If you already have a PaysafeCard then you enter your 16 digit pin code.

Where do they get the cards from?
PaysafeCards are available in 28 countries – Europe, US, Mexico, Argentina.  There are 350,000 points of retail such as Paypoint in the UK and 7/11 in the US. We work with top shelf distribution partners in every country we are in and we make sure our PaysafeCard vouchers are convenient and local.

What’s your commission?
Prices have come down as is always the case with market pressure. The reality is that the PaysafeCard processing is higher than credit card processing, typically between 10-15%, but we are a lot less expensive than mobile payments for example. All payments are guaranteed with no chargebacks so it’s less book keeping and accounting. Just like paying by cash on the Internet.

What are the best practices that you would recommend for the Internet dating industry? How should prepaid cards in general be applied?
You need to look at your payment mix. Lots of payment options are out there. If you’re only after credit card customers and repeat billing then you are only swimming in a small section of the pool. There a plenty people who have reservations about recurring billings or sharing personal information online. You need to have multiple payment options, not too many that you scare the customer away but an adequate amount to give the customer the ability to pay.  We think having a cash option, which we are, really does attract a large segment of customer base. We have seen 10-30% increase in sales just by offering a cash option.

We have you listed in our payment processors spreadsheet that we issue.  You can find that on OnlinePersonalsWatch on the left hand bar. In a nutshell how would you describe PaysafeCard as being distinguished from other prepaid card providers?
We have a couple of differentiating factors. First, we don’t charge any fees so if you want a $10 PaysafeCard then it will cost you $10 and when you redeem it you get $10 of value. Secondly, we don’t register customers. We are not an e-wallet so the customers who want to retain privacy and not share personal banking information can do so with us.