CNN — Nov 27 — Nonnie Dotson is an army nurse, mother of a 16 month old baby, and an internet dater with profiles on MySpace and SingleParentMeet. I was asked to comment on the profiles. Here’s my latest live interview on CNN’s Nancy Grace. Nancy gives a recommendation, of sorts, for online dating. – Mark Brooks
Category: Outlets – CNN
A MySpace For Grown-ups
CNN MONEY — Dec 1 — Reid Hoffman's MySpace-for-grown-ups is at a tipping point. These days you're either LinkedIn or left out. LinkedIn (8 million members) is all about business: recruiting, sales, investment. After a slow start, the service has nearly doubled its membership during the past year. Seeded with Hoffman's own high-powered network, LinkedIn has raced past its rivals. Sequoia Capital and Greylock pumped ~$15 million into LinkedIn. The private company says it's profitable and on track to hit $100 million in revenue by 2008. LinkedIn makes money from advertising, and services. People – mainly the site's 60,000 recruiters – pay an average of $3,600 a year for premium features. Corporate members pony up six-figure fees for access to the network. FULL ARTICLE @ CNN
Mark Brooks: fyi, Reid Hoffman also invested in Friendster early on. LinkedIn is a 'high integrity' network. By that I mean, the associations that people make on the site are likely to be real associations. High integrity networks take a little longer to build. LinkedIn will eventually be worth as much, and more, than the likes of Facebook. Facebook recently expanded it's focus by opening up to the whole world. It's no longer a school Facebook. It;s no longer special or exclusive. It will grow in the short term but lose it's core market (students) in the long term to more focused competitors. WAYN.com also took a while to build but is growing very fast now. OurStory.com will take a long time to build but will do very well also.
Modern Romance: Get Texted When Love is Near
CNN — Nov 30 — Online dating is so last year. Now, if you're thinking romance, look to your mobile phone. Match-making companies are creating new services that allow people to post their dating profile online and then automatically receive a text message on a GPS-enabled phone when a match is nearby, say, at a coffee shop around the corner. Mobile dating is such a new trend that the size of its user base isn't even closely followed. In a survey of online dating users conducted by Jupiter Research, barely a fraction of them said they use mobile platforms in search of romance. But younger generations more comfortable with newer technologies could change how people connect. Three in four of them use text messaging (versus one in four adults) and nearly half of them use their phones to instant message. FULL ARTICLE @ CNN
Mark Brooks: Think long term, think mobile. Mobile dating will eventually produce more revenue than online dating. Who wants to sit in front of a desk while chatting up a potential date? Users want to be free, mobile, but hooked into the net. Mobile dating is far, far more compelling than internet dating. LBS + Phonecams + Palmtop computer phones (a la 'sidekick'). Which is why I created Mobile Dating Watch. Watch this space 😉
The Race to Create a ‘Smart’ Google
CNN — Nov 20 — Everything you buy online says a little bit about you. And if all those bits get put into one big trove of data about you and your tastes? Marketer's heaven. Pandora creates unique "radio stations" for three million users. Whattorent.com administers a personality test and recommends DVDs. The Web, they say, is leaving the era of search and entering one of discovery. What's the difference? Search is what you do when you're looking for something. Discovery is when something wonderful that you didn't know existed, or didn't know how to ask for, finds you. When it comes to search, there's a $145 billion company called Google, but there's no go-to discovery engine – yet. Building a personalized discovery mechanism will mean tapping into all the manners of expression, categorization, and opinions that exist on the Web today. Professor John Riedl built one of the first recommendation engines in the mid-1990s. "The social web is going to be driven by these systems." Amazon remains the prime example. Levchin, (31, co-founded PayPal) is creating a "machine that knows more about you than you know about yourself." Slide is a slide show photo-sharing site. But photos are just a way to get Slide users communicating, establishing relationships. The site culls news feeds and gathers real-time information from eBay auctions or Match.com profiles etc. It drops information onto user desktops and watches to see how users react. FULL ARTICLE @ CNN
Mark Brooks: When I was 22 and fresh out of college I decide to spend a winter selling cars at a Ford dealership in Los Angeles. (This was after four summers selling aerial photography door to door in Pennsylvania and Michigan). I learned a lot from my American sales closers and counterparts. One of the things they repeatedly told me, and ingrained in me was "buyers are liars." This seemed like an extreme mentality at the time, but, at the core of this message, they were telling me that people really don't know what they want. They were right, and this is most true for the internet dating industry. Users absolutely need help and guidance. Some users know it, some don't. The premium money is in serving those who know they need help and guidance, and are willing and able to pay for the help. Unfortunately they are more likely to get creamed than get real knowledgeable guidance and assistance. This will change, and the (high integrity) companies that lead this change will be the Google's of the internet dating world.
Millionaire Web Site Sex Scandal
My Recommended Safety Tips were displayed on the 40 minute segment 5 times as follows:
- Don't share personal information
- Don't let them pick you up at home
- Coffe shop or public place for first date
- Let someone know where you are & have them call you an hour into the date
Mark Brooks: I knew I was in for a grilling. My first live TV interview. Do you agree with the safety tips? What's missing?
MySpace Worth $15 Billion?
The full article was originally published at Valleywag, but is no longer available.
Mark Brooks: YouTube and FaceBook are looking at $1 billion+ valuations right now so it's not too hard to extrapolate MySpace valuation out a few years at the $10 billion+ range assuming consistent growth rates. Crazy days. No wonder everyone and their uncle are starting social networks. (btw, flash based, next generation social network Mooble is for sale for a song. Email me at mark@courtlandbrooks.com if interested).
Friendster to Get a $10 Million Boost
The Mythology of 21st-century Dating
CNN — Feb 13 — According to Jupiter Research, more than 17 million people viewed online personals last year, and about 2.5 million paid for them. (It's usually free to browse; the money kicks in when you want to connect with someone.) There are several major sites to choose from, including Match.com, eHarmony, Yahoo! and the aptly named Plentyoffish.com. As part of a CNN Radio special, CNN Headline News anchor Erica Hill and I hosted a radio show discussing online dating PODCAST. FULL ARTICLE @ CNN INTERNATIONAL
Online Dating Feeling Less Attractive
CNN MONEY — Aug 18 — Online dating has shrugged off its social stigma and emerged as a mainstream means for singles to find that special someone. The U.S. online dating industry is expected to climb 9% year-over-year with revenues of $516 million in 2005, said Nate Elliott, an analyst at Jupiter Research. That's slower than the 19% growth in 2004. And 77% in 2003. There are currently nearly 1,000 dating Web sites, said Bill Tancer of Hitwise, and one out of every 100 people logging on to the internet visits an online dating site. Niche sites are popular. Social networking sites have become increasingly popular among the young. That's giving traditional online dating sites a run for their money, said John Tinker, research analyst at ThinkEquity Partners. The Big 3 online dating sites — Yahoo! Personals, Match.com and EHarmony.com will have to tweak their business models and create new innovative products to grow revenue. One place to look is advertising. Date.com's CEO Meir Strahlberg said that advertising revenues have doubled in the past few months to 10% of total revenue. "There are 86 million single adults who control annual spending of $1.6 trillion," Strahlberg said. "Online dating sites reach about 30 percent of that market currently." Date.com can target an advertiser's products to almost any demographic based on user profiles. Yahoo! Personals general manager Lorna Borenstein said, "today's online daters are increasingly sophisticated. You can't just increase offerings; you have to help singles figure out their relationship goals and offer tools to help them find their version of success, whatever that might be." FULL ARTICLE @ CNN MONEY
Mark Brooks: Hot future trends; 1. targeted advertising on online dating sites. 2. personality profiling.