FORBES – Feb 11 – Ashley Madison, the Match.com for adulterers with 8.5M users globally, is owned by Avid Life. Avid Life had $60M in revenue this year and $20M in profit, almost all of it from Ashley Madison. The site made a stink this year about its ads being banned during the Superbowl, as it has in previous years. One way the company may have gotten around this in the past is through guerilla advertising: slyly placing ads inside anti-Ashley Madison campaigns, like MyMarriageMatters.org — a marriage promotion website run by a divorce lawyer. One monogamy-supporting blogger traced an email address affiliated with the site back to Avid Life. This Marriage Matters ad arguably does more to show off Ashley Madison than to promote the sanctity of marriage. FULL ARTICLE @ FORBES
Category: Outlets – Forbes
Match.com’s Mobile Push
FORBES – Feb 3 - So far Match.com has produced apps for the iPhone, Palm's WebOS handsets and Research In Motion's BlackBerrys. Software for phones that run Google's Android operating system is in the works. The addition of the Android app will bring Match.com to between 80% and 90% of the world's smart phones. The company also supports a mobile Web version of its site. Juniper Research estimates that revenues from the global mobile dating market will grow to ~$1.4 billion by 2013. The next few years will determine whether Match.com remains the industry leader or loses ground to fast-moving upstarts. FULL ARTICLE @ FORBES
The Top Online Meat Markets
FORBES — Aug 25 — Online dating is now a $950M industry and according to Nielsen dating sites snared 27.5M unique visitors in June. Forbes used Nielsen's latest unique-visitor data for June 2009 to rank the 10 most popular dating sites. #1: eHarmony.com, with 4.25M visitors, up 48% YOY. Yahoo Personals came in at #2, with 4.1M uniques, followed by Match.com, with 3.4M. Plentyoffish.com, at #6, boasting 2.2M viewers, nearly double the amount a year ago. Noteworthy is the 91 minutes that an average users spends per visit. "Unlike other dating sites, Plentyoffish relies less on a marketing blitz than on word of mouth from satisfied customers", says founder Markus Frind. In Depth: The 10 Top Online Dating Sites. FULL ARTICLE @ FORBES
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Best Cities For Singles 2009
FORBES — July 24 – The New York metro area boasts a larger number of active accounts on Match.com than any other place in the country, making up 8% of the entire site's active members. Close competition with New York includes Boston, Chicago, Seattle and Washington, D.C., which round out the top five best cities for singles. Only 2% of Angelinos, who live in the second-largest metro in the country, actively use the site. To generate our list of best cities for singles, we ranked 40 of the largest U.S. metropolitan areas in seven different categories: coolness, cost of living alone, culture, job growth, online dating participation, nightlife and the ratio of singles to the entire population of the metro.
The full article was originally published at Yahoo Real Estate, but is no longer available.
Thrifty Singles Embrace Online Dating
FORBES — Feb 13 – Last month, traffic on Match.com's U.K. site grew 17%, from last year. EasyDate.biz, the parent company of online dating websites BeNaughty.com and DateTheUK.com, posted a 112% increase in sales this month from February last year. "We are currently experiencing massive growth in sales and membership levels are exceeding our projections. Month-on-month we are seeing an overall growth of 20%," said Easydate.biz Chief Executive Max Polyakov. FULL ARTICLE @ FORBES
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Online Dating Sites Flirt With Record Growth
FORBES — Jan 6 — With the current downturn in the economy, singles are turning away from traditional methods of meeting people casually in bars and instead are flocking to online dating. Easydate.biz has gone from making a pretax profit of £180k in 2006 to a projected £6m this year. Parship claims it has grown by 400% in sales terms from 2005 to 2007. In Britain alone, 8m active singles went on 24m first dates in 2008, with 69% of these arranged online. FULL ARTICLE @ FORBES
Matchmaker To Millions
FORBES — Feb 14 — There are about 92 million singles the U.S., says Match.com CEO Thomas Enraght-Moony. Match.com is an online dating leader, with networks in 37 different countries and with roughly 15 million users. Enraght-Moony talked to Forbes.com about why online dating is now widely accepted.
Q: Are the people who use the service in the U.S. much younger or older than in other markets?
A: Our sweet spot is people in their late 20s into their mid to late 30s. The 50-plus is our fastest-growing segment.
Q: Who do you worry about the most? eHarmony.com? Singlesnet.com?
A: This is just a short list of people that I worry about. We're in 37
different markets, and every market that we're in there's a list of
competitors.
Q: How is the money made in your business? Is it all subscription-based revenue?
A: We're about 95% in subscription revenues. Last year, we did $349
million in revenue and $78 million in profit, which is up about 24%
over the prior year.
Q: Are people finally comfortable with saying they use online dating services like Match?
A: I think people on Match today are very comfortable talking about it.
It's a big change from 12 years ago, and that's part of the success
we've had.
Q: Have the social networks hurt business?
A: Those services
are great for keeping in contact with the people they already know.
But, if they want to expand their possibilities or are interested in
meeting people outside their social circle, they come back to Match.
Late last year, we launched an application for Facebook. It's called
Little Black Book at Match.com.
Q: What's the next big offering in terms of technology or expansion?
A: We're rolling out a mobile platform, we're figuring out how to work with Facebook and MySpace.
Net Scams Not Slowing Down
FORBES — Nov 1 — Consumers reported that they handed over $1.1 billion to scammers in 2006 according to the FTC, up from $570 million in 2004. Worse, the FTC estimates only 10% of fraud victims actually report. The most prevalent is general merchandise fraud (goods not delivered) followed by auction fraud and then by fake-check scams. (A victim is sent a very real looking cashier's check that bounces a week later.) Another scam, Love Schemes, takes advantage of lonely people on dating sites. Finally there is phishing and the new vishing, a phone version of phishing where the victim is instructed to call a phone number and give personal information to someone representing themselves as a familiar company.
Mark Brooks: iovation (my client) allows subscribing internet dating and SNS sites to identify devices and share information about the reputation of those devices… and catch scammers at the gate.
Married vs Single
FORBES — Feb 14 — Marital status of the U.S. population; 53.5% married, 28.6% never married, 11.7% divorced or separated, 6.2% widowed (US Census 2003). Living arrangements of U.S. households; 28.2% married without children, 23.3% married with children, 16.4% other family households i.e. unmarried parents, 15.2% women living alone, 11.2% men living alone, 5.6% unmarried/unrelated roomates (US Census 2003). Married adults are less likely to smoke, drink heavily or be physically inactive. However, married men are more likely to be overweight or obese than other men (Center for Disease Control and Prevention's report "Marital Status and Health: U.S. 1999-2002). Median annual adult income in U.S., married $27,605, single $17,057 (US CENSUS BUREAU 2004). The probability of a first marriage ending in separation or divorce within five years is 20%. After 10 years 33%. The probability of a premarital cohabitation breaking up within five years is 49%. After ten years it's 62% likely (Center for Disease Control's National Center for Health Statistics 2002). Several studies suggest married people live longer, but is has yet to be proven decisively. An unusually high proportion of – about 15% – of female centenarians never married.
Business Networking; I’ll Introduce You
Forbes — …Social networking Web sites like Friendster, Orkut and LinkedIn hit the hype stratosphere last year, pitching their ability to find one a mate or a job. But a more sensible business idea is to sell the Web idea as software to companies to figure out who knows whom, and how well, to close more deals. Why cold-call when someone you know can introduce you? New firms like Spoke Software in Palo Alto, Calif. and Visible Path in New York City let you search address books, in-boxes and call logs of employees, investors, lawyers or anyone you consider part of your company’s ecosystem.