Category: Outlets – Miami Herald

eHarmony Is Selling Elevated Careers

Posted on August 17, 2017

Elevatedcareers 2017MIAMI HERALD – Aug 17 – Boca-Raton startup Candidate.Guru, provider of a recruiting technology platform that matches job candidates to employers, has acquired Elevated Careers by eHarmony, an employee engagement, personality and skills matching solution. Terms of the deal were now disclosed, but eHarmony will become a shareholder in the company. Candidate.Guru, founded in 2014, uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to help companies better vet and rank their candidates. Candidate.Guru will sell Elevated Careers as a separate product rather than incorporating it into Candidate.Guru's product, at least initially. Dan Erickson, general manager and VP of Elevated Careers, will join Candidate.Guru and be based in Los Angeles.

by Nancy Dahlberg
See full article at Miami Herald

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This post also appears on InternetDatingInvestments.

Summarized by the Courtland Brooks team

Dating Sites Become Mainstream And Focus On More Niche Markets

Posted on February 13, 2012

Avalanche logo1MIAMI HERALD – Feb 12 - Jewcier, a new dating site for Jewish singles, is now open to the public and joins nearly 20 other general and niche dating sites owned and operated by Avalanche, co-founded by Meir Strahlberg and his business partner Kris Covino in 1997. Among Avalanche’s largest sites are Date.com, launched on Valentine’s Day in 1997; Matchmaker.com, which Avalanche bought in 2005, and Amor.com, a Latin dating site also launched in 2005, which has more than 20K members in South Florida alone. Avalanche’s domain names are words people naturally type into the Internet, so they don’t have to spend a lot in marketing, Internet dating experts say. “They’re well respected within the industry for being savvy operators,” said Mark Brooks, an online dating industry analyst and editor of onlinepersonalswatch.com. Within the last six months, Avalanche has added five gay dating sites to its portfolio, which already included GayDating.com, GayMen.com, GayMarriage.net, PinkWink.com, which is oriented toward gay women, MyPartner.com and Gay.mx, a Mexican site. Gay sites are “a growing part of our business,” Strahlberg said. Overall, the company’s sites have 10M members worldwide, and 5-10% of them are paying members, Strahlberg said. Strahlberg, who owns half the company, declined to disclose Avalanche’s revenues, but said it is “highly profitable” and has been since its inception. This year, the company may be looking for outside investors for the first time, he said.

by Ina Paiva Cordle
The full article was originally published at Miami Herald, but is no longer available.

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‘Sugar Babies’ Seek Friendship And Help With Tuition

Posted on January 25, 2012

Seeking arrangement logoMIAMI HERALD – Jan 25 - Three Florida schools, including Florida International University, have had so many students join a sugar-daddy dating site that they’ve been included in the site’s ‘Top 20’ universities of 2011. For the women on SeekingArrangement.com, what they’re seeking is often dollar-specific: as much as $10K a month, or more, to date a certain well-heeled man. College students make up about 40% of the Sugar Babies on SeekingArrangement.com. 10 to 20 escorts are removed daily.

by Michael Vasquez
The full article was originally published at Miami Herald, but is no longer available.

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New Twists to Online Dating

Posted on September 5, 2011

Internet dating1 MIAMI HERALD – Sep 4 - Some say social media like Facebook, Twitter are better for screening romantic partners than traditional dating sites. They’re better at giving you a full picture of the object of your affections. One way to help gauge someone’s credentials is to see if they have a profile on LinkedIn. "People tend to trust social media sites, since there’s a great deal of overlap between their online and offline friends," says University of Texas psychology professor Sam Gosling. "The impression people have of folks based on their Facebook profile tends to be pretty accurate."

by Joshunda Sanders
The full article was originally published at Miami Herald, but is no longer available.

Looking For Love? Cupid’s Got Apps For That

Posted on February 14, 2011

Omnidate's virtual beach MIAMI HERALD – Feb 14 – The most popular are apps that use Global Positioning System to find a date near your typical hangout spot. Skout, an app for iPhone and Android, claims 3M active users. With an average user age of 25, the free app is more youth friendly than sites like eHarmony and Match.com. Such established sites have yet to incorporate such GPS tags; the idea of getting alerts from strangers who are physically nearby seems creepy and stalker-like to many users, says online dating business consultant Mark Brooks, editor of OnlinePersonalsWatch.com. Still, the category is growing. Grindr, an app for gay men, boasts 1.4M users and 300K log-ons a day, according to Grindr’s founder and CEO, Joel Simkhai. Though GPS-based tagging is this year’s hot trend, other technology-based matchmaking tactics may also facilitate finding the love of your life. For those who are shy, OmniDate.com lets users use an animated avatar of themselves and plops it into an animated chat room on the first date. OmniDate co-founder Ravit Abelman said it has been picked up by several dating sites, including Lavalife, TangoWire, JDate in Europe and the Facebook app Social Connect. She said it has been successful because it’s a way to break the ice beyond a bullet-list profile and lifeless e-mails. 

The full article was originally published at Miami Herald, but is no longer available.

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In Midlife, They’re Unexpectedly Single

Posted on September 9, 2010

Single in middle life MIAMI HERALD – Sep 8 - ~30% of boomers are single according to the U.S. Census. The percentage of divorced singles has doubled in 30 years, from 7% in 1980 to 15.6% in 2009. The never-married have also grown, from 5.3 % to 9.6%. Only the category of widowed singles has dropped from 8% in 1980 to 3.6% in 2009. More than 96M Americans (43% of adult U.S. residents) are unmarried, the highest percentage ever. People who reach midlife unattached are "a growing market". Meetcha, the new dating website, seeks to bring people together in big cities through an idea labeled  as PODS — people out doing stuff. "If the last time you dated you were 21, you're going to face certain shocks when you go out there again,'' says Pepper Schwartz, AARP's love and relationship expert.

The full article was originally published at Miami Herald, but is no longer available.

Mark Brooks: I'm working on a paper entitled, 'how internet dating has changed society' and will be including some of these numbers. The paper is constructed from the responses from 30 idating executives on the subject and will be released after the Paris Internet Dating Conference.

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In World Of Online Flirting, Virtual Gifts Are Big Business

Posted on February 13, 2010

Virtual gift1 MIAMI HERALD – Feb 12 – Virtual gifts have become a $1 billion industry in the U.S. and $5 billion worldwide. Snap Interactive runs the Facebook app. "Are You Interested?'' which introduced a gift store two months ago. CEO Clifford Lerner said the app. is raking in "a couple thousand dollars a day'' just from gift purchases starting at $1.25 for a heart, to $20 for a picture of an engagement ring or gold bricks. "We've actually seen that the higher cost of some of these gifts, the more we actually sell,'' Lerner said. "If a girl is not interested in a guy, and she sees he spent $20, she's probably going to respond. And that's worth it to the guy, just to get a response.''

Mark Brooks, a social media and Internet dating consultant, has seen companies recently introduce new features like virtual goods or mobile dating services. As the online dating space becomes more saturated, finding extra revenue is more important. "It's more difficult to get started, it's more difficult to make money in this market,'' Brooks said. "Virtual gifts are definitely in right now.'' PlentyofFish discovered that as a gift's adorability factor increased, so could the price. "The cuter they are, the more receptive they are,'' said Kate Bilenki, Director of Love at PlentyofFish.com. "Teddy bears, hearts, bunnies, cute things like that.''

Avid Life Media's HotorNot.com got the virtual gift ball rolling in the dating scene back in 2002 by selling virtual flowers which now cost $2 to $10 each. At AshleyMadison.com users can send a virtual bottle of champagne or hotel room key. "The growth rate is phenomenal,'' said Noel Biderman, president of Avid Life Media. "If it has the right impact, people will pay to replace words.'' AshleyMadison has 5.2 million members and has seen spending on virtual gifts jump from 2.4% to 4.1% of total user revenue in the past year.

This kind of success is persuading other sites to give it a spin. First Beat Media oversees more than 100 niche dating sites like BikerPlanet, GothScene, LatinaRomance and TattooLovers. It's testing virtual gifts. "Seeing a ton of icons of roses and chocolates from other suitors on your page might turn people away from contacting you — doing more harm than good," said Stephen Ventura, director of operations. "We're approaching it very cautiously,'' Ventura said. "We feel it might detour some folk from the relationship finding process.''

The full article was originally published at Miami Herald, but is no longer available.

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Seeking A PC Affair?

Posted on May 4, 2009

Ashleymadison logo MIAMI HERALD — May 2 — In March, Ashley Madison claimed annual revenue in the tens of millions of dollars and 3.3m users worldwide. South Florida was its sixth-largest market (177k users), behind New York and Los Angeles. The Gender breakdown is 70-30 men-women; 60-40 in South Florida. Americans spent $957m on dating sites in 2008; in 2013, Forrester projects $1.5 billion. February data from Compete show that Adultfriendfinder and Fling logged 37.9m unique visitors, more than the next 12 dating sites combined. Sites like these and Ashley Madison have one big advantage over the competition: ''Their target audience is going to be on the site forever,'' says Mark Brooks, an Internet dating industry consultant. "The typical dating services are victims of their own success. After three months, people bail — they sign off because they've met someone, or they skip over to another dating site. The people at Ashley Madison have already demonstrated they're not going to be committing any time soon, and they keep on cycling back around. It's a wonderful cash machine.'' ''Sneaky or deceptive is not my cup of tea,'' said Paul Falzone, founder of TheRightOne, and a professional matchmaker for 30 years. "These guys are totally the opposite of what we're about . . . Do you want to spend your life with someone you're compatible with, that you enjoy, or do you want to live a lie?''

The full article was originally published at Miami Herald, but is no longer available.

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Internet Dating Doesn’t Deter Matchmakers

Posted on August 11, 2008

Matchmakinginstitute_logo MIAMI HERALD — Aug 11 — Despite the popularity of Internet dating, the ages old profession of matchmaker is still thriving. Annie Robbins,  57 of Fort Lauderdale,  was trained at the Matchmaking Institute in Manhattan, which set up shop in 2003 and has since trained 250 aspiring romance-makers. Matchmakers charge  up to $100,000, says Lisa Clampitt, one of the founders of the Matchmaking Institute. Robbins says her fee, ranging from $400 to $7,500, is not an expense, it's an investment. Clients became frustrated with dishonesty online but comfortable with the idea of having a third party find them a match, Clampitt says.

The full article was originally published at Miami Herald, but is no longer available.

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The Perfect Site For Blind Dates

Posted on April 6, 2008

Crazyblinddate_logo MIAMI HERALD — Apr 4 — CrazyBlindDate.com is just what it sounds like. Crazy. But in a fun way. The site doesn't make users fill out a profile or post a picture or select the type of partner they are searching for. It's targeted to people who feel like going out, are adventurous enough to be set up on a blind date, and want to do so immediately. Members can also go on a blind double-date.

The full article was originally published at Miami Herald, but is no longer available.