OPW — Mar 7 — TRUE moves up one spot to take 3rd spot from eHarmony. Plentyoffish moves up two places to 5th place. Webdate vaults back onto the top 15 taking 10th spot.
Category: WebDate
Must Love Dogs, Buddha, Caves
DENVER POST — Feb 28 — "There are certainly more niche sites coming online, because I seem to hear about more wackier new ones every day," says Nate Elliott, an online personals analyst with Jupiter Research. Some offer bells and whistles such as the video chat and mobile dating technology available at Webdate. Others like adultfriendfinder.com brazenly tackle subjects such as casual sex encounters and fetishes. Everybody has his or her "thing," whether it's a passion for Catholicism, a love of dogs or spelunking. The niche dating concept hinges on the idea that if you find someone with that same thing, you'll be more likely to foster a stronger connection. Cowboydating.com, Geek2Geek, SingleParentsMingle.com, BlackPlanet.com. Datemypet.com receives 50,000 visitors a month. "Niche dating is a solid model right now because [each site] has branding that's appealing," says Mark Brooks, editor of onlinepersonalswatch.com. "But what you give up is more choice available on the larger, general-use sites. You've just gone from a pool of millions with everything under the sun, every age, every demographic to a pool of thousands." Larger general-use sites are updating search engines to allow users to pinpoint must-haves in their profiles. Match, Yahoo Personals and eHarmony together account for more than 50 percent of all online dating traffic. FULL ARTICLE @ DENVER POST
Must Love Dogs, Buddha, Caves
DENVER POST — Feb 28 — "There are certainly more niche sites coming online, because I seem to hear about more wackier new ones every day," says Nate Elliott, an online personals analyst with Jupiter Research. Some offer bells and whistles such as the video chat and mobile dating technology available at Webdate. Others like adultfriendfinder.com brazenly tackle subjects such as casual sex encounters and fetishes. Everybody has his or her "thing," whether it's a passion for Catholicism, a love of dogs or spelunking. The niche dating concept hinges on the idea that if you find someone with that same thing, you'll be more likely to foster a stronger connection. Cowboydating.com, Geek2Geek, SingleParentsMingle.com, BlackPlanet.com. Datemypet.com receives 50,000 visitors a month. "Niche dating is a solid model right now because [each site] has branding that's appealing," says Mark Brooks, editor of onlinepersonalswatch.com. "But what you give up is more choice available on the larger, general-use sites. You've just gone from a pool of millions with everything under the sun, every age, every demographic to a pool of thousands." Larger general-use sites are updating search engines to allow users to pinpoint must-haves in their profiles. Match, Yahoo Personals and eHarmony together account for more than 50 percent of all online dating traffic. FULL ARTICLE @ DENVER POST
O2 Partners with Enpocket and Time Out to provide Time Out Dating
Mark Brooks: Enpocket built Match.com's mobile app. Match mobile users can search a database of a couple hundred thousand other match mobile users. Match made the decision to spend less on the initial application development which does not allow the Match mobile users access to the millions strong entire Match.com database of users. Webdate allows access to the full database.
Sprint Launches Three New Mobile Chat Services
Mark Brooks: Internet dating takes a sizable time commitment. Mobile services allow users more convenience and freedom. Webdate Mobile is the leading mobile dating application allowing users to search a database 5 million strong. Webdate is 'channel agnostic.'
Mobile Dating Makes Cell Phone use More Obnoxious
Mark Brooks: Location Based Services could lead to a significant paradigm shift in online dating eventually.
Internet Advertising Growth
MEDIA POST — Dec 1 — Revenue from Web ads next year, excluding online newspaper classifieds, will increase by a predicted 25.2%, while overall U.S. ad revenues will grow by 4.5%. The Internet will account for more ad dollars than radio by 2007, and will surpass magazines by 2008, to become the third largest ad category, with newspapers and broadcast television remaining in the top two slots.
The full article was originally published at Media Post, but is no longer available.
Mark Brooks: Webdate, OKCupid, Plentyoffish, Friendster and Myspace offer advertising. Who else?
Yahoo, Google to Launch Wireless Services
The full article was originally published at Biz Report, but is no longer available.
Mark Brooks: Webdate, Match and Lavalife all offer mobile phone based dating. Webdate offers a more advanced 'downloadable app' and allows users to search their entire database of over 4 million, rather than a limited set of mobile-only users.
Yahoo, Google to Launch Wireless Services
The full article was originally published at Biz Report, but is no longer available.
Mark Brooks: Webdate, Match and Lavalife all offer mobile phone based dating. Webdate offers a more advanced 'downloadable app' and allows users to search their entire database of over 4 million, rather than a limited set of mobile-only users.
How Cellphones May Beat Computers as a Dating Service
WALL STREET JOURNAL — Nov 3 — The latest phones can do email, video, music, photo sharing and Web surfing. Though the U.S. was late to the market for sending text messages over in recent years. SMS.ac boasts tens of thousands of communities of users who share interests in topics including sports, music and politics over their cellphone screens. In July, Upoc launched its first dating service. Since then it has attracted about 25,000 subscribers, at $4.99 a week, he says. Match.com has offered such a service on cellphones since February 2003. Zogo expects users to communicate in a novel way: by voice. Users are connected by a phone call. Zogo makes the calls to the two users. No phone numbers are made public, so users can remain anonymous behind their screen names. The Zogo service is free as the company builds up its user community. It eventually will cost $12.99 a month. Setting up a Zogo account and using it on a cellphone was cumbersome.
Mark Brooks: Instant gratification with Zogo's service…once they build a critical mass of users. Webdate offers mobile dating with access to 4 million profiles. Nice.