The full article was originally published at CantonRep, but is no longer available.
Mark Brooks: Community Connect (Blackplanet.com, Asianavenue.com, Migente.com), Friendfinder, and Spark are the niche dating leaders in terms of overall revenues.
Category: YahooPersonals
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
Yahoo! Launches Social Network Site for UK
JOURNALISM.CO.UK — Feb 21 — Yahoo! has launched a social network and community publishing platform for the UK. Yahoo! 360° invites users to build their own profile page incorporating their blog postings, Flickr photographs, reviews of local events and restaurants, links to friends’ blogs and discussion groups as well as lists of favourite TV, books and music releases. The UK version is being launched in beta and has been developed using research and feedback from the US version. Around one million of MySpace’s 50 million registered users are in the UK. MySpace UK will be promoted on other News Corporation platforms such as Sun Online and Times Online and will initially aim to build its audience through the UK music scene. FULL ARTICLE @ JOURNALISM.CO.UK
Yahoo’s Challenge
INFORMATION WEEK — Feb — Yahoo's chief data officer Fayyad knows if you're about to buy a new car. "When you're on the Yahoo network you're telling a lot more about yourself and your intent…I can turn that into a very powerful ad-matching machine…in many cases, much more powerful than search." Yahoo; $5.26 billion in revenue last year, 47% more than 2004. Google; $6.1 billion in 2005, a 92% increase. Between November 2004 and November 2005, Yahoo went from handling 32% of Internet searches to 29.5%, according to comScore Media Metrix. Google's market capitalization stood at $106 billion earlier this month, more than double Yahoo's market cap of roughly $46 billion. Yahoo is more diversified than Google, with 12% of its revenue coming from user fees. Yahoo has more unique users and they spend 10 times as much time on Yahoo. "If I get 10% more usage from the average consumer, I have suddenly created 10% more inventory for my ads," Fayyad says. Yahoo accomplished something like that last year when it made an effort to improve user retention with Yahoo Mail.
Mark Brooks: Yahoo Personals, complete with premier profiling, is a goldmine for contextual advertising.
Online Personals Watch Interview-CEO of Plentyoffish.com, Markus Frind
OPW Interview — Feb 21, 2006 — I met Markus at iDate2005 and barely gave him the time of day; a hokey little site called Plentyoffish. I have a lot more respect for him these days. Plentyoffish is free and has snuck up on the Canadian market and now he is sneaking up on the American market.
What's your background Markus?
Computer programming. I went to a Technical Institute for a few years and then worked for a few dot com companies. Every one of them went under after 6 months. I was a developer of websites and databases; nothing glamorous. I was really good at making things efficient. They threw me from project to project making things super efficient.
Why did you decide to offer plentyoffish for free?
I originally created the site because I had to learn asp.net and I didn’t want to buy a book, so I created the site and I just kept adding things to it that I liked. I had to continue to learn new things and it just kind of became a dating center; it wasn’t meant to be an actual site. Then I wanted to learn SEO (Search Engine Optimization), so then I read up on SEO and I integrated that into the site and taught myself. Then it just kept growing and every time I wanted to learn something, I would add that to the site. Eventually it just became a huge thing.
How do you make money?
I make money off the ads upselling to other sites. It doesn’t need much money to run. The site does about 13 million pages views a day, making it one of the top 5 sites in Canada of any site and in the top 60 or so in the region according to Hitwise. I started this in March, 2003 and I haven’t kept track of the registrants, but my traffic has grown 12 fold in 12 months overall in both markets.
How can you afford to do radio and TV advertising?
My costs are next to nill Look at American Singles. According to their quarterly reports they spend a million dollars a month just handling servers. I spend about $15K a month tops. It is cheap to advertise on radio if you have none of those other costs.
Who do you regard as your top competitors?
I’m really competing with Match.com. In Canada, I started at 3% last year and I’m sitting at over 50% market share and in the next 6 months I will double the size of the dating industry in Canada.
Are you at all worried about other major players or new entrants starting up with free sites?
Not really. A lot of VC’s are throwing around a lot of money and probably have funded some of the other free sites, but I have so much of a head start that I don’t think there’s much they can do. Google and Yahoo would only affect me little if they went free, in fact I think they would help me rather than hurt me. If the average dater is using 3 dating sites, they are probably currently using Plentyoffish and Match and Yahoo. If Google comes in and offered a free site, most of the paid dating sites like Match and Yahoo would get pushed out of the market. I took a poll today that says that over 55% of my members are paying members on other sites or have been in the past.
What's next for plentyoffish in 2006?
Plentyoffish is already blazing the trail. All the other dating sites are attempting to go niche, whereas plentyoffish is the only site that segregates the database on the spot, so no individual user has access to whole database. When they login and create their profile, the database is refined and they only access to a limited subset. So basically, as soon as you sign up, a niche is created around you. You only have access to that specific niche. Currently, no other site is doing this. This is like creating a niche site on the fly. If you logon and you don’t want to see ‘smokers’; every person on there that is a smoker will get filtered out of the search results and no smoker will ever be able to message you. This is specifically the reason why people leave the big sites or the niche sites, because a lot of the people that they don’t want to message them are messaging them. If you filter them in real time, the brand power of a large site will blow away a billion niche sites. No one will remember a tiny niche site and they won’t have the brand to be able to compete. 2006 is setting the stage for a show down with Match.com.
Pickiness Dominates Quest for Perfect Mate
WASHINGTON POST — Feb 20 — Falling in love has never had a reputation for making much sense. Dante glimpsed Beatrice a few times and wouldn't shut up about her for decades. Why should not falling in love be any more rational? There is something peculiarly modern about this phenomenon, something aligned with our dark privilege of too much, this consumeriffic culture in which jeans and houses and breasts and ring tones are customizable. Consider it all: geographical dislocation, cities filled with singles, extended childhoods and postponed childbearing, speed-dating, the growing sense that the dating pool is as vast as the 454 men-seeking-women between the ages of 29 and 31 within five miles of your ZIP code on Yahoo Personals.
The full article was originally published at Fort Wayne Journal Gazette, but is no longer available.
Mark Brooks: We are in a throw away culture…why commit? Seismic changes on our views on marriage and long term relationships (commitment) will continue. How will this affect online dating. More importantly, how will online dating influence these seismic changes? Your comments please.
Lucrative in Love
The full article was originally published at Washington Examiner, but is no longer available.
Mark Brooks: The number of monthly uniques visiting dating sites is down because social networks are sucking many of of them up. They add their profiles, hang out, and then realise that social networks are for friendship, internet dating is for dating, and they convert over to dating sites. Social networking sites are good for online dating. They've sucked up many uniques but dating sites are reporting improved conversions and higher revenues. How could this be? Social networks are a great precursor to online dating. Manu users who might not have considered online personals in the past will start with a social network and then 'upgrade' to a paid site to get more focused attention.
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 Population Flat
RED HERRING — Feb 10 — JupiterResearch said, "it’s not clear where daters are looking for mates but it doesn’t seem online social networking communities pose a significant threat." A mere 14% of online daters not subscribing to a service reported using social networking sites. Yahoo is the top dating site on the web, according to 19% of participants in a survey conducted by GMI Poll. Match.com comes in second, with 14%, followed by eHarmony.com, with 5%. Among the prospective daters, 42% report success when using the sites.
India’s Internet Population Explosion
RED HERRING — Feb 10 — The number of Indians getting online continues to swell, according to the Internet & Mobile Association of India. By the end of 2005, the number of Internet users in the country hit 38.5 million, up 54% from 25 million in 2004.