OPW – May 31 – Zoosk is launching its first National TV campaign in the USA on Monday 1st June. Here's the ad. What do you think?
(video not available anymore)
Category: Zoosk
Quepasa Partners With Zoosk
MARKET WATCH – May 18 – Quepasa.com, a social network targeting the Latino community, signed an agreement to make the Zoosk online dating service available to Quepasa's registered user base of over 13M Latinos. The objective of the agreement is to extend the Zoosk community across the countries of Latin America by promoting and monetizing the Zoosk offering to the users of Quepasa.com. The service is expected to go live on Quepasa.com before the end of May.
The full article was originally published at MarketWatch, but is no longer available.
This post also appears on SocialNetworkingWatch.
Zoosk Hosts Speed Dating For Start-Ups And VCs
MARKETWIRE – Apr 28 – Zoosk, the social dating network, will be hosting the first VC & start-up speed dating session at Web 2.0 Expo on Wednesday, May 5, 2010 in San Francisco. Each start-up will get the chance to 'flirt' with up to four VCs during the matchmaking program and will be given three minutes of undivided attention each. To qualify, the company must be a start-up or entrepreneur looking for seed or additional funding. To participate in this event, RSVP by Friday, April 30, 2010 at: http://zooskdate.eventbrite.com/.
The full article was originally published at Marketwire, but is no longer available.
Zoosk Deepens Global Footprint
MARKETWIRE – Apr 27 - Zoosk, the social dating network today announced the Zoosk iPhone application and Zoosk Messenger for desktop chat, localized in multiple languages. Zoosk currently monetizes in 52 countries. Users can enjoy Zoosk across all major social networks — Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Hi5 — as well as mobile devices and the iPhone platform. Today Zoosk adds Zoosk Messenger, developed on the Adobe Air platform for a rich interactive experience on the desktop, and the Zoosk iPhone app.
The full article was originally published at Marketwire, but is no longer available.
Facebook Kills App Notifications – Minor Impact On Zoosk and SNAP
OPW – Apr 13 – Last week we reposted a post from Markus Frind's blog saying that Zoosk and AreYouInterested saw a massive drop in users after Facebook turned off the app notification last month. Apps developers had to shift to new communication channels. Facebook recommends using either counters, dashboard news notices or request access to users’ email addresses. Zoosk now uses emails and sends users to its website instead of sending push notifications that go to their app. Alex Mehr, the CEO of Zoosk said there was "no significant impact on the overall business." They lost some traffic on Facebook but gained pretty much the same amount on zoosk.com, according to Alex. Cliff Lerner, CEO of SNAP Interactive, also confirms that their app AreYouInterested has not experienced any declines from a revenue perspective as a result of the removal of Facebook notifications. "We've experienced continued growth with our AreYouInterested.com website and extremely high engagement stats on our AreYouInterested iPhone dating app which we believe is without equal in the industry. In the final analysis we feel that removing notifs and streamlining our ability to collect emails has actually aided our business significantly because we now have a better way to email active users which is far more valuable than sending notifications on Facebook", said Cliff.
This week: news on Match.com, SNAP Interactive, EasyDate, Zoosk, AreYouInterested, GameCrush and Executive Dating.
Facebook Dating Apps See Massive User Drop
THE PARADIGM SHIFT – Apr 2 - Facebook turned off app notications last month. Large Facebook dating apps like Zoosk and Are you interested saw massive drops in users. This is why you don’t build companies that are completely dependent on the whim of another company. FULL ARTICLE @ THE PARADIGM SHIFT
See all posts on Zoosk
See all posts on AreYouInterested
Internet Dating Industry Weekly News March 15th, 2010
This is the news for March 9th through March 15th, 2010. Here is the news we covered:
- Zoosk ranked #42 in Wall Street Journal’s top VC backed companies
- AreYouInterested.com iPhone App going strong
- Sex.com domain up for auction
- Match & Meetic partner in Latin America
- Zhenai.com posts strong growth numbers
Zoosk Makes Top 50 VC Backed Companies List
WSJ – Zoosk made Wall Street Journals list of top VC backed companies, coming in at #42 out of 50. They were the only internet dating company on the list. Social networking oriented companies included Slide, Zynga and Rock You. The rankings were calculated based on the track record of success for the VC investors who sit on the company's board, the amount of capital raised the founding executives track record of success and the recent growth in the value of the company.
The full article was originally published at WSJ, but is no longer available.
Alex Mehr, CEO Of Zoosk
How rosy was your Valentine’s Day?
My Valentine’s Day was great personally and more importantly, on the site, we had quite a few promotions that went very well. A lot of people joined our site 4 or 5 days before Valentine’s to find that last minute Valentine.
How big is Zoosk now?
It has just crossed 50 million people.
How are you driving such an incredible growth?
It’s a combination of few different things. We do a lot of online marketing just like any other dating site and we also promote heavily through social networks.
You just did a deal with IMVU. Can you tell us more about that deal? Why go virtual?
The deal was not particularly about IMVU being a virtual world website. It was more a test for us to see how syndicating our site to other websites would work in terms of monetization and added value to the end user. If it is successful we roll it out to many other sites. And we’ve been doing it for a couple of sites so far and it’s looking great.
What are your thoughts on virtual dating in an internet dating environment?
It might appeal to a really young audience. But I think for people who want to go on dates, avatar based dating isn’t a viable method. So we are staying away from it at this point.
Zoosk was started in December 2007 and we interviewed you in June 2009. Since then you’ve raised another $30 million round of funding led by Bessemer Venture Partners. Congratulations. What are you doing with the money?
A lot of it is going to go into promoting our product, not just on social networks but also through offline channels. We also have some product development in plan that requires more capital. I don’t want to talk about the specific details but you can expect a lot from us in the coming year.
What site developments are you most proud of since we last talked in June 2009?
There has been quite a lot happening on Zoosk.com in terms of making online dating more social. We have introduced the information sharing. Zoosk has a home page just like Facebook that has feeds.
Profiles on most dating have a structured look. You go to a person’s profile and see the stats and everything about them. We provide that as well but that doesn’t provide context for initiating a contact. Let’s say you see Angelina from San Francisco, she’s 30 and her birthday is coming up in 3 days. That would be perfect for you to initiate a conversation in that context. That has been, by far, the most successful feature we’ve rolled out.
How important is the iPhone platform for you?
iPhone is the way to go mobile. It has been an interesting project for us and we’ve learned a lot. We are rolling out newer versions of our iPhone app. Our plan is to roll out at least one new version every month for the next few months. Pretty soon we are also going to develop for iPad and Android.
Could you see a day when there are more people accessing Zoosk through iPhone and iPad?
You will see a lot of people having smart phones at a very young age and accessing websites through those devices. But I don’t think this is going to happen for another 3 to 5 years. It is a long term planning but we are developing and getting ready now.
What is coming next for Zoosk? How do you intend to give Match.com a run for their money?
We don’t compare ourselves to Match.com. We consider ourselves a social network for dating. We share a lot of characteristics with social networks but at the same time the main purpose of our site is dating.
We’re doing a lot of things and one of them is making our home page smarter with news feed items and information sharing, build more things around social graph.