Internet Dating Affiliates

Match Loves Oodle

OPW - Oct 21 - Match hearts Oodle.com, that's for sure. Have a look at Oodle now and its chock full of Match profiles. Match has done a distribution deal with Oodle and loaded the site up with several hundred thousand profiles. If you want to beat out the Match.com deal be prepared to pay North of 10c CPC, but don't expect more than a 5% conversion of clicks to registrants.

See all posts on Match.com

This post also appears on OnlinePersonalsWatch.

Dating sites Using NY Affiliates Now Subject To State Tax

THE PARADIGM SHIFT -- May 22 -- If you use affiliate marketers based in New York, you are now subject to new York Sales tax. This means eHarmony, Match.com, True.com and all other major sites with an affiliate program are now subject to this law. The Law comes into full effect in 10 days. FULL ARTICLE @ THE PARADIGM SHIFT

Adult Vs PG Affiliate Programs

FF -- Apr 21 -- The consensus is that adult dating sites (Fling, AdultFriendFinder, and SexSearch are the top 3) still convert better than PG dating sites (Singlesnet, Match, and Yahoo! Personals are the top 3 PG sites). The top adult dating sites also generate more traffic. See Compete comparison of Fling vs Match. For a listing of all the payouts across all the affiliate networks, please email me at mark@onlinepersonalswatch.com. - Mark Brooks

Casual Dating Affiliate Payouts Top The Industry

FF -- Feb 15 -- Does anyone know of any dating affiliate programs that pay out higher than casual dating sites?  The super fast growing dating sites Fling and SexSearch are topping my research on payouts. SexSearch is paying out $90 and Fling $50 per paid sign up over Valentines. Adultfriendfinder is definitely feeling the heat on its tail from these two. I'm surprised how many dating sites don't have affiliate programs. Match, eHarmony, Perfectmatch and Yahoo! have good programs, but many top and second tier players have relatively small programs, if they have them at all. From the affiliate perspective adult dating sites just plain convert better, which would partly explain the rise in popularity of casual dating sites over the last few years. CJ, Linkshare, Azoogleads, Shareasale, Primary Ads, and Link Connector all drive significant amounts of traffic to dating sites.  CJ seems to have the most offers. Email me at mark@onlinepersonalswatch.com for a copy of my spreadsheet listing all the dating offer payouts on the top affiliate networks. - Mark Brooks

Which Dating Sites Convert the Best?

OPW -- Jan 2 -- Online Personals Watch is for online personals marketing managers and executives to stay ahead of the news, and for the press to research the industry. It's not really designed for end users. Having said that, I make a few bucks from affiliate text links. $5k last year. Not too shabby. I thought I'd share the conversion numbers with you, for open discussion. I'm listing companies with which I had more than 1000 click throughs. I'm told affiliates will usually send an affiliate program 300 clicks before drawing initial conclusions on conversions. Here's the rankings drawn from stats for January 1st 2005, through December 25th 2006.  I'll redo them for a smaller date range later this quarter.

	Dating site	Affiliate System	Total Commission	Total Uniques	Income per Unique
#1	PerfectMatch	Commission Junction	$899	2567	35c
#2	SexSearch	In House	$1,580	4690	34c
#3	TRUE	Commission Junction*	$1,459	5626	26c
#4	AdultFriendFinder	In House	$1,523	6144	25c
#5	Yahoo Personals	Commission Junction	$1,595	6780	24c
#6	eHarmony	Commission Junction	$502	3536	14.2c
#7	American Singles	Commission Junction	$285	3591	7.9c
#8	Match	Link Share**	$503	4887	7.7c
#9	Cupid	Direct Track	$210	3334	5c
#10	Joint: Webdate and Love Access	Both In House	$0	2923/1916	0c

  * I switched out to TRUE under Primaryads.com and they are paying out a little better.
** I've not had a good experience with LinkShare.

All the sites pay out slightly differently.  Where I had an option, I opted to be paid by % of revenue generated. I've focused on Dollars per Unique for this comparison.  If you want the full spreadsheet, email me at mark@onlinepersonalswatch.com and I'll send you the stats including the number of registrants, paying members, revenue and additional ratios. Your comments please…

OPW -- Jan 2 -- Online Personals Watch is for online personals marketing managers and executives to stay ahead of the news, and for the press to research the industry. It's not really designed for end users. Having said that, I make a few bucks from affiliate text links. $5k last year. Not too shabby. I thought I'd share the conversion numbers with you, for open discussion. I'm listing companies with which I had more than 1000 click throughs. I'm told affiliates will usually send an affiliate program 300 clicks before drawing initial conclusions on conversions. Here's the rankings drawn from stats for January 1st 2005, through December 25th 2006.  I'll redo them for a smaller date range later this quarter.

	Dating site	Affiliate System	Total Commission	Total Uniques	Income per Unique
#1	PerfectMatch	Commission Junction	$899	2567	35c
#2	SexSearch	In House	$1,580	4690	34c
#3	TRUE	Commission Junction*	$1,459	5626	26c
#4	AdultFriendFinder	In House	$1,523	6144	25c
#5	Yahoo Personals	Commission Junction	$1,595	6780	24c
#6	eHarmony	Commission Junction	$502	3536	14.2c
#7	American Singles	Commission Junction	$285	3591	7.9c
#8	Match	Link Share**	$503	4887	7.7c
#9	Cupid	Direct Track	$210	3334	5c
#10	Joint: Webdate and Love Access	Both In House	$0	2923/1916	0c

  * I switched out to TRUE under Primaryads.com and they are paying out a little better.
** I've not had a good experience with LinkShare.

All the sites pay out slightly differently.  Where I had an option, I opted to be paid by % of revenue generated. I've focused on Dollars per Unique for this comparison.  If you want the full spreadsheet, email me at mark@onlinepersonalswatch.com and I'll send you the stats including the number of registrants, paying members, revenue and additional ratios. Your comments please…

Paid Dating Sites Discover Local Spam

THE PARADIGM SHIFT BLOG -- Dec 5 -- Paid dating sites have now all adopted the strategy I created 3 years ago and taken it to the extreme. Check out google searches like garrison dating. Date.com  Matchmaker.com take the top spots. Followed by match.com, AmericanSingles.com, Meetic and Match.com UK.  Matchdoctor and others have started retooling their entire sites to try and rank high for local queries. Its like everyone just caught on in the last couple of months.  FULL ARTICLE @ PARADIGM SHIFT

Online Dating & SN Site Google Page Ranks

iDATE FORUMS, Marc Lesnick -- Nov 20 -- Here's Google's Page Ranks for various online dating and social networking sites:
9 -- Match.com
8 -- Y! Personals, MySpace, Orkut, Chemistry, Friendster, Perfect Match, YouTube
7 -- eHarmony, JDate, Date, Lavalife, TRUE, Bebo, Facebook, Friendfinder, iLove.de, LinkedIn, Meetic, HotorNOt
6 -- Bolt.com, Cupid.com, eCrush.com, Gay.com , Parship.de, Plentyoffish
5 -- Baihe, Dating.dk, Mate1, Neu.de, MatchDoctor.com, Manhunt.net, Sexsearch
4 -- Adam4Adam, Gaia Online, SportsFansMatch, Tianji, WebDate
3 -- 51Friend, eRomance, JWoo
0 -- GreatExpectations, AmericanSingles, Friendscout

iDate2006.com got a page ranking of 6. Google scores 10 (of course). So did the New York Times. NASA and the White House. CNN, Yahoo, Dell, Hotels.com, Mapquest, eBay, Amazon and Columbia University got a page rank of 9. American Express, Travelocity and Sony got a page rank of 8.  Scoring a 7 were Citibank, HSBC Bank, Coca Cola and Pepsi. Google gives a ranking of 6 to Lancome, Revlon and model Pamela Anderson. How did the other models do? Page ranking of 5 to Heidi Klum and Cindy Margolis. Unbelievably, Cindy Crawford got a page ranking of 3. FULL ARTICLE @ IDATE

Mark Brooks: ...and Online Personals Watch scores a 5. What does your site score?  What have you done lately to improve it? Does it matter? Your comments please...but not here. Click here.