Online Personals Watch: News on the Dating Industry and Business

TRUE Introduces Relationship Readiness Tool Identifying Sexual Personalities

PRNEWSWIRE -- Aug 29 -- According to a breakthrough yearlong study from TRUE there are eight different sex personalities. TRUE introduces SEXPLORATION, an adaptive test designed to address a key element of compatibility -- sexuality.  "Sexual incompatibility is one of the top two causes of relationship conflict, making great sex a vital part of a successful long-term romantic relationship," said Herb Vest, CEO of TRUE. "Too many people avoid this important topic, which can cause unnecessary strife in relationships. We created SEXPLORATION to provide our members with a tool to better understand and measure important sexual compatibility issues prior to sex, so they can engage, and/or re-engage in a happy, healthy and committed relationship."  69,000 men and women have taken "SEXPLORATION." Men and women between the ages of 45-59 were the most risque, or the 'Mavericks' of the group, indicating they are the most provocative, adventurous and uninhibited in the bedroom. Younger Americans, on the other hand, are Initiators and/or Subservients, meaning, they are typically leaders rather than followers and they can be "submissive, with an attitude."  More than 43% of women were found to be Traditionalists.  More than 30% of men were found to be Intellectuals, meaning, while they love talking and thinking about sex, when it comes to the actual practice, they're not quick to move into the provocative side. TRUE's team of psychologists developed SEXPLORATION based on research from a yearlong study to reveal eight different sex personalities:  The Traditionalist 31%, The Maverick 13%, The Intellectual 29%, The Fantasizer 4%, The Contradictor 1%, The Introvert 7%, The Initiator 1%, The Subservient 14%.  SEXPLORATION is endorsed by Psychology Today and  conforms to the Standards for Psychological and Educational Testing as established by a joint committee of the American Educational Research Association, the American Psychological Association, and the National Council on Measurement in Education.  RELEASE AT PRNEWSWIRE

Mark Brooks: Sexual issues, money issues and family issues are three of the most common areas of marriage strife.  TRUE, bold as always, is tackling sexuality matchmaking head on, in a very classy manner.  The adaptive testing approach offends noone.  Hey, I discovered I'm a maverick!  Take the test, what character type are you?  Your comments please...

Join aSmallWorld? Well, if you Have to Ask ...

INTERNATIONAL HERALD TRIBUNE -- Aug 29 -- Asmallworld.net is an exclusive, closed membership, social-networking Web site for the international jet set.  75,000 members interact in a purely social context.  Not everyone agrees that exclusivity makes for a better network.  Joe Hurd, VP business development at Friendster.com said, "they have erected a night club-style velvet rope and bouncer in front of their community, but that doesn't mean you will have more fun inside."  FULL ARTICLE @ INTERNATIONAL HERALD TRIBUNE

Mark Brooks: There is an online dating site for every whim, fancy and fetish imaginable.  Social networking will follow suit with networks focused on specific areas of interest, age, social strata, exclusivity and geographic.

The New, Impersonal Personals -- Blogs

PACIFIC NEWS -- Aug 26 -- Friendster, MySpace, Xanga and Facebook are supposed to keep friends connected, but I see people with about 100 plus "friends." Do they actually know these people? One thing I've noticed about the blogs and personal profiles people post online is how open people are. The friendships I've created in the real world have slowly drifted into blog form. Conversations are short, to the point, and can be edited with the click of a mouse. What's next, catching up on old times at an online bar with virtual drinks? I recommend a support group for this sort of thing. No one should be a flaming addict alone with their computer at 1 in the morning. Nothing good comes out of that, except maybe delusional flashes. FULL ARTICLE @ PACIFIC NEWS

Mark Brooks: We should remember, online community is indeed 'virtual.' Nothing will ever touch 'face-to-face.'  The internet is a great vehicle for managing relationships, even initiating them, but some brow time is needed for real, spiritually uplifting relationships. 

Think Partnership Announces COO, President and New Initiative

BUSINESS WIRE -- Aug. 16, 2005 -- Think Partnership has appointed George Douaire as COO (Kodak, Peapod) and Scott Mitchell (Anderson, Tunes.com) as President.

Mark Brooks: Think Partnership recently bought Kowabunga (affiliate service) and PrimaryAds (affiliate network) and is in the process of buying Vintacom/Relationship Exchange.  Scott spearheaded their numerous acquisitions.

ELove Thinks It has the Answer

MASS HIGH TECH -- Aug 22 -- "What's the price tag of finding a person for the rest of your natural life?" asks Paul A. Falzone, chief executive officer of eLove. ELove is a marriage between an online service and a bricks-and-mortar dating shop.  Staff will take video and audio clips of you. Then they will check to see if you are married. They will run a criminal background check to see if you've been cooling your heels lately. Membership is $995 plus monthly payments of $19.95 in NY. FULL ARTICLE @ MASS HIGH TECH

Mark Brooks: It was only a matter of time before real world dating sites hitched their horses to the safety bandwagon True.com started.  A Great Expectations, or ItsJustLunch or Tableforsix could make this idea fly.

Web Site Links Lonely Farmers

SANTA CRUZ SENTINEL -- Aug 24 -- Nearly 500 farmers and ranchers are booting up and surfing cyberspace for their soul mates. Enter FarmersOnly.com. FULL ARTICLE @ SANTA CRUZ SENTINEL

Mark Brooks: Just when I think I've seen it all...

Hooking Up Is Out; Finding Your Perfect Match Is In!

PRNewswire -- Aug 23 -- PerfectMatch.com appears prominently in the "Must Love Dogs" movie trailer and throughout the extensive television campaign.  PerfectMatch's remarkable growth in 2005 has been driven by partnerships in entertainment with Sony Pictures' "Hitch," the Dr. Phil Show and Lifetime Television, as well as major online brands MSNBC, iVillage and drugstore.com. PerfectMatch is a premium "relationship" site and continues its impressive growth while the "casual" dating space faces an industry-wide slowdown. A primary reason for the slowed growth within the casual dating space is the emergence of the savvy Internet dater. "Casual sites like Match.com and Yahoo! Personals are terrific to introduce users to online dating," Mr. Dahl, CEO, stated continued. "As singles gain confidence, we can expect them to graduate to a community of like-minded people. At PerfectMatch, singles can do that because we have a community of genuine people looking for real love and sincere 'relationships.'"  PerfectMatch.com(TM), is preparing for another sizeable growth increase in 2006 with the release of a book "Finding Your Perfect Match" authored by PerfectMatch relationship authority Dr. Pepper Schwartz (Penguin), and a partnership with NBC Universal's "The Break-up" starring Vince Vaughn and Jennifer Aniston.  RELEASE @ RED NOVA

Mark Brooks: Match and Yahoo Personals, along with True.com I might add (a relationships site with a slightly broader perspective), allow users the freedom to decide what kind of relationships they are interested in. eHarmony and PerfectMatch are focused on people who are 'very single' and very motivated to hook up for a longer term relationship.  Examples of full-on casual dating sites include Adultfriendfinder/Passion.com (Alexa rank has gone from 100 to 45 over the prior 12 months), Sexsearch (Alexa rank grown from 1500 to 600), Mate1 (15,000 to 2,000).  Eroticy and IwantU are plugging along as well.  Morals aside, full-on casual dating sites are here to stay.  This segment is alive and kicking and not to be ignored.

As Chaperones Hover, Single Muslims Look for Love

NEWSHOUSE NEWS -- Aug 23 -- Islam forbids unsupervised dating, so the gathering of young, unmarried Muslims in the banquet hall of an Edison restaurant was billed not as a singles party but as a Muslim Matrimonial Event.  Chaperones roamed while the 100 unmarried "candidates" got to know each other through small group talks. Muslim gatherings like this have sprouted up around the country in the last few years. Singles both defend and fret over the prospect of arranged marriages in person and on Internet sites like www.islamicaweb.com. FULL ARTICLE @ NEWSHOUSE NEWS

Mark Brooks: Shaadi is the leader in muslim online personals.

MatchFlick Expands Film News & Reviews for Movie Fans and Dating

BUSINESS WIRE -- Aug 22 -- MatchFlick, for movie lovers, adds nine new film industry Columnists.  "Since its inception in January, MatchFlick has grown to more than 30,000 visitors each month," said MatchFlick Founder and CEO, Seth Leonard.

TEAMDATING.COM Offers Safer, Less Stressful Way to Meet

PR NEWSWIRE -- Aug 22 -- Teamdating.com helps people meet as in the real world ... With your friends. The site is geared to be a natural extension of your current social life. This group approach provides the added security of having "safety in numbers" when teams meet one another. Many are hesitant to engage in the anonymous world of online dating due to safety concerns.

Mark Brooks: Seems everyone is jumping on the 'safety' bandwagon these days.

A Speedy 60-Second Guide to Dating

WESTERN MAIL -- Aug 20 -- 15% of single people in Britain are looking for new ways to meet 'the one', and are using speed and internet dating.  Researchers at Ohio University say it takes just three minutes for most people to decide whether they were going to fall in love, remain friends, or never speak with a person again. Men spend almost 10 times as much buying drinks and meals for potential partners than women. FULL ARTICLE @ IC WALES

Speed Dating Reaches 88mph

WESTERN MAIL -- Aug 20 -- Singletons are getting the chance to get up close and personal with potential squeezes as they loop around a rollercoaster.  A Welsh theme park has decided to hold the romantic event on rollercoasters, water rides and terrifying vertical drops to give hopefuls a shot at romance.  Co-founder of Spark Dating Jayne Davies said a bout of screaming on stomach-churning rides should help daters get their nerves out of the way. FULL ARTICLE @ ICWALES

Mark Brooks: The UK market is a couple of steps behind the US market.  Speed dating seems to be picking up nicely.  Leading UK dating site, DatingDirect.co.uk, is offering a nice smattering of events.

Dating Website Weeds out Beauty from the Beast

NEW ZEALAND HERALD -- Aug 21 -- A new online dating service is attempting to weed out the wonderful from the weirdos by allowing only beautiful people to join up. theBeautiful has about 200 members from almost 400 applications and has special ways of "validating" applicants suspected of palming off snaps of models as themselves. FULL ARTICLE @ NEW ZEALAND HERALD

AIM Begins Buddy Popularity Contest

WASHINGTON POST -- Aug 21 -- Beginning this week, the 50 million users of AIM could perform a self-esteem check by visiting www.aimfight.com.  Enter your AOL/AIM screen name and your friend's screen name and click "fight" to figure out who has a bigger score - as in who's better connected and more popular. Your popularity is based on who has you on their buddy list. FULL ARTICLE @ MSNBC 

Mark Brooks: This feature plays to the egos of the 'connectors.'  Engage the connectors and they rave and make lots of (viral) noise, spreading the word. I score 7790. Meir Strahlberg, CEO of Date.com has me beat at 18020.

Google Maps Heats Up Dating Game

CNET -- Aug 19 -- A new application powered by Google Maps and a personals Web site just might offer a satisfying alternative.  Dubbed "HotMaps," it allows users to roughly pinpoint where a subscriber of HotOrNot lives.  Once a specific location on the HotMaps Web site is selected, a list of markers will appear. These signposts will then denote where subscribers to the dating site live. Created by Frozenbear. FULL ARTICLE @ CNET

Online Personals Watch Anonymous Phone Call Service White Paper

ONLINE PERSONALS WATCH -- Aug 22 -- A white paper on anonymous phone calling services/enablers is in process (in addition to OPW's mobile dating white paper).  Phonematrix, Voice Star, gNumber and PrivateTel have identified themselves as having service offerings in this category.  Do you know of any others?  Please contact me at mark@onlinepersonalswatch.com.

Nielsen Netrating to Provide Online Personals Watch with Rankings

ONLINE PERSONALS WATCH -- Aug 22 -- Nielsen Netratings is now providing monthly rankings to Online Personals Watch (see column on left).  Each month you can expect to see the top 15 online personals site rankings from Hitwise, Alexa and Nielsen Netratings.  In addition Hitwise provides enough numbers for us to pull the rankings for some additional categories (defined by Online Personals Watch).  These categories are; personality profiling, religious focused, black, asian, gay.  We use the Alexa rankings for the social networking rankings and adult dating sites.  The methodologies used by Hitwise, Alexa and Nielsen, (and also Comscore) are very different.  Hitwise pulls their numbers from ISP's and only ranks by market share.  Alexa uses data from it's toolbar userbase and also only gives a ranking score for websites.  Nielsen pulls from a panel and extrapolates numbers such as uniques from it's representative panel of tens of thousands.  Also note, Hitwise and Nielsen categorise online personals slightly differently so, for example, you'll see TheFaceBook in the Nielsen rankings but Hitwise chooses not to categorise this as an online dating site.

Online Dating Feeling Less Attractive

CNN MONEY -- Aug 18 -- Online dating has shrugged off its social stigma and emerged as a mainstream means for singles to find that special someone. The U.S. online dating industry is expected to climb 9% year-over-year with revenues of $516 million in 2005, said Nate Elliott, an analyst at Jupiter Research. That's slower than the 19% growth in 2004. And 77% in 2003. There are currently nearly 1,000 dating Web sites, said Bill Tancer of Hitwise, and one out of every 100 people logging on to the internet visits an online dating site. Niche sites are popular. Social networking sites have become increasingly popular among the young.  That's giving traditional online dating sites a run for their money, said John Tinker, research analyst at ThinkEquity Partners.  The Big 3 online dating sites -- Yahoo! Personals, Match.com and EHarmony.com will have to tweak their business models and create new innovative products to grow revenue. One place to look is advertising. Date.com's CEO Meir Strahlberg said that advertising revenues have doubled in the past few months to 10% of total revenue. "There are 86 million single adults who control annual spending of $1.6 trillion," Strahlberg said. "Online dating sites reach about 30 percent of that market currently." Date.com can target an advertiser's products to almost any demographic based on user profiles. Yahoo! Personals general manager Lorna Borenstein said, "today's online daters are increasingly sophisticated. You can't just increase offerings; you have to help singles figure out their relationship goals and offer tools to help them find their version of success, whatever that might be."  FULL ARTICLE @ CNN MONEY

Mark Brooks: Hot future trends; 1. targeted advertising on online dating sites.  2. personality profiling.

Arcode Software Develops New Dating Service

GLOBES -- Aug 05 -- Israeli company Arcode Software Solutions is launching a new dating service, entitled "I Pick You" (IPQ). People meeting accidentally can contact each other through the IPQ website.  People who met by chance in a bar, exercise room, library, or supermarket, and who lacked the nerve to start an immediate conversation, can send an IPQ dating card to a person they like. The two people can use the card code later to contact each other through the website.  Arcode's revenue comes from sales of dating cards. FULL ARTICLE @ GLOBES

Mark Brooks: What kind of response rates will guys get.  1 in 20?  What do you think?  Your comments please.

Farmer Writes Personal Ad in Cornfield

AP -- Aug 17 -- CANANDAIGUA, New York (AP) - A farmer, in place of posting a newspaper advertisement to search for a mate, resorted to planting a message in a cow pasture in 50-foot letters made from corn stalks. "S.W.F Got-2 (love symbol) Farm'n." Single White Female Got to Love Farming. Underneath was a long arrow pointing to his house. FULL ARTICLE @ MY WAY